Latest / FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD / #58 THE TIBET-NEPAL CROSSING

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#58 THE TIBET-NEPAL CROSSING · FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD

• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Hey y'all, pull up a chair.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Beth Arnold, and this is from the Inside Out, where American life, politics, and memory meet as we tiny specks in the cosmos try to make sense of it all.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's April 3rd, 2026, and I'm reading the Tibet Nepal Crossing.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: The moment I saw the horrendous footage of the wall of Blackwater crashing through the Girong checkpoint between Tibet and Nepal, I thought, oh my god, I was there.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: In September 2019, almost seven years ago, just right around this time, not long before COVID, I spent two weeks in Tibet fulfilling a challenge made by the Dalai Lama when I saw him speak in Paris years before.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: To his sold-out audience in the Bear Sea Arena, he told wrenching stories about how the Chinese were destroying Tibet and the Tibetan culture.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: He challenged his audience to go there and witness this ourselves.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I took this challenge seriously.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: It had taken me a decade, but I accepted that dare and I had gone.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: I had seen and I had witnessed.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if I hadn't worried about my excellent guide being punished for telling my friend and me the truth about the evil atrocities that had happened and were still occurring in Tibet by the Chinese government, I would have written extensively about that trip.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't just Blackwater crashing down the Lindai Kola River Channel last week.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was the mountain itself.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Ice, boulders, rock, mud, trees, and then as it tore through the valley, houses, cars, bridges, animals, and human beings.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: A wall of death.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: What I can't fathom is the force of it.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: The physical impact of the glacier shearing off and slamming into the valley floor packed so much force that it registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: But it was the motion of the mountain collapsing itself that generated the massive seismic waves.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: The United States Geological Survey now explicitly classifies it as a landslide/slash glacial collapse event.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: The sheer kinetic energy generated by this vertical drop generated enough heat to instantly flash melt massive amounts of ice, converting a solid mountain of frost and rock into a highly pressurized fast-moving sludge of a slurry.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Monitoring mountains for such catastrophes is real, but I'll be getting to that.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: As of September 1st, the count of victims was more than 1,000 dead and more than 4,000 still missing.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Only 16 dead and 546 missing were on the Tibetan occupied by China side.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: The worst damage was in Nepal's Rasua district.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: The misery.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And this in a place profoundly rustic and rural.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: The average rural Nepalese family lives on$7.50 to$12.50 every day.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Even though homes are wired for light, roughly 66% of the country still cooks using firewood.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Most rural communities rely on dirt roads or tracks carved out of steep hillsides.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Nepal is famous for its trail suspension bridges spanning river gorges and connecting isolated mountain villages to schools and markets.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine walking over them as part of your daily life.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: But Nepalese are held closely within their families and communities, they share economic precarities, and they are supported by tight-nant spiritual lives, Hinduslash Buddhist principles of shared destiny, Dharma, and community trust.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: They aren't attacked and shamed like our poor are.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: But I digress.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm nothing if not curious, and my time and experiences spending a total of six weeks in Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan were rich and fulfilling.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: I had been fascinated by Buddhism and horrified by the invasion and the military occupation of Tibet, and I had read much about it.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the lessons I learned during my time there were instructive about China and its desire to erase individuality and culture that doesn't fit their totalitarianism.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: They want to control everything and everyone, both inside and outside of their borders.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: The Tibetans' devotion to the Dalai Lama infuriates the Chinese.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: He's a thorn in their side, and we were advised to delete all our social media on our phones and laptops.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: If the Chinese found anything about the Dalai Lama on our devices, and they had devices that could scan our phones, they might not let us into the country.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: I packed up my laptop and left it in a bag I stored in Kathmandu.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Once we got to Tibet, my friend and I were nervous about going through immigration and customs.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Then when we were traveling through the country, we had to stop at checkpoints constantly.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a tourist, the regime keeps track of you.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: The excellent travel company I'd found through PicoEAR had made all our arrangements, including our guide car and driver.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: State organization is the requirement, and one or both, the guide or the driver, could have been spies reporting on us.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: There are explicit rules for close surveillance of tourists, including cameras in our van.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: My friend couldn't check her email because of the Chinese internet censorship system, the great firewall of China.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: You must have a VPN to get beyond it because the major services are blocked there.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: My friend and I were just as nervous leaving Tibet as we'd been entering it.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: But we were leaving with rocks and a few marine fossils that we'd bought high in the Himalayas after we'd watched the stunning sunrise on Mount Everest and then traveled onto Everest Base Camp.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Farmers find these fossils in their fields or along rivers and desperately need the money from selling them.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: The Himalayan mountains were formed when tectonic plates collided, pushing an ancient Tethys Sea floor high into the sky.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's bizarre to be standing on the roof of the world with evidence of ancient marine life in your hand.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: These stupendous mountains are like a village of holy giants, goddesses of an ancient world.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: The Tibetan name for Everest is Chomaluma.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: In the Tibetan language, this translates to goddess mother of the world or goddess mother of the universe.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Tibetans have revered the mountain for centuries as a living goddess and sacred protector of the region, but all of these mountains are viewed as gods who protect the valleys below.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: For Tibetans and Sherpas, last week catastrophic rock-ice collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border is understood not just as a geological event, but as a profoundly spiritual and cosmic warning.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: In Tibetan Buddhism and the native Bun tradition, mountains are sentient living entities, and a collapse of this scale is interpreted through spiritual lenses.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: For one thing, this is a disturbance of mountain deities.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: When a mountain crumbles, traditional folklore suggests the resident deities, Yula, have been deeply disturbed or angered.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Monks and elders often attribute this anger to human arrogance, disrespect for the environment, such as overcommercialization, mining, or littering, or the intense political and cultural friction gripping the region.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: The disaster is seen as a sign that the local protectors have withdrawn their shield of safe passage.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: In Tibetan philosophy, human greed and environmental destruction generate negative collective karma.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: The physical collapse of a mountain is viewed as the earth's interpretation of negative karma, a physical manifestation of a broken spiritual balance between humanity and nature.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: I get that.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe Mother Nature is mad as hell at us.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, Donald Trump is her worst enemy, piling his contempt upon her land, her air, her seas, her creatures.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Decisions like opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, rolling back water protections, and limiting endangered species rules or direct harms to wildlife in public lands.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And there's so much more.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: He destroys everything he touches.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when almost anything catastrophic happens in the world, I ask myself if Trump had anything to do with it.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: In this case, scrutiny has turned toward yet another incompetent and cruel administration decision to pull U.S.AID funding from a critical Himalayan monitoring program.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: For 20 years, the partnership between NASA and USAID used satellite data to track glacier stability and environmental hazards in the region.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Trump didn't cause a glacier to fall off a mountain in the Himalayas, but his administration did dismantle American-funded disaster risk capacity and one of the world's most climate vulnerable mountain regions at precisely the moment scientists were warning that those hazards were increasing and early warning was needed.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: New York Times bestselling author and public historian Jermaine Fowler wrote, Doge hunted federal grants for the word climate and defunded whatever came up.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that came up was a USAID and NASA satellite program that mapped dangerous glacial lakes, predicted floods, and ran early warning systems across the globe, including Nepal.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Last week a glacier collapsed above the Nepal-China border and the flood killed over 270 people.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: More than 200 are still missing.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Elon Musk said he spent that weekend feeding U.S.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: aid into the wood chipper.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: We've all now read the story of the head teacher of a Nepalese school who was warned by a friend of the tidal wave coming for them.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Those warnings helped him save 900 students in only 13 minutes.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: In an article on NPR, scientists say glaciers in this region and around the world are increasingly unstable because of human-caused global warming.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Across the mountains of Nepal and Tibet, climate change is causing glaciers to melt at an alarming rate.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Planet heating emissions from burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal, are the primary driver of climate change.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Scientists say that in addition to reducing climate pollution, renewable energy and battery technologies are increasingly price competitive with traditional energy sources.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: The Trump administration has paid energy companies nearly$4 billion to cancel offshore wind projects.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: We have to ask ourselves if Trump is literally a moron or if greed has eaten his brain.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: And our cowardly Congress goes along with him, and our Supreme Court enables him, as far as I'm concerned, traders all.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Global warming isn't merely melting the Himalayas.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Across Asia it's making the mountains come apart.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Only weeks before the Lung Tung National Park catastrophe, Nirmul nims Persia, one of the greatest high-altitude climbers of all time, and the heroic star of 14 peaks, nothing is impossible, was killed with nine others by an avalanche on Broad Peak in Pakistan's Karakorum.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Scientists can't say that global warming is what caused that particular avalanche, but they can say that the frozen world in which it happened is changing dramatically.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: I followed these astonishing mountaineers.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: NIMS was a devastating loss.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: American Mallory Geis also died in that avalanche, and a few years ago, lauded ski mountaineer American Hilary Nelson was skiing from the top of Manisloo with her partner Jim Morrison.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: She triggered an avalanche that swept her off the side of the mountain.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: She dropped more than 5,000 feet.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Nelson is regarded as the most prolific ski mountaineer of her generation.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: I also had my own crossing story about that border.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: When my friend and I made our way through the big modern authoritarian technocrat building that just got violently torn apart and washed away, we all saw it on the videos, there was just as much tension leaving the country as there was arriving.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: I never felt the Chinese had good intentions toward any of us.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: They're so afraid a thought or an idea might break loose from visitors and infect their citizens' automatons, especially the rebellious Tibetans.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: I had absolutely loved my experience in Tibet, learning about the people and their culture, such devoted Buddhists to His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be happy to go back and see Mount Kalaish, which so many tourists literally died to see in this mountain collapse and flood.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: After we exited the rigid Chinese border police and their building, we pulled our suitcases along the Friendship Bridge, which you've also seen being washed away while people were trying to run to safety but didn't have a chance.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's surreal to see this and the black wall of water crashing down.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: We know they were instantly washed away, and from what I can ascertain, they died from blunt force impact.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: On the Nepalese side of the river, my friend and I went through their immigration and customs.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Compared to Chinese big brother on the other side, we were now on the old hippie trail.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: My friend almost lost her marine fossil, but with some fast talking, I got it approved.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: I never feel so alive as when I'm traveling, and I am fearless.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: I understand how to make my way in the world, whether I know the language or not.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: The difference between the two sides was striking.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: One side was the Tibetan kingdom in the sky and its occupiers' authoritarian brutalist style, while on the other side what seemed like a gaggle of random shacks.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Our new guide and driver met us and we climbed into the SUV.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Picture this.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Piercing mountains through the clouds with sheer cliffs but no rails to keep cars from sliding off the muddy roads.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Villages clinging to the sides of mountains, which makes me wonder how mothers keep their toddlers from falling off.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: We had to stop because a section of the road snaking along the side of the mountain had washed away.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Big semis and buses were lined up on the side of the path waiting for someone to fix it.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: How's that going to happen?
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: I wondered, and how many times a season does this road wash out?
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, it's scary to think about those big old buses and trucks on that road.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: Our guys explained that another SUV driver and guide would pick us up on the other side of the washout, and they dropped us off.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: We finagled our luggage up the road till we got to the spot where the road was literally gone, for fuck's sake.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: For us, it was a disaster.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: For the locals, it was a way of life.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Some local guys acted as our porters and carried our bags across the thin ribbon of earth that clenched the side of the mountain.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: And we followed.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is not where we wanted to find ourselves.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: How many vehicles or people are swept off the mountain when it crumbles in a much smaller act of letting go than what just happened at the border crossing?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: But another car driver and guide did pick us up on the other side and we slid along the road in what must have been a foot of mud beneath us, with our expert driver keeping us from falling off the cliff that would have been a vertical drop of up to a thousand feet to the bottom of the valley below.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: My friend was beside herself.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Let's fucking go.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: I thought if we slid off the side of the mountain, it was nothing I could control, so I might as well enjoy the ride.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: I moved up to the front seat and I'm here to write about it.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: But what just happened there last week is an earth-shattering tragedy in which thousands of people have now crossed into another plane.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Not to mention the animals.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: What did the Dalai Lama say?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: I am saddened to learn of the devastating floods in the Rasua region of Nepal and Kirong in Tibet, resulting in loss of life and heavy structural damage.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: I pray for all those who have lost their lives and offer my sympathy and heartfelt condolences to the bereaved and to all those affected by this tragedy.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: Since this region has seen calamities in the past as well, these are certainly symptoms of a deeper underlying cause, whether climate change or other factors.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that appropriate follow-up measures will be taken wherever possible to help ensure that such disasters do not recur.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: With my prayers, Dalai Lama.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: The mountain goddess has made her will known.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, guys, thanks for pulling up a chair and listening.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: If this piece stayed with you, I hope you'll share it.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And if these essays have been meaningful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: From the Inside Out is an entirely reader supported publication, and your subscription helps sustain this work week after week.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, from one tiny speck in the cosmos to another.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: See you then.