COLUMN ONE : End of the Trail to Katmandu : Idyllic Nepal charmed Westerners, and many settled there for years. Now, amid political troubles, the government is showing some the door.

“Ah, Miss Barbara,” the old tour guide said, as Barbara Adams drove away from the Hotel Yak and Yeti, her long hair billowing like a silver flame out of her ancient white convertible.

“Ah, Miss Barbara,” the guide repeated, pointing toward the disappearing image and shaking his head. “She was once a queen.”

Well, a princess, to be sure; a pioneer, without a doubt, and, perhaps more than anything else, a tireless seeker of heaven on Earth, the Shangri-La that drew her and thousands of other Americans to this once-secluded Himalayan kingdom after it opened its mysterious mountains and valleys to the outside world.

It has been 29 years since the afternoon when Barbara Adams, in the lobby of the old Royal Hotel, fell in love with a prince and his country.

Now, her prince is dead. The kingdom she loves has lost much of its charm, tarnished in part by those who embraced it. And Barbara Adams is among the many Americans and other expatriates here that the Nepalese government wishes would simply go home.

“Home?” the 58-year-old native of New York, a city she says she hardly remembers, mused recently over breakfast. “This is my home. I had always planned to die here, and, well, my plans remain unchanged.”

Adams is perhaps the most notable of the expatriates living here, but many others also are caught up in a new government policy aimed at controlling resident foreigners.

Some came in search of paradise, others for the drugs. Still others came to scale the snowy faces of Mt. Everest, or to walk the mountain paths. In most cases, though, they came for shelter from the harsh realities of an increasingly complex modern world--a world that now appears to have caught up with them even here.

Most are still welcome, say Nepalese officials. The new policy, they explain, is designed to “regularize” and “modernize” foreign residency laws that were so lax that Katmandu came to be synonymous with hashish, heroin and the hippies who designated Nepal as the last stop on the Asian “peace trail” of the 1960s.

Indeed, Adams, who started Nepal’s first travel agency, and dozens of other long-staying Americans who first came to Nepal as Peace Corps volunteers, are not the principal targets of the government crackdown.

“It’s more that the Nepalese are concerned about their reputation,” one Western diplomat said. “The term ‘Freak Street’ suggests the kind of person who was attracted to Nepal and the kind of person the Nepalese don’t want.”

He referred to an ancient brick lane in Katmandu that for years was lined with “head shops” and hash-cake bakeries.

“The Nepalese are tired of that reputation,” the diplomat went on, “and now the number of those kinds of tourists has fallen off sharply. Now, by and large, you just have people who are considered to be doing something for the country.”

A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy here said there are still about 300 Americans living in Nepal, almost all of them working with international agencies that are spending tens of millions of dollars to develop a country that ranks among the poorest on Earth.

Among them are Jesuit priests, veterinarians, educators, agronomists and scientists. Most have not been touched by the new policy.

But the embassy spokesman said the number of resident Americans has declined sharply since November, 1988, when the new policy became law. It limits the stay of any foreigner not employed full-time in development work.

“You might as well call it the Barbara Adams law,” one Western diplomat said, half-jokingly.

Old Nepal hands like Barbara Adams, and even many of the aid workers, who have had little trouble staying on here, had harsher words for the new residency rules, particularly in light of the government’s repression of a nascent pro-democracy movement.

“I think they’re trying to get rid of the people who know too much,” Adams said during an interview at a Katmandu cafe run by another American expatriate. “When we brought in Western ideas of economic development, they couldn’t be separated from the social and political ideas that come along with them. The government wants the economic aid, but it does not appear to be ready for the social and political change that it brings about.”

Nepal, a landlocked nation of Himalayan mountain peaks, terraced farms and fertile flatlands between China and India, has experimented with Western democracy only once. This was a decade of near-anarchy that came after King Tribhuvan liberated the nation in 1951 from a century of harsh dynastic rule.

Corruption flourished amid political infighting; development came to a standstill, until Tribhuvan’s son, King Mahendra, carried out a “royal coup” in 1960. He banned all political parties, curtailed basic freedoms and reinstated dynastic rule.

The autocratic tradition has continued, and three decades of stable if Draconian rule has attracted billions of dollars in foreign aid, bringing Nepal its first roads, bridges and basic health care.

But with the development has come a new round of corruption, which in recent months has spawned a populist movement for economic and political reform.

Communists, social democrats, intellectuals, professionals and human rights activists have united in sometimes-violent street protests--a movement that Adams and many other foreign residents support. The government of Mahendra’s son, King Birendra, has responded with an iron fist.

Thousands of Nepalese have been jailed, some of them picked up off the street at random. Political prisoners have reportedly been beaten and tortured. Newspapers have been seized or censored. Yet the movement for a multi-party system and open elections is winning support.

“The main thing is that everyone wants a change,” said Allen Lundberg, a 48-year-old native of Arcadia, Calif., who came to Nepal in 1966 as a Peace Corps volunteer.

“They want the corruption stopped. They want the streets cleaned. And the democracy thing is just an umbrella for that, although I do think that in many ways this is a result of Nepal’s opening up to the outside world.”

Lundberg, who manages a hotel for mountain trekkers, said of the government crackdown: “For me, it’s a personal disappointment. When I was brought here, in the so-called good old days, when Nepal really was a Shangri-La, I always felt that Nepal could have been better. It could have been different by absorbing development without giving way to corruption. But here we are again, reinventing the wheel.”

Lundberg apparently has not been targeted under the new policy on foreigners, but he said that many of his expatriate friends have been. He said he is thinking of leaving Nepal if the political situation has not improved by the time his contract expires in May.

For Barbara Adams, who has already been thrown out once, when nine police officers came to her door last year and took her away, the situation is more than a disappointment. For the former princess, who is now in Nepal on a tourist visa, it is tragic and personal.

“I fell in love with Nepal instantly--the beauty of the country and the people,” she said, recalling her arrival here for the first time, back in the days when a siren was sounded to scare cows off the grass landing strip when a plane approached what is now Tribhuvan International Airport.

“It was the innocence of this place. There was simply nothing wrong with this valley, nothing out of place. I felt totally at home in Nepal. I tried three times to leave, but I broke down in tears at the airport each time. It was a paradise, and there was no other like it in the world.”

Like so many of the Americans who settled here then, she discovered it quite by accident. An Italian magazine had asked her to write an article about a trip by Queen Elizabeth II to the kingdom, but all commercial flights were fully booked, and by the time she got here, the queen had gone.

“So I never wrote the story,” she said, “and I never left.”

Within weeks of her arrival, Adams recalled, she was sitting in the lobby of the now-closed Royal Hotel, surrounded by hunters just back from stalking tigers, when her life changed forever.

Prince Basundhara Bir Bikram Shah, the king’s handsome and worldly brother, mistook her for someone else and began talking to her before he realized his mistake.

Almost instantly, she said, they fell in love, and she became the prince’s consort, a relationship recognized under Nepalese law as a legal marriage. Almost as quickly, she found herself in the forefront of Nepal’s new open-door policy.

Adams, a graduate of Georgetown University, eventually founded Third Eye Tourism and Travel. It was Nepal’s first international travel agency, and it came to be almost synonymous with the name of the country.

“More than anyone else, Barbara Adams is responsible for introducing Nepal to the outside world,” Lundberg said, echoing the view of foreigners and Nepalese alike.

With every passing year, Adams said, her love deepened, for her prince and her new homeland.

After the prince died in 1978, Adams became entangled in a morass of royal intrigue, and she was forced to sell her share of Third Eye. But her feelings for the place endured. She shifted her interest to textiles, worked to improve the quality of Nepalese exports and began work on a book about Nepal’s ancient weaving industry.

But it was not a full-time job as defined by the new law, and suddenly, last April, she was told that her application to extend her residency permit had been denied.

A few weeks later, she was unceremoniously deported. The U.S. ambassador softened the blow by driving her to the airport, with American flags flying from the official embassy car. He and a handful of friends bade her farewell with a champagne toast.

But Adams was lost. Nepal was her home, she said, and by last October she was back, on a tourist visa issued by Nepalese diplomats who are close friends. So far, no one has asked her to leave again. If they do, she said, she will refuse.

“I’ll try to fight it here, even if I have to go to jail,” she said. “This is still my country. I still want to stay here, even if I have to stay like so many other Nepalese who are in jail for their love of the country.”

But she has a recurring nightmare that she will wind up like another foreign pioneer in Nepal.

Boris Lissanevitch, a Soviet national, was as legendary a figure as Adams for the 30-plus years he spent here. He was instrumental in building several of Katmandu’s finest restaurants and hotels. But by the time of his death a few years ago, Lissanevitch had lost everything. His properties were taken over by Nepalese partners.

“To this day, everyone who’s anyone speaks of Boris as if he were a god,” Adams said, her voice cracking as she recalled her late friend. “But you know, when he died, there were only three Nepalese at his funeral. And maybe that’s the fate in store for me as well.”