By Yoichi Clark Shimatsu9-11-26

Nepal as one of the friendliest destinations for foreign tourists, trekkers and journalists has been stunned and mortified by a disastrous flood that swept through its central river system, resulting in the drowning deaths of up to 5,000 missing and some 2,000 bodies of drowning victims as the grim search continues through central Nepal. The deaths include those of local Nepalese farmers and town-dwellers, foreign tourists, trekkers and Chinese workers at a dam-building project. At a time when summer turns to autumn, the search for decomposing bodies of flood victims is going slowly due to riverine mud, deep forests and loss of roads in the rugged countryside west of the nation’s capital Kathmandu.

Earlier in the journalism career of this roving writer I visited Nepal dozens of times, often riding across the Himalayas on horseback or trekking with backpack with a Nepalese writer in pursuit of drug-smuggling outlaws connected with the CIA, violations of international laws by foreign diplomats, and most grievously tracking the actual cause of the murders of the Royal Family (falsely blamed on the young prince, who was a bold advocate of Nepalese opposition to sinister aggression from corrupt politicians in India). More than a decade after those adventures, this writer is compelled to respond to the chaotic and usually uninformed reportage from the international news media. This account connects the many sites along the flood path from south-central Tibet to the border crossing into Nepal and along the central waterway to the exit point near the tiger reserve on the border with northern India.

Gateway between Nepal and China-Tibet

The choke-point of the Gyirong border crossing – directly on the path of the fast-flowing killer flood bursting out of the Tibet border region – saw the the first flood deaths inside Nepal, which included Chinese visitors at the entry tunnel. Immediately before the fierce and fast wave descended a nearby mountain on the Tibetan side, there were casualties along the roadway arriving from the town of Gyirong, the Chinese provincial center near the southern border. The border crossing is located alongside the rivulet of the same name which trickles slowly and seeming happily on most days. The force and scale of the sudden flood rushed down the Chinese road to burst with full fury into the tall oversized two-story structure, drowning Chinese and Tibetan waiting in line to enter Nepal. A surveillance camera on the Nepal side caught the fearsome wave as young Chinese men ran for their lives under the tall waves. The normally narrow creek was transformed into a raging river rushing downhill to vulnerable farm communities and trading posts downhill and around the westward bend.

The Gyirong border post is quite familiar to this journalist who has waited there on the Nepalese side to pick up Chinese news reporters and college students at that China-Nepal border post as a guide and host of their adventures in Kathmandu and along the Everest trail. Having earlier served as the first foreign journalism professor in China - at Tsinghua University in Beijing - I kept in contact with former students, professors and news reporters from China’s capital Beijing along with Shanghai and Hong Kong. For most of those young people, it was their first foreign visit made possible by the absence of protocol pressures and sheer professional envy associated with being a working journalist in the “world capitals” - the USA, Europe and the UK. Luckily in those days it was not well known to the outside world that Nepal has been at the center of contention between an increasingly influential India and the western powers, especially Britain – versus China - as implied in author John Krakhauer’s “Into Thin Air” escapade along the Everest Trail.

Kathmandu a quarter-century ago was a crowded yet laid-back town with friendly young people nearly all of whom spoke English - thus a perfect starting point for journalists from abroad to engage in news reporting on foreign affairs. Since those decades much has changed in Nepal for better or worse - although the rural regions have remained essentially the same pastoral hinterlands of farming folk and water buffalo. What has changed in the countryside over the past two decades are the first giant steps toward modernization as seen - with horror - in the riverside commercial centers that became “killing fields” of the fast-rising flood.

Before going into the specifics, it should be mentioned that Nepal’s wildlife reserves along the river’s north-bend (haven of monkeys and wild birds) and the southern borderland (home ground of the Asian tiger) have not reported any mass kills of wildlife or their caretakers - which is good news indeed of nature prevailing without human ambition, thanks to the conservation efforts of the late Royal Family (who were murdered in an international intrigue followed by a sinister cover-up). Nepalese society has survived countless horrors and setbacks yet the population remains strong, frugal and cheerful, carrying their undeserved burdens in graceful silence. In their muddy footsteps while searching for drowned relatives, my sympathies reach out to mourn the horrific death toll. It is difficult to also look ahead to recovery, renewal and remembrance. Arrivals of foreign tourists are important for that nation’s economy, political savvy, innovation and, of course, maintaining the pristine beauty of mountain peaks, deep forests and riversides.

The earliest report of an initial flood assessment came within two days after the disaster from an anonymous Chinese researcher who apparently flew aboard a helicopter over the Tibetan mountain terrain east of the provincial capital Gyirong along a flight-path northwest of Nepal’s border checkpoint. That plausible account discovered the flood’s starting point was a massif to the west (northwest of the border crossing). The flood origin was pinpointed along a lower slope of a snow-covered rather drab bald mountain without a name on the maps of a dozen world atlases that I’ve flipped through. A closer look shows the no-name colossus stretches out to the west and east with a series of rocky humps. There appear to be no trees on its slopes.

Drabness is a sight distained by tourists and mountaineers who thrive on spectacular rocks such as Yosemite’s half-dome, the splendor of the French Alps and, of course, the daunting harsh roof of the world without a trace of human sentimentality - Everest. The killer mountain is by comparison an anonymous hump along the frontline of spectacular peaks of the Tibetan Himalaya, facing off against the solitary peaks along the edge of Nepal, such as the swirling giant Manaslu. That natural border region has many rivulets streaming downhill. Along a far narrower scale the anonymous furrow seems just one of many harmless drainage ditches, is a cloud-catcher, which gathers pools of rainwater which then seeps - dribbles - downhill to the valley by the binational border-crossing. (Of minor interest, the back side of the killer massif is the location of large lakes, a tourism area for Chinese vacationers,)

Source: Rense.com