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Anxious Nepal decks up for SAARC summit

With numerous barricades and a dead nightlife, a never-before-seen clean city and conspicuous determination, Nepal is playing the perfect host for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit as if to prove a point.

For a frequent traveller to Kathmandu, it is no more the old romantic, tourist city fabled for Thamel's nightlife, bars ad bookstores.

Its tourist charms are now only for daytime display. Thamel, the favourite haunt of tourists, is dying out as South Asia's best street corner for world famous bookstores and bars. In the past, some like Rum Doodles have even found a place in world rankings.

By 9.30 pm the city is dead. Deserted restaurants close down early and security personnel roam the streets with their frozen fingers locked on the triggers of dated self-loading rifles.

This winter is really chilly in the Kathmandu valley.

The internal emergency clamped in the wake of Maoist violence in the past two months has come in handy for the authorities.

While most barricades can be crossed by waving an identity card, the King Birendra International Convention Centre and the Soaltee hotel, where most heads of states are putting up, is out of bounds for ordinary people.

The SAARC summit could not have come at a better time for the Nepal government, which is reeling under the combined impact of Maoist attacks, political instability and a new king still trying to gain popular acceptance.

"It was very, very important for us to host this summit. It sends a significant message within and outside," says a senior government official.

Seizing on the opportunity, authorities have turned garbage dumps into gardens, dressed dirty bridges in welcome banners and are trying to give tourism industry a little respite.

The city has been beautified like never before. The aesthetically constructed airport looks much cleaner and security men are more polite.

At the Tinkune Triangle, close to the convention centre, a plot of wasteland has been converted into a garden. The designer, a lady named Renchin Yonjan, calls it the 'Ocean-to-mountain garden'.

There is at least one more such garden, complete with fountains, coming up on the road leading to the convention centre.

At Bhadrakali, a dirty bridge is being covered with welcome banners.

It is another matter that some hotels have also seized the opportunity to charge inexplicably huge tariff in a city where one could easily get a really good room for less than Indian Rs 1000.

Nepal today is facing tough times with the people still sceptical about the king while tourism, the mainstay of the economy, is in the doldrums ever since September 11. The attacks by the Maoists has only deepened the crisis.

The government hopes that a successful SAARC summit would lift some of the dark clouds.

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