‘Living overseas gives you a huge amount of freedom.’ : The Call of Nepal’s Katmandu : Some Americans Find Life Irresistible in Faraway Land

Down a rock-strewn, packed-dirt alleyway just a stone’s throw off Durbar Marg in the center of Katmandu is a little green door. Nearby, scruffy dogs sprawl in the morning sun, and the smells of a country fighting to overcome basic poverty permeate the air.

Inside the little green door, however, the sounds of a Mozart piano concerto slowly absorb those of life outside. Small tables are scattered through a garden fit for Florence: fruit trees, myriad plants, even a strawberry patch.

Welcome to Mike’s American Breakfast, haven for Peace Corps volunteers, tourists, Western-educated Nepalese, diplomats and AID workers, and Katmandu’s small band of long-term resident Americans.

At the other end of the world from Brooklyn, Cleveland or Hollywood, it is an oasis that fills a need almost as great as the majestic mountains, gentle people and spiritual longings that have enticed travelers to Katmandu ever since Nepal began opening itself to the outside world in the 1950s.

The Ultimate Escape

Katmandu, last stop on the trail of those in search of spiritual fulfillment. The ultimate escape from the freeway mentality. Wanderlust in the mountains. Freak Street. The nirvana of the backpacking youth of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the main link in the trail that followed the seasons from Kabul to Goa to the shadows of Mt. Everest.

Kabul is gone now, swept off the youthful traveler’s map by 10 years of savage war. Goa’s beaches still are a lure, but the fancy resorts and high-paying tourists make it less appealing.

And even Katmandu is changing, if it ever really fit the image it had in much of the West. Freak Street is still there, but the numbers of denizens who gave it its name are far fewer and the Nepalese government has just instituted a rule that to get a visa extension tourists must demonstrate they have spent at least $10 a day instead of the old rule of $5.

For a handful of Americans, now mostly in their 30s and 40s, Katmandu remains the last stop, a place where they have found their niche in a world that wants to move on a little faster than they would prefer.

Peace Corps Experience

Some never heard of it until they came here in the Peace Corps in the 1960s. Others started on the rebellion trail during or after Vietnam and found their answers in these hills and mountains. Still others are Buddhists drawn by the large Tibetan Buddhist community that has taken root since the Chinese swept into Tibet.

They are in their own way solidly middle class and comfortable with a style of life that straddles two worlds but at its core is about as different as it possibly could be from their counterparts’ back home. Dentists, restaurant owners, self-made anthropologists, a jack of all trades or two--for all, Katmandu now is home.

Mike Frame, who grew up on his family’s farm near Northfield, Minn., had never been on an airplane when he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Nepal.

“I didn’t even know where it was and I had to get out my map,” he says as he looks across the garden court of his restaurant as the tables slowly fill up with breakfast customers.

The Minnesota farm boy, like scores of other Peace Corps volunteers, got hooked on the country.

“The Peace Corps people keep coming back,” he says in his Midwestern accent. “I probably average one a week who I knew somewhere along the way. It’s the people. You get to know the people and you feel like you’ve got a home.”

The Peace Corps wrenched a lot of Americans in a lot of places out of their insular worlds and taught them about different peoples and different cultures. The Foreign Service and the Agency for International Development are full of people who got their start in the world beyond American shores in the Peace Corps.

For some, like Mike Frame, the impact was even more profound.

‘Needed a Job’

He stayed on for two tours as a volunteer and then signed on with AID in its agricultural extension program. In 1970, he went home, starting a communal farm in Wisconsin. A decade later, he was back. “Ran out of money and needed a job,” he says. For several years, the Peace Corps again was his home, this time as one of the paid staff, overseeing field projects, and then, he took the next step.

“I didn’t always like what was going on in America; there are so many regulations, so much organization. I liked it here in this society,” he says, although like almost all the other long-term Americans here he makes it clear he is not throwing off American life and culture. It’s just that for now, something else gives them fulfillment.

Mike’s American Breakfast, however, was an accident.

“We were sitting in my (Nepalese) partner’s house a couple of years ago and were talking about how it would be nice to open a good restaurant here. I’ve always liked cooking and good food,” he recalled.

“I sort of forgot about it until a couple of weeks later my friend came rushing up all excited and said, ‘We can do it!’ ‘Do what?’ I said.”

Now, at age 48, he is well into a new career as part owner of one of the world’s unique restaurants. But still. . . .

“I got a visa for seven years with this deal,” he says. “That’s probably long enough to run a restaurant.”

While most of Brian Hollander’s dental school classmates are firmly ensconced in well-heeled practices back home in Oregon, the tall, handsome 39-year-old has turned his professional training into a means toward a different end.

“Living overseas gives you a huge amount of freedom,” he says as he sits on the front porch of a friend’s house, looking out over the haze-shrouded Katmandu valley. “I have a partner. We are not interested in becoming rich; we just want to be comfortable. Before the kids were born, Judy (his wife) and I saw lots of Asia that most people only dream about seeing.”

While the Peace Corps started Mike Frame on his travels, it was the U.S. Army that sent Hollander abroad. The Army had paid for part of his dental schooling, and in return he served two years as a dentist in West Germany. It was enough to give him the travel bug.

Wanderlust Traveler

First he worked in the Cameroons through a volunteer program called Dental Health International. On the way home, he stopped in Nairobi and happened to come across a small group of Western dentists who needed somebody to help out during the vacation period. A few months later, the wanderlust carried him farther east, to Nepal.

“I decided to go to Nepal for trekking. About all I knew was that Mt. Everest was there and that I wanted to see it. One day I was hanging out at the Peace Corps office and a guy needed a root canal. They always used to go to Bangkok for work like this, but I told them I would do it there. I went off trekking, and by the time I got back, they had arranged space,” he says.

He fixed cavities and did root canals for a month and the diplomats, AID workers and other foreigners in Katmandu at the time got used to the idea of having a resident dentist. While Hollander went off sailing from Hong Kong to the Philippines and bumming around Southeast Asia, some diplomats went to work to try to make a more permanent arrangement.

A few months later, when he was back home in Oregon and about to commit himself to a rural group practice, the letter came saying a Katmandu clinic was a go.

A few weeks later, the chairs were in place and the drills ready to roll.

Katmandu, however, is not suburban Portland. First, approval from the resident astrologer was needed, since nothing in Nepal--from the king’s coronation to start-ups of new ventures--is done without his blessing.

Astrologer’s Advice

“We went to see the king’s astrologer for the best date to open and he told us to bring dirt from the corners of the building,” Hollander recalls. “He looked at it and asked, ‘Is this from inside or outside?’ We had brought some sweepings from inside, but he said it had to be from outside. So we went back and dug some up from the corners.”

Finally, an appropriate date was found, but one little problem still had to be cleared up.

The astrologer said the area where the clinic was built was inhabited by the ghosts of two Nepalese who had been killed there many years ago. A daylong puja (prayer ceremony) with the local Hindu priest would make everything right.

“Once that was done,” Hollander says, “all we had to do was walk in backward the first day and give the first patient a good break on the fees.”

That was eight years ago. Now Hollander and Judy, a former volunteer in a Cambodian refugee camp who also found her way to Nepal, have two children and seem happy with life in Katmandu.

“The kids get to grow up in a different culture. They go to a school (the American-run Lincoln International School) with kids from 35 different countries. They grow up without prejudices,” he says.

A Visit to the U.S.

In 1986, they took a year off, spent three months with the children in the South Pacific, then went back to the United States, traveling in a camper to give grandparents, aunts and uncles a chance to meet the children and vice versa.

“When we are in the States,” he says, “it is not rushed. We have real quality time with parents.”

Will they go back to the United States?

“We try not to make real long-range plans,” he says. “We won’t be here forever. Something will come up. . . . “

Meantime, he is deep into helping the Sherpa people of the Everest region get better dental care.

“My big goal is to set up a clinic in Namche Bazaar, the last town before Mt. Everest. There used to be no sugar there, but with all the trekkers, now it is everywhere and 75% of the kids have trouble. We’ve got a Sherpa woman in Canada now going to dental school. I want this to be a Sherpa clinic. I don’t want my name on it,” he says.

“We just got the land for the clinic from the village committee and we have a lot of donations. It’s going to go now.”

When James Gambrone was growing up in Brooklyn, his heroes were Audie Murphy and John Wayne. Tarawa and Iwo Jima were part of the history of a patriotic Italian-American family.

“I very much wanted to go to war,” Gambrone says.

When Vietnam came along, he enlisted.

Instead of the Mekong Delta or Cam Ranh Bay, Gambrone found himself in Korea as part of a M.A.S.H. unit, and from time to time, the stories of Vietnam convalescents didn’t square with some of his earlier images. When he came home in 1968 and went to work for Dean Witter, he found that it was time for a change.

“Since I was 5, I remember talking to my mom about seeing the world, so I sold everything and bought a ticket on a luxury liner to Japan,” he says as he looks out across the green fields of the American Club in downtown Katmandu, which he now manages.

Deeper Into Asia

His travel took him deeper and deeper into Asia, first as the itinerant tourist and then as the searcher for inner truths. After a year in India doing a lot of meditation retreats, he landed in Katmandu. “It was on the trail. You had to do it then. Free drugs and the mountains. It was like going to California and not going to San Francisco,” he says.

It wasn’t long before his money ran out, so he started a shop on Freak Street where he sold Tibetan and Nepalese woodblock prints to tourists. It lasted until 1974, when, in his words, “I fell in love and wanted to go back and be with ‘the relationship.’ ”

On the way home, “the relationship” decided she didn’t want to be with him.

Six years of wandering followed--painting houses in Oregon, making and selling crafts, drifting into the human potential movement in California. By 1979, he says, he realized he wanted to go back to Nepal.

“The context was art, but I think it was more than that. I was fed up with the pace and life style of America. America is too big. It’s no longer human-sized. Katmandu is human-scale,” he says.

The times have changed, and maybe Gambrone has changed too. In the early ‘70s, there were more people just searching. The fallout from the ‘60s, he says.

On a Human Scale

“Now I come back, and I am a consultant to an art gallery (and manager of a recreation complex to help pay the bills). But it’s still on a human scale. People have time for you.

“When I go home, I see my gardener. . . . He’s a peasant, but he is gold. We work together in the garden. You know, I don’t even own a TV. A lot of people do, but I work in the garden and I work a lot with contemporary artists. It is nice to think you are contributing to this culture.”

When he first came, he was a member of Siva’s Slaves, a local motorcycle club. Now he tells you proudly that he is president of the Gear Wallahs, the local mountain bicycle group.

Judy Chase came to Nepal a dozen years ago with a grant and a plan to do a book on Nepalese folk art. Somewhere along the way, like much of life here, the project got stretched out a bit.

“I thought I would whip over here for a year and do the book, but it is a very complex culture. You can’t really do an ‘art’ book here because art is not really separate from life, from culture,” she says.

When Chase began her book, she trekked deep into the valleys between sky-high Himalayan peaks for five years, spending two-thirds of her time on the trail, seeing what they were making in the different tribal regions that have kept their own cultures, shielded by the great mountains.

Now most of the text and the pictures are done and she is corresponding with a California museum about a project that would combine book and exhibition.

“It may take another three or four years,” she says. “That’s just about right; 12 years--Nepalese pace.”

Meantime, she lives on a small farm with her California potter husband just a few miles from Katmandu City. Their gardens burst with everything from rice and wheat to artichokes and herbs.

Far From Connecticut

It is a long way from Waterbury, Conn., where she grew up, and Colby College, where she went to school. Approaching 50, she smiles when she talks of how she went off to Boulder, Colo., for graduate school in math in 1961.

“Actually, I went to ski,” she says, “ski and rock-climb.”

It was the rock climbing that eventually brought her to Nepal in 1974 at the head of an Outward Bound group. She liked what she saw, went back home long enough to work up the funding for her book, and came back.

She still is a trekker, combining her love of the mountains with her interest in yoga. It all keeps her in contact with what she calls an organic way of life that is very different from the America in which she grew up.

“In so many places here there still are no roads. There are things we no longer have a glimpse of any more. Ancient Hindu and Buddhist shrines mark the landscape. There are churches in Vermont that mark the landscape, but the difference is that most people here--99%-- are still related to that way of living,” she says.

“I’m not involved in rituals, but I like watching others who are. I like what it does for their lives. It allows them to have a bit of equanimity, whatever goes by. And I like equanimity.”

While most of the Americans who are long-term residents of Nepal came here in search of something about themselves, others were drawn more specifically to the country’s Buddhist community.

Nepal is a Hindu kingdom, but it now is home to a large Tibetan Buddhist community, members who fled here after China took control of their homeland.

Of the 100 or so remaining long-term residents, U.S. Embassy officials say, about half are here because they are Buddhists or because they have become students of Buddhism and Tibetan culture.

The numbers are shrinking, as Nepal begins to enforce a new policy on visas for foreigners. Tourists, especially better-off tourists, are courted, but there is a clampdown on longer-term foreign residents that already has whittled down the numbers here and left many who remain wary of what lies ahead.

Especially vulnerable are those without a job that links them to an institution, such as a school or aid organization, or to a sanctioned business with a Nepalese partner.

A Worried American

“This is my home and has been for 5 1/2 years. I don’t want to see it go up in smoke,” says one worried American who asked that he not be identified.

Now 37, he had a successful business in Oregon before deciding, at age 30, that there was more that he wanted out of life.

“I had been exploring Tibetan Buddhist thought and liked it. . . . There was a real attraction, more than with Hindu culture,” he says, explaining why he left his business behind him and came to Nepal.

His interest in religion and culture, however, has led him even deeper into Nepalese life than some of his counterparts, although all share a certain separation from the material comforts enjoyed by other Westerners in the diplomatic and foreign-aid communities.

“If I wanted to live in Philadelphia, I would live in Philadelphia,” he says. “. . . A lot of Westerners don’t stay here because they can’t cut it. They can’t handle living on the cutting edge for so long, moving from a culture that is based on doing to one based on being--who you are, where you come from, what caste you are in.

“Part of my difficulty in going back to the States is that once you have learned to cross over and to be comfortable in another society, people (at home) don’t care about my life here, because they have no way of knowing about it. . . . Where does that leave me?

“Re-entry is so difficult. You are so much better off if you are married. At least there is someone you can relate to.”