Some commentary on the bumper Nepali tourism year

I'm on my way to writing the 90ᵗʰ post in Nepal on kindle. Big deal, yad da yad da. Among all this surely I've written about the bumper tourism year( and month) Nepal has had. October saw the largest number of tourists in the country, foreign ones, ever. Not as many Chinese tourists but that's a whole separate posts. And that's not accounting domestic tourists. I'm reliably informed the the trekking 'trails most popular among the Nepali visitors are overflowing with people, seeing ' 'bumper to bumper' traffic, so to speak, on the trekking ' trails.

Thamel seems well-touristed and Pokhara was reliably busy too. The thing is, though, foreign tourism makes up for a much smaller portion of the economy, and the public minds pace, than it used to. The remittance economy is a behem­oth with no competitors. With every other family sending a family member abroad, high-spenders in town are Nepalis now, much more so than the sort of hippie budget tourist that comes here. Trends are driven not by visiting tourists but by Nepalis ( or more accurately, TikTok). Globalization has made the world smaller, the internet has accelerated the trend, and now foreign tourists don't feel as important anymore. They're a small part of a large( not very/and growing economy, their size has inflated but everything else has grown much faster so now they occupy a much diminished role in our awareness and in our economy.

Good riddance, I say! A diversified economy is a healthy economy, and even though we're in no way diversified, we've certainly grown more self-respecting.