DOSSIER: Rural Heritage

Pokhara Base Camp
The Trisuli Centre & The Big Fig
Bandipur & The Old Inn
Nuwakot & The Famous Farm

Even today Nepal is not a place of cities.  It is, for the most part, a place of farms and villages and small towns and of distinctly different pastoral scenes defined by altitude and location.  And if this has been the case for centuries, then it is no wonder that rural life is steeped in tradition, custom and ancient ways.

These can now so easily be lost, for here there is no longer a time-warp in which they might survive.  And yet renewal needs positive preservation born of a new dimension.  And it is finding this dimension while honouring ancestral values that drives our Rural Heritage projects.

There are two sides to this; on the one hand informed ideas concerning a community’s inclusive participation, with its reasoning and its returns, and on the other, our focus on using material and practical traditional skills - instead of the modern ‘quick- fix’ .

Thus there is renovation and rebuild, breathing life back into empty and tired but wonderful buildings - or the ruins of them.   And so it follows there is the uplift, the new green shoots, of a small community rediscovering its self-worth.  It is simply summarised as ‘tourism in the community – the community in tourism’ and in this synergy it is natural for a community not just to see but to be an active contributor in the rejuvenation.