Tourism Voices from Kanchenjunga, in Nepal, explore how local communities experience tourism and how they would like tourism to develop.
Stories from this region include the perspectives of local residents, entrepreneurs, young people and other groups involved in tourism.
Nepal, Taplejung — Kanchenjunga
Roughly a thousand young people leave Taplejung every year chasing better wages, most drifting home for a while before leaving again. Girls stay; boys go. The bigger fear at home isn't tourism — it's the Maoists, who've already banned beer and wine and now want Coca-Cola gone too.
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A trekker's hot shower can burn through a day's worth of firewood. Campsites in the alpine zone show the cost — rubbish, cut trees, uncovered toilet pits — much of it left behind not by the tourists themselves, but by the crews who carry their gear.
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The conservation fees tourists pay now sit in a bank account — a start, though not nearly enough to fix the road into the district. Organised trekking groups spend little locally, and independent travel won't even be allowed here until 2004.
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Handicrafts didn't sell — the materials were never good enough, and there was no money to buy better ones. What the women of Taplejung want instead is a guesthouse of their own to run, in a district where men's literacy rate still runs double that of women.
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Two-thirds of what trekking agencies spend is spent in Kathmandu, not here, and barely half of trips hire local porters at all. What would help most isn't more tourists — it's a road that doesn't wash out every monsoon.
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