Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal

by Mark Liechty

Westerners have long imagined the Himalayas as the world’s last untouched place and a repository of redemptive power and wisdom. Beatniks, hippie seekers, spiritual tourists, mountain climbers—diverse groups of people have traveled there over the years, searching for their own personal Shangri-La. In Far Out , Mark Liechty traces the Western fantasies that captured the imagination of tourists in the decades after World War II, asking how the idea of Nepal shaped the everyday cross-cultural interactions that it made possible.
 
Emerging from centuries of political isolation but eager to engage the world, Nepalis struggled to make sense of the hordes of exotic, enthusiastic foreigners. They quickly embraced the phenomenon, however, and harnessed it to their own ends by building tourists’ fantasies into their national image and crafting Nepal as a premier tourist destination. Liechty describes three distinct the postwar era, when the country provided a Raj-like throwback experience for rich Americans; Nepal’s emergence as an exotic outpost of hippie counterculture in the 1960s; and its rebranding into a hip adventure destination, which began in the 1970s and continues today. He shows how Western projections of Nepal as an isolated place inspired creative enterprises and, paradoxically, allowed locals to participate in the global economy. Based on twenty-five years of research, Far Out blends ethnographic analysis, a lifelong passion for Nepal, and a touch of humor to produce the first comprehensive history of what tourists looked for—and found—on the road to Kathmandu.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ethnography, Anthropology, Travel

401 pages, Paperback

Published February 21, 2017

Reviews

[Michael McLaren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really well written and a incredibly well researched book, that has no qualms diving deep into the interesting characters that were involved in the early Nepal tourist scene, all contextualised within the cultural movements and global history happening at the time.

My favourite chapters were the ones focussed on the unique characters in the Nepalese tourist industry, mostly Boris Lissanevitch - a Russian Ballet dancer turned Nepalese Hotel proprietor/socialite in the style of the British Raj. The descriptions of the early hippies culture, and the Nepalese perspective on it, was also really interesting. It really captures the specialness of that early interaction.

It was a lot broader than I expected, diving into the history and global context at the time, as it was relevant to Nepal that is. I'm not super familiar with a lot of the background and it wasn't a struggle at all to keep up.

Just really solid all round.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the first half of the twentieth century, Nepal was a hermit kingdom even more so than Tibet, but then tourism came. This book is a history of the first three decades of tourism to the country, which involved three successive waves: highly wealthy, mainly elderly tourists in the 1950s and early 1960s, the heyday of “hippie Nepal” in the late 1960s and early 1970s as Kathmandu drew shoestring travelers overland from Europe, and finally the establishment from the early 1970s of Nepal as a destination for trekking. I briefly lived in Kathmandu in the early millennium and was surprised at how the old “Freak Street” haunt of the Sixties travelers was no longer even recognizable as tourist district, while tourism was now concentrated in the massive North Face-branded enclave known as Thamel that was unmentioned in older publications. Liechty answered my questions about how that happened, but the book has a wealth of other fantastic details. It is very entertaining and I read its 400 pages in nearly a single sitting.

What makes this history so strong are the personal connections, not mere reliance on archival material. Mark Liechty had repeatedly visited Kathmandu since the 1960s, had a firsthand awareness of many of these developments, and knew who to ask for more details. He carried out a large number of interviews: former travelers to Nepal, longtime expats in Kathmandu, and Nepalis who interacted with tourists. (For the last category, he cleverly employed local Nepalis to do the interviews, so the subjects wouldn’t feel bound by politeness.) While this book was published in 2017, much of the research was carried out in the early millennium, so Liechty was able to interview generations that have now passed away.

Liechty presents us with a whole list of quirky personalities: a Russian emigre hotelier who served the jet set of Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, etc.; an American hunter who was truly instrumental in tourism to what is now Chitawan National Park, but an inveterate fabulist all his life and a challenge for separating fact from fiction; a Nepali English professor whose world was transformed by meeting the hippies; four middle-aged Beatniks who made Kathmandu their home in the 1970s and produced interesting art. Indeed, the depiction of a whole community of travelers who settled down for years in Kathmandu, and weren’t just on a limited-time trip for spiritual enlightnment or leisure, is something largely missing from the many earlier books on the Istanbul-Kathmandu trail that I had read.

I really enjoyed the book and it now sits near the top of my rankings of books on European backpacker travel to Asia. However, there are some infelicities that stop it from being a fully five-star affair. Copyediting is spotty for a respected university press, and one chapter abounds in typos. For the 1960s and 1970s, Liechty speaks solely of Kathmandu as a destination for countercultural travelers, but they were only one demographic on the overland trail between Europe and the Indian Subcontinent, others being e.g. non-alternative Aussies and New Zealanders unable to afford flying that distance; many histories of the overland trail are quick to point this out. Liechty’s major citation for details of the overland trail is David Tomory’s 1996 oral history A Season in Heaven,and while that book is one of my all-time favourites, it is almost entirely an anglophone affair. This book would have been stronger had Liechty also drawn on French, German, or Yugoslav sources, but troublingly the bibliography contains almost no references in languages other than English or Nepali.

[Marsha Altman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book about the history of tourism in Nepal.

[Stephanie McGarrah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anytime there is Yeti discussion I am happy.

[Ngima Sherpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good to start who love Nepal's history, especially about tourism and cultural.

[Bram]

Read the introduction closely. He summarizes all his arguments well.

[Mills College Library]

338.47915 L718 2017