| Juhi |
Posted
on 08-Sep-01 02:54 PM
Maybe it's the exalted beauty of the mountains or the golden glow of the sunsets, maybe oxygen deprivation. Maybe it's the twinkling eyes of the rugged men who work as guides in the Himalayas. Or maybe it's the way trekking in Nepal, a little country perched between China and India, makes Western women yearn for transformation of both body and soul.
Along with fluttering Buddhist prayer flags and eight of the world's 10 highest mountains, love and sex are in the air for Sherpas and female trekkers in this kingdom in the clouds.
"A lot of single American women go to Nepal looking for romance. It's been going on forever," says Richard Bangs, a founder of the adventure travel company Mountain Travel Sobek in El Cerrito, Calif.
It's hard to say who, if anyone, gets exploited when two cultures commingle so intimately. Still, many women return home from Nepal with spicy flings to tell their friends about and little thought of the consequences of their dalliances. Others fall in love with Sherpas and must walk difficult paths to make extreme cross-cultural romances work.
The Nepal Tourism Board doesn't tout the country's aphrodisiac qualities, and it would be an overstatement to say that the Himalayan kingdom has become a Third World fleshpot. Still, some years ago, the U.S. Embassy in Katmandu distributed a brochure to American trekkers "to provide perspective and relay experiences of men and women who had assisted their porters in visits to the U.S," said embassy spokesman Robert C. Kerr. Some jokingly referred to the brochure as "So, You Want to Take Your Sherpa Home?"
The former Donna Marie Larson, a high school history teacher from Newark, Del., likes to say she brought home a big souvenir from a 1988 trek in Nepal: her husband, Phurba. She is now Donna M. Sherpa. At the time of her trek, she was a retiring woman of 39 who surprised herself by pursuing the shy 24-year-old Sherpa. She realized that she had to take the initiative because consorting with a client could reflect badly on a Sherpa, and she said to herself, " 'If he laughs and rebuffs me, I'll just walk away.'
Tourists who have affairs with Sherpas have introduced something else to the culture. "Sex in Nepal used to be more functional, tied up with reproduction and family obligations. Western culture has introduced the idea that you can have sex for the sake of sex," says Vincanne Adams, author of "Tigers of the Snow and Other Virtual Sherpas."
Before the tourism boom, Sherpas were universally described as shy. "But what are you going to do when a woman climbs into your sleeping bag?" says Brot Coburn, an author and special projects director for the American Himalayan Foundation in San Francisco.
On the trail, the Sherpa's job--a prestigious and lucrative one--is to help clients reach breathtaking heights and to make them comfortable and happy. "They really serve you. They even bring tea to your tent in the morning. This kind of treatment can be very attractive to women who are fed up with the Western dating scene," Neubauer says.
Pijan Lama, 45, one of the few American women with a long-term marriage to a Sherpa, says she's seen relationships between Sherpas in their 20s and Western women twice their age. Many of the women are lonely professionals who put off marriage to pursue careers, she says, and find out too late that there are few available men left in their socioeconomic group.
But hearts have been broken and lives derailed when East meets West on the footpaths of the Himalayas. Some of the Sherpas who get friendly with trekkers have wives and children back home. This poses serious problems if couples try to turn trail romances into long-term relationships, leaving Nepalese women alone in remote villages knitting sweaters for export, weeding potato patches and waiting for support checks.
According to Coburn of the American Himalayan Foundation in San Francisco, some trek leaders on Everest tell their porters and guides that sex with Western clients defiles the great mountain, leading to disasters such as the deaths of eight climbers on Everest in spring 1996.
But some Sherpas see pleasuring clients as a part of the job; others have adopted a macho attitude about sex on the trail, viewing it as a perk and becoming more "Don Juanish," says anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner.
And homosexuality, which once existed only in an intensely covert way, has all but come out of the closet in Nepal, with male trekkers from the West, like female trekkers, finding Sherpa romances.
"I think that women who are entering into one-night stands with Nepalese men are breaking existing Nepalese conventions," says Ruth Rosselson, a freelance writer in England who has trekked in the Himalayas. "They're also reinforcing a distorted view of the 'sexually liberated' West and making things harder for women who visit after them. Sexual harassment may be more prevalent in the future because of this."
Pradeep Raj Pandey, chief executive officer of the Nepal Tourism Board, worries about the increasingly aggressive behavior of some Sherpas. "What I've seen and don't like is soliciting. I don't want anyone to get trapped into something they don't want to get into."
Western women who stay in Nepal with Sherpa lovers sometimes do feel trapped. Work opportunities are limited. The society is paternalistic; men drink, spit, play cards with friends and then disappear for months on treks. "Western women don't understand that domestic abuse and alcoholism" can happen in Nepal just as in the U.S., Pijan Lama says.
Sherpas want to come to the U.S. because they've heard that "this is the place where they can make it," says Tsewang Sherpa Lama, a founder of the United Sherpa Assn. in New York. He estimates that there are about 2,000 ethnic Sherpas in the U.S. Anecdotal reports indicate that as many as 500 could be in mixed marriages or relationships.
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