The Beginning
It was the summer of 1982. I was living in Bombay (it was still called Bombay then) and I was on my first assignment in the Foreign Service.
Adventure called. And it called from Nepal.
I had never been to Nepal. It still seemed a mysterious place. Kathmandu was a Bob Seger song and it was about getting as far away from where you had been…a new beginning. And, although Bombay was pretty exotic and far from my norm, Kathmandu…well…traveling to Kathmandu just seemed like something I had to do.
The flight from Bombay was uneventful – if you can call your first glimpses of the majesty of the Himalayas uneventful. It was incredible.
But little did I know that it would be a journey that would bring me to where I am today. That it would lead me to Engage Nepal.
On that first visit to Kathmandu I rode a bicycle through streets that were not clogged with motorcycles or buses or trucks. It was serene…almost eerily quiet to bike along with pagoda-like temples rising up before me.
And then, the first time I viewed Pashupatinath Temple I was, quite simply, amazed. This was NOT like anything we had in St. Paul, Minnesota!
My son, who had just turned three, was in awe too. He wasn’t sure where we were but he knew this was something new… and something special.
Of course, it is amazing how things change. A visit to Swayambhu in 1982 found you surrounded not by a concrete cityscape, as it the case today, but by rice paddies and an unmarred natural landscape.
Durbar Square was unlike anything I had ever seen. Bodhatnath Temple touched my heart then…
…and it still does today.
Hanuman Dhoka still captures the imagination. And still today any stroll through the streets of the city will offer sights that capture the eye and the soul.
I know that on that first trip I marveled at every sight…and every time I turned a corner I encountered something that was, for me at the time, exceptional and unique.
It was a chance to discover, to learn about a new culture and to meet, for the first time, the gracious, tolerant and compassionate people of Nepal – people who today still touch my heart and are part of my life.
That trip, 37 years ago was short. Only a few days. But it sparked a love affair that continues today.
These pictures from my first journey are grainy – they were taken along time ago when we didn’t have phones that captured incredible digital images as we do today But, truth be told, I don’t really need the pictures – the images from that first vision are still as rich in my memory as they were in 1982
I remember hoping then that I would return someday to the land of the Yak and the Yeti. To a unique nation at the top of the world. And that hope has been realized as I have returned…again and again.
Today, traveling to Nepal is very much like coming home.
But that first trip in 1982, that was the beginning. And I’ll never forget it.