Seymour Totti’s Foreign Policy

Cute though ain’t they? (Reuters)

.
.
.
In Kathmandu, according story on Reuters, police have been raiding “scores of discos, nightclubs and dance bars” saying many were running bars where “nude dances” were performed. This has led to thousands of bar workers to take to the streets in protest.

This must be a fairly recent thing because I was in Kathmandu earlier this year and I spent several evenings looking for just such nightspots. I’d been planning a trip anyway but a newspaper report I’d read spoke of dance bars where desperate maidens sold their honour to foreign males. I was sold.

Well that turned out to be a load of bollocks. In Thamel, the main tourist district of Kathmandu, I found no more half a dozen discreet bars where girls were dancing respectably and who reacted with horror at the suggestion of anything more lewd than polite conversation.

None of the bars I went to had many customers and the few that did were patronised by locals. Of course the good bars may not be in the tourist district, maybe I was just looking in the wrong place.

It’s possible, but I doubt it. Bars have overheads, they need to sell beer to pay the rent and the girls. In the venues I visited a beer was around US$5, lady drink was US$7.50. That’s big bucks in Kathmandu and beyond the budget of most locals, who don’t seem to be very big beer drinkers anyway. The only people who can pay those prices with any degree of regularity would be tourists.

And that’s the problem. If the bars are not in Thamel few tourists would ever find them. Most of Kathmandu is a warren of narrow lanes, unnamed, unlit and totally deserted by 10.00pm. It’s also a place where the kind of outfit that western girls might wear to the mall on a Saturday afternoon is regarded as downright salacious in the conservative Hindu nation.

Now I’ve no doubt that commercial sex exists. But I also know that foreign correspondents have to justify their existence and on a slow news day a juicy, wildly exaggerated story on prostitution will always get picked up by someone.

I also doubt that genuine sex workers in Kathmandu would be out protesting in broad daylight and smiling for the cameras.

Having said all that there is great potential for a bar scene and the women, with a blend of Indian and Tibetan are strikingly beautiful. My next visit is penciled in for late this year.

See Reuters
See also Kathmandu Reveisited
See also Hot Indian babe