Lyudmila Tyuting is a solid, well-read, emancipated, eyed Teutonic woman who does not hide that she lives in Berlin Hinterhoy (back yard) in Kreuzberg (West Berlin) and is eager to see the horizon, especially with pagoda silhouettes in the distance. It seems that Berlin is a city with a lost horizon.
It oscillates between Kathmandu and Berlin and is very active in the area of "sanfte". (soft) -tourism, which means tourism with understanding. On May 27, 1996, she spent her 50th birthday with her Nepali friends at Thanpoche Monastery. She is concerned about the negative aspects of tourism and wrote the information service "Tourism". For potential tourists in the German-speaking world, she is a specialist from Nepal who cares about the cultural and natural heritage of Nepal, as evidenced by her travel books.
I met her at the Volkerkunde Museum in Freiburg, in the metropolis of the South-West Black Forest, and this event was one of a series of talks under the auspices of "Contemporary Art from Nepal." promote cultural and religious development in Nepal.
Lyudmila Tyuting spoke about the fascinating Nepal, the Sun and the Shady side. and explained the slides and information and described Nepal as a wonderful country.
And another topic was “Tourism with Insight is not claimed: environmental damage through tourism in Nepal” which was more or less interested Nepal fan would find in Bikas Binas, a thoughtful book about the environmental aspects of Nepal, especially environmental pollution. Wednesday in the Himalayas, published by Ms. Tutting and my friend College Kunda Dixit, a well-known journalist from Nepal, who has been executive director of the International Press Service since decades, and editor-in-chief and publisher of The Nepali Times.
Mrs. Tutting's story, posed by what Germans usually call the Berliner Bay (Berlinerschnauze), has pedagogical and practical value, and she tried not only to show that a tourist from abroad makes a mistake in Nepal, but also offered, as a tourist should behave and dress in Nepal. In general, it sounded like a German etiquette book called “Knigge” for potential travelers to Nepal.
In the past, there were many transparent slide shows and conversations under the auspices of the Badische Zeitung, the University of Freiburg and the Volkshochschule with jumpers, jumpers, rimpos, meditations, boxing experts and boksis &, 39, shamanism, Tibetan Lamaism, tai-chi, taoism, yen- oriented zen and something you. It is a fact that every Hans-Rudi-Fritz, who was in Nepal or the Himalayas, acts as an expert on issues related to the House of Snow.
Some have bothered to do a little research on the background, and some don't, and the result is a series of howods. Like the guy who wrote a thesis about the traditions in Nepal and held a slide show in the auditorium of the University. Photos of the Nepalese village were, as usual, breathtaking. Pokhara, Kathmandu, Jomsom, Khumbu district, and then a slide of the Bhimsmen post was shown, and our expert noted that this is the only mosque in Nepal.
Or the time when the Swabian expeditionary doctor from Stuttgart held a virtual (talk) at the university-auth-max (maximum audience). A color slide of a large group of Nepalese porters flashed on the screen. Porters were shown watching alpine expedition members eating their sumptuous dinner, with every imaginable European dish, and the comment was: The Nepalese ate once a day, so they just looked at us while we ate. (So in the original). A decent German was sitting next to me by the name of Dr. Petersen, who was a professor of microbiology, remarked: “Solche Geshkloklagkeit!” (Lack of taste or grace), but this did not seem to interfere with our Swabian Himalayan hero. Most Nepalese eat two large meals: at lunch and dinner, with a lot of snacks thrown between them. And when you visit a Nepalese family, you also offer hot tea and snacks depending on the wealth and status of the family.
Every time I heard such unkind, thoughtless remarks, I groaned, and my blood pressure shot, and my ECG registered a tachycardia, and I probably had developed ulcers. Oh, my mucous membrane. The remedy would be to avoid such stressors in the form of a slide show, but I could not. I had to say to myself: boils, old man, the landscape is beautiful. And this. If it were not for the delightful beauty of the rural Nepalese and Kathmandu valleys and cultural treasures ... You just had to use the ear plugs (Oxopax) and enjoy the magnificence of Nepal: its uniqueness, its smiling people always with what the British call, tough upper lip and that the Germans called "runner", "Kriggen Lassen", despite the ten-year war between government forces and the Maoists in the past.
Another time, a European couple came to my apartment with a thick album full of photographers of images of Gods and Goddesses and experts. I wanted to determine what and where, they were photographed in Nepal, because it was supposed to be published as an illustrated book about the temples of Nepal. Some experts, I thought. The couple looked like a drug addict on Freak Street in the early seventies. Like the legendary Nepali, one helped where he could, although I had to shake my head after they left.
Lyudmila has been going to Nepal since 1974. However, when you remind her of her image in those days, she likes to forget everything, because she probably made some mistakes and learned from the mistakes of the past. And now ecology seems to be her passion. She wants to “sensitize” potential tourists through her slide shows, speeches on television and pay attention to the Nepalese etiquette to feel at home in Nepal, despite the cultural shock and change.
Tourists are terrorists. flashes across the screen, and Ludmila explains that she removed the graffiti on the Berlin Wall in Kreuzberg. Every time a tourist visits another country, they get a cultural shock: a language barrier, a matter of mentality, alien customs, and as a result they return to their countries, loaded with many prejudices. She then shows the bus base of tourists who fumbled around the Hanuman Dhok Palace. She says some of the tourists got angry with her when she took pictures of them. Tourists seem to reserve the right to photograph each country and its people as something normal, without bothering to allow them permission. “Wir haben schon bezahlt!” Is their argument. Doesn't it smell like cultural imperialism, after the motto: I paid in dollars, stamps, francs and yen for the trip, so you locals have to take care and take care of me. The fact is that tourists paid for their travel agencies in Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart or Kathmandu, and not on the faces and objects that they photograph. Payment allows you to land in the country, but how to behave in another country is another matter.
Today you can walk around the world in 18 days. she says, and wherever you constantly lead people. She talks about earth trotters who travel independently and write books with insiders' secret tips on how to get the most out of the land with the minimum of your money. A poor carrier with a pile of cargo, compressing culinary supplies, responds, and this forces Lyudmila to say that some leader of the expedition has successfully risen to the top of the Himalayan peak, we have never had any loss. Only porter is dead. She then reminds the audience that the porters do not have medical or accident or pension insurance in the German sense.
Funeral pies in Pashupatinata is an eternal topic for tourists, says Lyudmila with a groan, and she describes tourists with video cameras in ghats. You would not want a foreigner to attend the funeral ceremony of your loved ones, would you? - asks Lyudmila.
It was interesting to know that on the Jomsom highway in Tatopani there are video clips in the interests of local Nepalese, tourist travelers and their porters. I saw & # 39; Gandhi in this campaign she said, thus signifying the film by Sir Attenborough. You can even see the latest movies in Hollywood and Bollywood. Video Picot Iyer in Kathmandu. can still be interesting for Nepalofil, because he has the ability to record every jump. Poster advertising. The tragic victims of animals in Dakshinkali. Apparently, from “Bikas-Binas” (the destruction of development), the box office cocktails were released about the so-called “hissing, romantic, exciting, futuristic” box-office cocktails, produced in the Bollywood pulp mills, DVD-mills.
If you want to meet people and get to know them, you need to travel slowly, says Lyudmila Tyting. Then she tells about the wonders of the polaroid camera in the Nepalese customs. Men are driven by toys. She says: “If you take a picture of a customs officer and give him a photo, you will easily overcome the barrier.
Does tourism have currency for Nepal? Not surprisingly, she said, with imported food from Australia, lighting from Holland, whiskey from Scotland, air conditioning from Canada. She shows Pokhara in 1974. Corrugated iron sheets are transported on the backyard porters along the Jomsom trail for the construction of small mountain restaurants.
A Gurung woman appears in her traditional dress, roasting a circular village in her open-air tea shop, and old Lyudmila advises the audience to learn about the benefits of acquiring immunity or strengthening it through gamma globulin and the benefits of tetanus shots before going to the Himalayas.
After the show, I went with Lyudmila to a Freiburger tavern named Zum Shternhen for a drink and a chat. Tony Hagen, a geologist who grew up from Lenzerheide, worked with a double PhD. and he was invited to talk about the development of Nepal from 1950 to 1987, as well as the role of developing cooperation. Tony Hagen was a celebrity in Nepal because of his geological pioneering work and publication. Alas, Hagen passed away sometime after starring in an autobiographical film. Ingrid Kreid, who hastened to return to Cologne, gave a lecture on the history of the blissful artists and the freedom of art in the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal and expressed deep concern about the theft of the Nepalese temple and ritual objects.
Lyudmila is a name that must be reckoned with as a global traveler, a journalist, a Nepali expert in the German-speaking world, and she criticizes the alternative tourist scene. And she is still fighting for outsider rights in South Asia. It was for the Chipko movement in India and condemned deforestation, environmental damage, invented for the human rights of Tibetans and Nepalese, written about the development and destruction of the so-called third world countries. Once she told Edida Crest, travel editor of Tageszeitung (TAZ, Berlin): "My heart is Nepalese, and the rest is German." Her base camp in Kathmandu is the Vajra Hotel, run by Sabina Lehmann, a hotel with theatrical talent, and she is working on a novel about climbing this time. She wanted to imitate the characters of James Hilton's “Lost Horizon”, in which people are very old and not worried about gerontological problems. She wants to live at least 108 years on this planet. One can only admire and wish her success in her endeavors and pedagogical criticism.
