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Vision postcard with Nepal stamp and writing
Reporter
SALLY NEIGHBOUR
Map of India and Nepal
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Vision people on street of Kathmandu, temple building, traffic, man with face mask
17:46:00 Neighbor: The legendary city of Kathmandu is't It what it used to be. The old heart of the city still has the charm that's lured travelers from the west for decades, but around it there's grown up a sprawl as squalid and polluted as any third world capital. The once sweet Himalayan air now reeks of fumes. The locals wear face masks. Car emissions are among the worst in the world.
Vision Neighbour walking past people selling goods, rubbish floating on water, children at water, dead pig in water, women collecting water in buckets, child walking in water
18:44:16 The holy vishnumati is now a water-logged tip. Children play in the shallows alongside Scavenging pigs. You can spot the odd dead one, too. In these same waters people wash and graze their cattle, and water their crops. One test measured water pollution at more than 4,000 times World Health Organization standards.
traffic children's voices
Neighbour and Hillary walking on street
19:22:06 Neighbour: How do you find it here now compared with when you were first here?
Hillary: Well I first came here in 1951, which is a long time ago.
Neighbour: It's a far cry from 40 years ago when Edmund Hillary's climb up Mount Everest first put Nepal on the tourist map.
Hillary: Things were very different of course, I mean there were no tourists here at all, and no hotels and of course very few motor cars. There was no road joining Kathmandu with the outside world, so the few motor cars had to be carried in by porters.
Vision women with backpacks, tourists walking on street, crumbling bridge,
traffic
19:58:15 Neighbour: The trickle of tourism that Edmund Hillary started has long since become a stampede of around 300,000 a year. The tourist boom has compounded the problems caused by Kathmandu's own exploding population and poorly planned development. The city's ancient infrastructure is crumbling under the pressure.
Vision woman selling goods, street market, busy street.
traffic honking horns
CU Hillary on street
20:18:10 Hillary: I think tourism has had some advantages. It's certainly brought more finance into the country. But it's had quite an effect on the local culture and the vast numbers of hotels, vehicles, and..
WIDE Hillary and Neighbour on street, people in street
20: 33:24 honking horns and a lot of the rubbish in the streets.
20:38:10 Neighbour: But Nepal's most serious environmental problems are far from Kathmandu. It's in Hillary's beloved Himalayas that the impact of tourism
and the resulting environmental destruction has been the most seriously felt.
CU Hillary and Neighbour
20:23:16 Hillary: The other thing of course ..
is the destruction of the forests in Nepal. Vast areas
of forest have been destroyed
and some of this is due to the
increase in population, and some
of it has occurred due to the
greatly increased number of
tourists in the area. It a major problem here, there's simply no question about it.
helicopter
Vision helicopters air strip, Neighbour in helicopter, vision looking down at landscape,
21:14:05 Neighbour: Our trip to the Himalayas began, like most
trekkers' , with a short
flight from Kathmandu,
through the dense blanket
of smog that now fills the Kathmandu Valley much of
the time. The deforestation
is clear - vast areas of
forest have been destroyed.
Around here, for farmland,
further up, to cater for
the needs of tour ists . The
rivers are clogged with
silt, washed from treeless
slopes. Erosion has left
the landscape ugly and
scarred. This wasn't what
the guidebooks had promised.
Vision Himalaya mountains, interior helicopter, local people, helicopter landing in field and Neighbour getting out
21:54:01 But then we hit the Himalayas. It was just like
flying into a postcard. It
was the sort of flight you
never forget. The landing
was memorable too - right
in the middle of someone's
freshly sown potato field.
The locals were a bit
bemused, but they didn't
seem to mind.
bells ringing
Vision yaks train climbing mountain, people walking on track with yaks, Neighbour sitting on mountainside
22:24:05 The music of the yak trains that wind up and down the
treacherous tracks of the.
Himalayas told us that we'd
arrived at the start of the
trekking trail. This is
the ...
22:43:13 beginning of the Everest National Park, or Sagarmatha
as it's known to
the local Sherpa people.
It's the highest and one of
the most ecologically sensitive places on earth.
Bells
Sherpa people walking up mountain trail, hikers with backpacks walking on trail, trekkersat beginning of park trail.
22:53:21 The Everest region has a local population of a mere
3,000 Sherpas, but each
year they're swamped by
more than 12,000 trekkers.
Neighbours in hut with other trekkers, park entrance, Neighbour and trek group with porters, group walking over suspension bridge, Sherpas climbing mountain with baggage,
23:06:08 You have to queue up to get into the park. Like most
trekking groups we set off
with a convoy of support
staff -porters, cooks,
helpers and a guide. For we
novices it was going to be
a hard slog. The Sherpas do
this every day. Five
minutes into the park
they'd left us way behind.
Even carrying loads of
fifty kilos or more, they'd
be there an hour before us.
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Sherpas carrying baskets of wood, men listening to radio, Neighbour in village, villagers
23:45:02 The pressure on the forests is obvious all the way - an
endless stream of porters
carry loads of freshly cut
timber to the villages in
the park. The lodges and
tea houses along the trail
are the mainstay of the
local economy, and wood is
the only resource they
have.
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CD Sherpa woman, wood mounds,
24:07:15 Woman: Tourists mean business. We all benefit from them. We use most of this wood for the tourists. It's cold - we have to heat the rooms. I have no stove, so I need wood for cooking, too.
leaves crunching
Vision soldiers walking up hill, man next to stack of timber
24:28:01 Neighbour: Cutting trees inside the national park is banned. It's the army's job to enforce it. All timber is supposed to be brought in from outside. But the locals have plenty of reasons to ignore the ban when the army is not around, and on the lower slopes, the clearing of forests goes on virtually unchecked.
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Vision mist on hills, Neighbour walking on trail, Namche bazaar, local people, Namche at night,
24:51:04 At dusk we arrived at Namche bazaar, the main
Sherpa village on the route
to Everest. On the trail, a
family was singing a local
folk song welcoming the
Spring. Namche is a tourist
town now. This jumble of
lodges and tea shops is the
main stop for those on the
trekking trail.
talking
Vision tourists sitting in lodge eating, Sherpa woman cooking, burning fire, clothing hanging on 1ine.
25:25:19 They come here for the warmth, the hot meals and
the streaming showers. Each
trekker will use five times
as much wood as a local
Sherpa. The conservation
groups claim every hot
shower burns up three
trees. It's become a touchy
issue in the trekking community.
Neighbour and Hall walking through Namche
25:48:07 H all: Personally I would like to see firewood completely banned from burning, especially in these popular regions.
Neighbour: New Zealand mountaineer Rob Hall is a veteran in Nepal. He's climbed Everest three times and leads expeditions for a living. Groups like his have been blamed over the years for many of the problems in the mountains chiefly for turning Everest into the world's highest rubbish dump. But he says they've cleaned up their act.
CD Hall and Neighbour
26:12:13 Hall: There was quite a large sort of rubbish problem. At the base camp there were literally piles of rubbish, two or three metres high. Expeditions had simply dumped their rubbish in a pile and left. We took a clean up expedition to the base camp area. We took 200 yak loads - that's 5,000 kilos - of rubbish out of the base camp.
glasses clanking
Vision rubbish being dumped, men carrying baskets of bottles, men working in rubbish tip, Neighbour and Hall talking
26:33:20 N eighbour: The campaign to clean up Everest has since become a crusade. It's run by a local committee, backed by the Nepalese government, and the World Wildlife Fund. But collecting the rubbish is only a start. There's no recycling, and little space on the mountain side for disposal. And it all costs money. So the Nepalese government has targeted the lucrative expedition industry. The clean up is now funded out of the fees paid by mountaineers. They're also forced to pay a $6,000 rubbish bond. It's refunded if they take their trash home with them. No one objects to that, but the mountaineers say a 900% increase .
CU Hall and Neighbour
27:22:08 in expedition fees is going too far.
Hall: Last Spring the fee was US $10,000 for nine people to climb on the mountain. They increased that fee to $50,000 for five people. So it went from being about $1,000 per person fee to a $10,000 per person fee. The policies are having a major effect on expeditions. This season, for example, there are eight less climbing expeditions than last season.
Vision tourists climbing trail, Neighbour and guide on mountainside, pine trees on mountain
27:47:03 Neighbour: The dilemma is how to keep them corning, and stop them destroying what they come to see. Reforestation is one answer. But at this altitude trees grow as slowly as five centimetres a year. These blue pines will take 100 years to reach maturity.
footsteps
Vision Neighbour and guide, Mingma walking on mountain
28:09:01 Neighbour: So where are we heading to?
Mingma: We're heading for Tengboche, which is 7,000 feet high and it's just above the ridge there. That I s the roof of the monastery.
Gong horn chanting
Vision building against mountain backdrop, monks blowing shells, Lama, interior of monastery, Lama and Neighbour walking through monastery, mountain vista.
28:25:08 Neighbour: At dawn the Monks of the Tengboche monastery herald the new day. For them this is Buddha's country. The Incarnate Lama of the monastery is the man who started the campaign to clean up the Everest region. He sees it as nothing less than the work of god.
Negus in studio
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29:05:24 Negus: Sally Neighbour reporting from the not exactly pristine Everest. That's it from Foreign Correspondent for now. See you next week.
29:15:22 N EW YORK
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TONY JONES
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ROBERT BONDY
BRIAN HALL
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DARREN COSTELLO
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