On a visit back to his native country, on a trek in the Annapurna region of Nepal, Portland State University professor Bishupal Limbu remembers being uncomfortable because of his shoes. They were nice, they were meant for the occasion and the Australians he was trekking with had on similarly fancy boots. Yet the army of Nepalese porters hiking alongside them — and possibly carrying their weight in the trekkers’ cargo — were wearing flimsy, beaten-up shoes.
Limbu was traveling with what he says he believes was a good travel company, one that pays porters a relatively high salary in Nepal and treats them better than a lot of trekking companies might.
“It is pretty common to see inadequate footwear in remote areas of Nepal,” says Limbu, who specializes in globalization and post-colonial literature. “Yet the context becomes really discomforting when you have rich tourists with fancy boots and the porter has on flip flops.”
Limbu has thought a lot about tourism in Nepal and he sees the industry as both necessary and good, especially for Nepalese people’s livelihoods. Yet he won’t discount that there are negative sides to it.
From the complexity of the income disparity between visiting tourists and native residents, to the mass amounts of trash littered on Mt. Everest by adventure travelers, to the “moral superiority” sometimes braided into aid-oriented travel like voluntourism, Limbu says, tourism in Nepal and elsewhere has a host of potential ails.
The goal for Golden resident Mary Jackson and University of Colorado graduate Stephanie Maltrich is to build a travel company that can mitigate the potentially negative aspects of adventure travel for their customers, and offer them a more meaningful and culturally sensitive experience than a lot of other companies working in Nepal might. Their adventure startup, called Tuttaré Adventures, is taking its inaugural trip to Nepal in November. It is a for-women, by-women company focusing on women’s empowerment and aiming to set itself apart from other adventure companies in Nepal.
“A lot of people want to go to Nepal,” says Maltrich. “For some people, it is a lifelong dream. But how do we be responsible? How do we help them go to Nepal more meaningfully, more sustainably and more mindfully?”
Adventure travel is a huge and growing global industry, one that will not be disappearing from Nepal or anywhere else anytime soon. Worldwide, travelers spent $345 billion on adventure travel in 2012, according to the United National World Tourism Organization. As of 2013, adventure tourism constituted roughly 40 percent of Nepal’s tourist industry, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Ignoring globalization or not aiming to understand it, Jackson says, is not an option today.
“We live in this world where everything is connected,” she says. “What happens on one side of the globe doesn’t stay on one side.”
Which is why participants in November’s inaugural trip might hear firsthand from Nepalese natives about Nepal’s changing glaciers and the impact of climate change. They might see those glaciers themselves. They will also interact with a new wave of Nepalese female trekking guides and consider what female empowerment means, both in Nepal and the United States.
Ultimately, Jackson hopes participants will engage with globalization and what it means — and that might mean questioning complex issues like: What are the global dynamics that have created the income disparity between Western tourists like the ones who traveled with Limbu and the Nepalese porters who accompanied them?
Limbu says those hard questions are important for travelers to ask, and Jackson says Tuttaré Adventures has no intention of doing anything less. She and Maltrich are working hard to avoid creating an experience where tourists quickly snap photos of touristic sites and check it off a bucket list without aiming to understand the nuances of the culture they are visiting. Their intention is to get people engaged while in Nepal in a much more meaningful way.
Compared to the conventional tourist, Limbu says, adventure tourists are likely to be more aware of environmental and ethical degradation bad traveling can have on the host country. If they spend time outdoors, they are more likely to be environmentally conscious. But adventure travel can still pose problems, and those problems might be further aggravated when paired with voluntourism.
Many publications that have reported on voluntourism, including The Guardian and The New York Times, say that it — like adventure travel — is a “growing trend.” Most voluntourists come from the United States and 85 percent are interested in “alleviating poverty,” according to the Global Center for Volunteer Service. However, roughly 80 percent of voluntourists are performing predominantly unskilled service work like manual labor, and Limbu says that is work that residents from the host country could be paid to do.
Though well-intentioned, Limbu says, the message to the host country is, “You’re not capable of doing this yourselves.”
Equally worrisome are instances like the now famous case of Cambodia’s orphanages. Well-intentioned volunteers flooded to Cambodia after the civil war there ended in the ’90s, mostly to volunteer in schools or orphanages. As a result, impoverished Cambodian parents began giving up their children to orphanages in order to secure them a Western-type education. The number of Cambodian “orphans” has doubled to 10,000 in the last decade and yet more than 70 percent have at least one living parent, according to a 2012 Al Jazeera article.
“Voluntourism,” according to the Al Jazeera article, “is fueling a high-profit volunteering business that sees volunteers’ dreams exploited and Cambodian children separated from their families.”
In a New York Times opinion editorial, guest columnist Rafia Zakaria put her finger on another reason voluntourism can leave a bad aftertaste, one reminiscent of colonialism.
“The problem with voluntourism is that it treats receiving communities as passive objects of the visiting Westerner’s quest for saviordom,” Zakaria wrote. “Even more vile is its reliance on poverty as a visible spectacle.”
In an increasingly globalized world, Limbu says, it is more important than ever for travelers to be aware of their affects on their host countries. That might simply mean being aware of their intentions for volunteering, like knowing that they might just want to feel good. While not bad, that is a different intention than disinterested volunteering, and different than volunteering a much-needed skill.
The negative aspects associated with adventure travel and voluntourism make for an obstacle course that the potential volunteer adventure traveler must navigate. It can be daunting. Making the right choice on where to go, what trekking company to hire and what nongovernmental organization to visit can be overwhelming and disheartening.
Jackson says she’s aware of the host of problems associated with voluntourism, and though Tuttaré Adventures’ mission statement is “empowering women of the world through service and adventure travel,” the service component is intentionally vague.
She personally knows that empowerment just happens.
“My mother used to always tell me, ‘When you travel, you are so brave and confident,’” says Jackson. “Traveling and leading wilderness trips has taught me that I can do something unexpected. I used to be a shy person — both shy and fiery. Especially through adventure travel, I really have developed this confidence which has helped me start this company.”
What the “service” means is complicated, explains Jackson, especially because her intent is to wait and see what both “service” and “empowerment” means for travelers with Tuttaré until the group is on the ground in Nepal. That choice to wait, says Maltrich, comes from research on ecotourism, women’s empowerment and sustainable travel Jackson has done at least in part as a Ph.D. student in sustainable education at Prescott College.
Jackson says she doesn’t want Tuttaré Adventures’ participants to expect a set agenda that would come at the risk of ignoring the complexities and specificities of the situation on the ground.
“We are not going in and saying ‘This is what we are going to do. This is who we are going to help,’ and we aren’t scheduling time for empowerment,” says Jackson. “We will not say ‘OK, it is now time for us to be empowered by Nepalese women.’ We aim to understand the dynamics of the world and that means understanding how things are contextual.”
So the group will wait to see what service they can do until they find out what their partner nonprofits in Nepal need. It might be as simple as getting to know women who work as guides for 3 Sisters Trekking, a Nepalese company that paved the way for women to become trekking guides, traditionally not a position women hold in Nepal. Jackson is personally acquainted with some of the trekking guides they will travel with, having done her master’s research at 3 Sisters Trekking.
Kirsten Turner, a Boulder resident and a participant in November’s trip, says she is not typically inclined to hire tour companies, but Nepal is different.
“Picturing myself showing up in Kathmandu alone seems crazy,” says Turner.
She says she is confident the service component will be humble and will employ her relevant skills — maybe teaching the female guides some basic rock climbing techniques.
“It’s going to be great to base [the service learning] on what our skillset is,” says Turner. “I don’t know how to build a fence, for example. If that were the thing we were going to do, I wouldn’t be helpful. You’d have to teach me how to do that first, which would be silly.”
She doesn’t expect the Nepalese guides will learn anything life-changing from her, she says, but hopes to spend nine days trekking with them, learning from them, maybe picking up some Nepali and sharing the same human experience with them, realizing “our lives look really different, but we are all just people.”
Eventually, Jackson says, she would like to incorporate the American women’s skills even more into the service component. She envisions getting midwives and labor doulas as participants, so that the American women and Nepalese women can trade birthing techniques and practices.
Essentially, Jackson says, there will be a reciprocal exchange between the American women and the female Nepalese guides. No one is going to “help” or “save” anyone.
Jackson says many of the women who act as guides for 3 Sisters Trekking get frequently harassed due to their gender when on the job. That is something she — and probably every woman on the trip — can relate to.
“One guide I had this last January would get stopped by men who would say to her, ‘You can’t be a guide, you are a woman,’” says Jackson.
Both Jackson and Maltrich can relate similar experiences they have had in the United States. They have been hassled by male hikers who tell them they can’t be guides or summit mountains alone as women. Given that, Maltrich says, the empowerment that takes place in Nepal will be reciprocal. And that attitude, Jackson says, lacks the kind of moral superiority that other companies might aim for when they bring foreigners into a country aiming to “help.”
Limbu says he sees a huge complexity in traveling to help people. He says he hopes instead that more travelers will work to offset the idea of foreign helpers going in to developing countries to “save” them.
“Instead of going ‘Oh my god, since I am an American and things are so awful in Nepal, I am going to go over there and help them,’ I would like to imagine a world where one thinks, ‘I am not going there to help anyone, but to be helped,’” says Limbu.
None of this is news to Jackson. Her approach to Tuttaré Adventures appears at first to be light-handed, but it becomes evident when she explains the structure of the start-up that it has taken her years to conceive of the intricacies of the program. Jackson appears largely unfazed by the potential ails of adventure travel — not because she hasn’t thought of them, but because she has.
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