Nepal: A mountain hideaway

It's Friday night at the New Orleans café and bar in Thamel, Kathmandu, the centre of Nepal's banana-pancake belt. To my right, a French couple pull out a laptop, order bottles of chilled Everest beer and log into their e-mail accounts via the restaurant's free Wi-Fi connection. On a neighbouring table some older British trekkers order plates of spicy beef choyla and settle down for the evening's live music. Outside, on Thamel's main drag, a Mexican wave of metal shutters can be heard clattering up and down as shopkeepers come and go, flogging racks of fake North Face puffa jackets and colourful, knitted hiking socks.

The overall experience is not so much déjà vu as complete groundhog day. I last visited the Nepalese capital 11 years ago but the cheap beer, wall-to-wall tie-dye, "German" bakeries and Tracy Chapman on a mind-numbingly frequent loop appear remarkably the same. Not that there hasn't been some modernisation, but there is one difference that overrides all others; in 1996 there were far more tourists around. The Maoist insurgency, which began in the same year, has led to rallies, roadblocks and demands for "political contributions". Add to that the bad publicity in 2001 from the massacre of nine members of the Royal family and, over the past decade, the country has seen a dramatic nosedive in the number of foreign tourists. For the poorest country in South Asia and one that relies heavily on tourism for income, the knock-on effects have been substantial; one estimate suggests that the Nepalese economy had lost about £400m in GDP by 2002 because of the conflict.

Daman Pradhan, the CEO of the Nepal-based Shangri-La hotel group, put this into perspective when I met him in the peaceful garden of the chain's Kathmandu branch. "Nepal's tourist industry has had bad luck for a long time but, on top of that, the authorities haven't made it easy for tourists to get visas, and there has been a lack of direct flights here from the rest of the world. Tourism is a sensitive business and recent events have had a direct effect on visitor numbers, as have inappropriate travel warnings," he says.

Although more than 13,000 people have been killed in Nepal since the Maoist insurgency began, not one of them was a foreign tourist. "With the insurgency, there were strikes, transport shut-downs and so on," he continues. "Many of the big foreign tour operators stopped selling Nepal for a time because they couldn't take the risk of sending clients to a country where they were not certain they could provide what had been promised."

In Pokhara, 200km west of the capital and the country's second major tourist destination after Kathmandu, according to a recent report published by the UK-based peace-building NGO, International Alert, "half the small hotels and restaurants have been forced to close, along with 20 per cent of travel agencies and 25 per cent of trekking agencies". A representative from the Union of Trekking, Travel and Rafting Workers of Nepal estimated that there were about 300 guides in Pokhara in 1999, a number that has since fallen to around 60.

Get up early and climb onto the roof of pretty much any of the town's hotels or guesthouses and you're rewarded with jaw-dropping views of the snow-topped Annapurnas (the mountains rise from 1,000m to more than 8,000m within 30km). With three lakes on the doorstep and easy access to those icing-sugar mountains, it's little wonder that Pokhara has long been a popular jumping-off point for some of the country's best-known trekking routes; around a quarter of all foreign tourists in Nepal visit the town. Yet the numbers coming here are tiny compared to what they were a decade ago. In 1996 I stayed in Damside, an area at the southern end of Phewa Tal, the lake around which the town sprawls, because it offered a quieter alternative to the liveliness of Thamel-like Lakeside. No one in their right mind would stay there today. Dirty, dilapidated, and all but abandoned by tourists, it's like a ghost-town. Things are slightly better in Lakeside. I visited in October, which is traditionally the peak season, and while I was sometimes the only tourist in a restaurant, a shop or even just strolling down the road, there seemed to be a lot more people here than a year before. That is, according to Ganga Nepali, the owner of the spick and span, bougainvillea-draped, Nirvana guesthouse, where I was staying.

"We're not 100-per-cent full, but this season is looking good. It's not how it was six years ago - in 2000 things were really booming. Even during the monsoon we would be more than half full - and, in season, we could fill up two or three times over. The worst year was 2005. We survived because we had a long-standing reputation and we had some regulars - missionaries and volunteers, rather than tourists."

It is a similar story at the opposite end of the lake. Walk north from Lakeside and you don't have to go far before it becomes eerily quiet. Though it's even more scenic here than in central Lakeside, with open views out over rice fields onto the water, there simply aren't enough visitors to fill the available space. The only vaguely busy guesthouse here is that run by the Chhetri sisters, female trekking guides who operate a sustainable-tourism business. Established as a restaurant in 1991, the sisters' business evolved into a trekking company run by women for women, and guided by egalitarian principles; the business now employs 30 girls and women from underprivileged families, including so-called "untouchables".

With luck, they won't have to hold the fort in Lakeside for much longer. The government and the Maoists signed a peace agreement last November, and on 16 January this year the Maoists joined the Nepalese parliament. Both sides have agreed to a UN-monitored permanent ceasefire, and the security situation in the country has improved.

Bolstered by this agreement, most of the big foreign tour operators are back. Yet Nepal's rough period isn't over. The Foreign Office warns "incidences of Maoist extortion of money from trekkers and climbers continue to occur on all main trekking routes", and says "demonstrations are likely to take place in the run-up to elections planned for June". But for Pradhan, at least, there is reason to be cheerful.

"People have seen what kind of effect a dearth of tourists can have here; today anyone in a position of power will think 10 times before starting anything."

Friends in Kathmandu tell me that tourists are starting to come back. Nepal needs them. As for the tourists, it's a buyers' market. Prices are cheap, availability is good and you can practically have the country to yourself.

On my last day in Pokhara I headed down to one of the garden restaurants overlooking Phewa Tal for an early-morning breakfast. I looked out on a mirror-perfect reflection of Machapuchare, "fishtail mountain". It was a moment of utter peace. Who wouldn't want to come here?

TRAVELLER'S GUIDE

Getting there:

The writer flew from Edinburgh to Delhi, via Frankfurt, on Lufthansa, and Delhi to Kathmandu on Air Sahara, via Southall Travel (0870 010 9003; www.southalltravel.co.uk). Alternatively, Qatar Airways (0870 770 4215; www.qatarairways.com) flies to Kathmandu from Heathrow and Manchester via Doha; and Gulf Air (0870 777 1717; www.gulfairco.com) flies from Heathrow via Bahrain or Muscat. To reduce environmental impact you can buy an "offset" from Equiclimate (0845 456 0170; www.ebico.co.uk) or Pure (020-7382 7815; www.puretrust.org.uk).

Staying there:

Hotel Nirvana is at Baidam 6, Lakeside, Pokhara (00 977 61 523 332; e-mail: hotelnirvana@hotmail.com). Rooms from NR300 (£2.20).

Red tape:

Britons require visas (60-day single entry, £20), either from entry points, including Kathmandu airport, or the Nepalese Embassy, 12a Kensington Palace Gardens, London W8 4QU (020-7229 1594; www.nepembassy.org.uk).

More information:

Nepal Tourism: www.welcomenepal.com.

Lonely Planet Guide to Nepal (published September 2006; £15.99).

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