Nepal

From Lake Champlain in Vermont to the Gokyo Valley of Nepal, from Antarctica to the jungles of Cambodia, and from the sidewalks of Nice to the wilderness of Zimbabwe, The Sun's readers have logged some serious travel miles this year -- and they have the photos to prove it. Every Sunday, the Travel Section's Personal Journeys page features trips taken by our readers and includes a Best Shot. As 2000 draws to a close, what better way to thank our many contributors than by offering a Best of the Best Shots from the past year?

At 1:30 a.m. on a chilly autumn night, the telephone rings in a brick house in North Baltimore and awakens Keith P. West Jr. Of a long list of possible callers from a dozen time zones, it turns out to be a cargo supervisor at Los Angeles International Airport. A gray plastic shipping container the size of a dishwasher has toppled off a conveyor belt. White fog is seeping from the seams, and West's name is on the address label. Should I call the fire department? the panicky cargo man asks.

KARMAIYA, Nepal -- The talisman tied above the entrance to Harsha Bahadur Bot's house is a bundle of rice, the flawed foundation of life in the plains of Nepal. Rice sculpts the landscape into diked squares of green or gold. The diesel pop-pop-pop of the rice mill is the sound of a village from afar, its beating heart. Rice is the basis of every meal, and a family's supply is bank account and insurance policy rolled into one. That the grain has the power to conjure good or ill seems obvious to Bot, 45, a farmer and fisherman.

KHANDSARI, Nepal -- On the 16th day of her life, the baby awoke with a choking cry in the pre-dawn darkness of her family's mud hut. Bhikhari Pasman fumbled to light an oil lamp and saw foam on his daughter's lips. His wife, Rampati, clutched the baby to her breast but found her too weak to nurse. So the father ran across the sleeping village to wake the shaman, who listened to his panicky words and chanted some magic over a jar of mustard oil. He rushed home and, as instructed, dripped the oil in the ears of the now-unconscious baby.

Advertisements in The Sun this week announced that a series of articles about a project in Nepal by the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health would begin today. However, because of the magnitude and intensity of news from the Middle East, that series is postponed.

ELLICOTT CITY - For Nepalese Sherpa Ram Chandra Sunuwar, conquering Mount Everest is an everyday experience. Learning the ins and outs of Western life this summer - shopping at Target, gambling at casinos and driving a car - have been much bigger challenges. Now Ram is about to head home again. But not before his U.S. stay with local mountaineer Chris Warner is toasted at a beer tasting Monday, one that will raise funds for a new school in Ram's home village of Khijiphalate in Nepal. Monday night at the Ellicott Mills Brewing Co. on Main Street, proceeds from the first sales of a limited-run Everest Lager will go toward the school project, aimed at giving 300 children in Ram's remote village a weatherproof structure and more teachers.

Thamel is a small, congested, frenzied tangle of semi-paved alleyways in Katmandu, Nepal's capital. A reasonable walk from the temple-filled Durbar Square, Thamel is a commercial district of bars and neon and cheap hotels and power failures and dazed, scruffy First World pedestrians and, here and there, an amputee hustling rupees. You can't see the Himalayas from Thamel, not even on days when the air in the Katmandu Valley isn't full of dust and smoke and powdered dung from sacred cows, but they are a presence.

In their house in the woods near Lake Roland, guarded by a topiary creature that used to be a crane but now resembles a scrawny dinosaur, Carl and Mary Taylor sit and gently correct one another's yarns. Which year was it, exactly, that they rode on horseback into roadless Bhutan, where Mary had lunch with the queen and their young son played on the floor with the 6-year-old future king? Was it Carl's father or his neighbor who killed the crocodile in the Ganges River and found five pounds of silver jewelry in its belly, the only remains of the women it had eaten?

KATHMANDU, Nepal -- New Year's Eve was a party time for millions of Indians. The Flight IC 814 standoff had come to a happy end with the Indian government announcing the release of three Kashmiri separatists in exchange for the 160 passengers -- most of them Indians -- on board. The perils of an eight-day ordeal were over. The new year could not have started on a better note. But the euphoria soon gave way to outrage. You didn't need an analyst to point out that the government had ended up paying a heavy price for the deal.

KATHMANDU, NEPAL -- Understandably, the recent coup in Pakistan, and consequent unrest in that country, continue to worry observers around the world. But few outside South Asia realize that the political upheaval in Pakistan has created an innocent victim.The annual Summit of South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC), scheduled for this weekend in Kathmandu, was postponed after India's declaration that the time wasn't suitable to holding a "productive" summit.The Indian withdrawal, the first-ever by a SAARC member-state on grounds of developments in a neighboring country, sets a dangerous precedent.