This past summer I had a bit of a brush with ‘celebrity’ when Pema introduced me to his good friend Dale Covington. When I first heard that name I dreaded for a moment that I was going get stuck in a conversation about some form of Seven Habits, but I was far off the mark. Stephen COVEY is another inspiring local luminary, but Mr. Covington is more famous for excelling at jumping off of perfectly good cliffs or Himalayan mountains and paragliding for a graceful and thrilling ride down to safety. The day I met Dale he was taking Pema out for a few free rides under his veteran guidance from the location of his paragliding school at the edge of a mountain slope south of Salt Lake City. My fear of heights prevails over my sense of adventure, so I passed up an offer to join them. I admit I really enjoyed watching the Over Khumbu video of Dale’s expedition to Nepal for high elevation paragliding, but that clearly exceeds my personal limit of about six feet that I can comfortably fall to the ground.

Now is a good time to have a look at our main page again since we’ve finally been adding some of those articles I wrote when we returned from Nepal. I spent most of November writing up short pieces on any subject we could come up with on our experience in the Hindu Kingdom. There is a long list of content articles to add to the site, and we just added about 30 of them to the menu. Not counting the blog, the photo gallery, and the Nepali news, there are 65 content pages on our site. There are still another 46 pages to add to the menu, but you can already see the list is getting to be a bit overwhelming, as far as layout and the sitemap are concerned. In between other projects we’re thinking of how to organize the menu layout so that it will be well organized and will convey exactly how extensive our coverage is. Having over 120 menu items will be pretty overwhelming. I’m very excited to get this added to the site so that I can share the wonderful ideas, history, and the unexpected surprises of Nepal.

Stepping off of the plane at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan airport from an international flight you will pass through the visa checkpoint. This is your last opportunity to unload some of your US dollars before entering the realm of the Nepalese Rupee (NPR) in paper and coin. The exchange rate has hovered around 75 NPR to 1 US dollar for the past five years. In early 1995 it was just under 50, and in January and November of 1998 there were sudden jumps (or drops from the Nepalese perspective) in the rate of exchange, with a shift of 11 NPR within a year. This is probably not the most telling statistic when it comes to describing the state of Nepal’s economy and their international trade, although it is of interest to tourist who make up a significant part of Nepal’s revenues. The most significant trading partner with Nepal is India, and considering the relative magnitude of their neighboring economy it seems that India could easily crush Nepal with any misstep. Nepal does have a heavy trade deficit, and that is primarily (~55%) with India. Nepal does not have that much to offer as export, but relies on many industrial and foodstuff imports.

Mt. Everest draws in the most adventurous and heroic climbers from around the world, but perhaps some of the most daring and defiant challengers to the ascent are locals from Nepal. The most famous and arguably most accomplished Nepalese climber was Babu Chiri Sherpa, who set many climbing and endurance records on Mt. Everest. He was intimately familiar with the remote region of Hades above Everest base camp, but was taken into the icy underworld in 2001 as he fell to his death in a deep crevasse. Another venturesome Nepalese climber named Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa predated some of Babu’s bold expeditions and had bright prospects for many legendary feats. Before his death at the age of 23 in a high-elevation avalanche in the Fall of 1996 he had already summited Mt. Everest five times, four of those without supplementary oxygen. On one expedition he made a statement for the pride of the Sherpa people by ascending the full extent of Mt. Everest wearing traditional dress (a chuba) and relying solely on the rarefied air of 29,000 feet and beyond. He was also part of Scott Fischer’s expeditions, including the catastrophe of Spring, 1996. He survived, but he couldn’t dodge misfortune much longer.