Nepal: a documentary from Journeyman Pictures

[macaroni21]

There's a usually a long gap between production and upload to Youtube, and this one is no different. The 59-minute documentary "Fairytale Of Kathmandu | A portrait of a fallen idol and the murky world of sex tourism" was made around 2007, but only uploaded this month. 

It opens with a charming and cheery tone: the celebrated Irish poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh makes regular trips to Nepal. He loves the exotic and simple life there, and over the years he has acquired many young men as friends who dote on him. But as the film maker follows him around, she captures scenes that raise many questions. And like the ominously dark monsoon clouds that come rolling in over the valleys of Nepal from the south, the tone of the film changes.

The Irish police undertook an investigation starting from 2006 (see https://archive.ph/20130217192154/http://www.independent.ie/national-news/boys-were-damaged-by-sex-trysts-with-poet-1286378.html) but nothing came of it. Apparently there was no investigation by the Nepali authorities since no complaint had been filed and all the boys were reportedly of legal age.

 

[Olddaddy]

Interesting, I'm just watching this now 

[PeterRS]

I watched the film. I had a sense of foreboding from the start for I knew that what we eventually learn at the end has happened before - albeit in some cases worse. In the late 1970s/1980s the Pagsanjan Falls about 100 kms from Manila was a notorious place in The Philippines where pedophiles not only congregated, they were for the most part welcomed. They brought money to a very poor neighbourhood. Worst of all parents would openly sell their young underage children for sex for what to the foreigners was peanuts. This was well known and quite widely spoken about when I spent occasional long-week-ends relaxing at Manila's Philippine Plaza Hotel. Eventually the authorities put an end to this dreadful practice, but I do not recall when that was.

I visited Nepal twice, once in November 1980 and again in November 2009. Each trip was for six days, three in Kathmandu seeing both the city and two of the main cities in the Kathmandhu Valley, Bhaktapur and Patan; and three in Pokhara where I wanted to see dawn break over the nearby almighty Annapurna Range. I had no interest in anything other than sightseeing. That was quite superb, especially the view of dawn over those extraordinary mountains, although whereas Pokara had been a small town with a hotel and some guest houses like the one I stayed at in 1980, by 2009 it had grown humungously into a city of over half a million. I cannot claim to have noticed any seeming relationships between foreigners and Nepalese, but then I was not looking for them!

Certainly Nepal is desperately poor, and the situation must have become far worse ouside the cities following the two mega-earthquakes in 2015 - one in April estimated at more than 7.8 on the Richter scale and a second just 3 weeks later later measuring 7.3. I realise these occurred 8 or 9 years after that documentary film. but hundreds of thousands outside the main cities were made homeless and the destruction in the cities was extensive. Much of Kathmandhu's historic Durbar Square was all but destroyed. I imagine many of the homeless youths found their way to Kathmandhu in search of work.

Why the Irish poet in that film was permitted without penalty to start unregistered charities to help Nepalese without any supervision is, I suppose, extraordinary. But we know that there are scamers everywhere and this would be up to the Irish government to handle. What is certain is that there will be other foreigners out to help young Nepalese - allegedly - but with sex as part of the deal. After all, it is known that Nepal was the first country in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage. With the age of consent being just 16, no doubt some of the backpackers of previous decades have been replaced by sex tourists. And this is such a shame for the Nepalese are a lovely. friendly peoples and they live in an extraordinarily beautiful country.