Hearing of my colleagues’ table-beating exotic travel experiences across all the continents prompts me to reminisce or reevaluate whether I have been too arrogant in keeping my sense of national pride and ‘not making hay while the sun shines’.

One such missed ‘opportunity’ that comes to mind concerns China. The first time I was supposed to go to China, it was provisioned in a contract and I was to check for parts of steel elements in the construction of the first Nepali motorable suspension bridge over the Bheri River, which I designed in 1986. However, I reasoned that if ever a problem came up in the fabrication of the design, my leaving for China would absolve the contractors of any and all responsibilities. So instead of going myself, I sent a junior colleague.

China and beyond

The second time was a proposed weeklong tour of China when I was Director General (DG) of the Department of Roads (DoR). But while checking the status of the visits of my predecessors, I discovered that none of such visits had any official status and neither were there any invitations from the host country. As an ex-officio, my national pride surfaced and I cancelled my visit to China, making my junior colleagues, who were supposed to form a ‘monkey travel-group’ with me, mad.

Then, there was a third chance when I was at the Ministry of Physical Planning and Works. One of the staff members of the operating contractors in Nepal left very annoyed when I did not accept an invitation to a great October festival in Beijing. Instead, I demanded a formal invitation from a government authority.

Similarly, in 1989, an early tour of Europe with three deputy DGs of the DoR had been arranged by a different branch of the DoR and managed by a private agency. So the government did not have any scent of it. It was later discovered that we were supposed to be placed in a 1970s Jhhonchhe (or Freak Street)-style motel in the bylanes of Amsterdam. As ‘ill-luck’ would have it, my trip was cancelled abruptly due to a sudden and fatal illness in the family. Anyway, as it was pronounced that we were visiting one of the most expensive cities in the world, I would no doubt have the opportunity to visit more Thamel-like motels; even though our poor government offers five star living accommodations in reciprocation to lowly foreign officials while they are in Nepal.

Rebuffing Japan

One other instance of a travel opportunity came again when I was DG of the DoR. The Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) had offered a weeklong programme for the training of the DGs of respective DoRs from developing countries in 1998. They would provide us underdeveloped countries with training, in addition to night runs to Shinjuku and Ginja, to which I was brutally unresponsive. Furthe-rmore, I had already been chosen by the then Government of Nepal as a DG capable of leading the DoR. Why did I need to pre-qualify for a ‘training programme’ sponsored by a foreign NGO, hampering my hectic work schedule? I had no time to rush to Tokyo for a week so I had to decline that programme.

Moreover, I had already had a hard time in Japan before when I was chief of the design section. On a similar road training programme, they had given us a daily allowance of 16,000 yen whereas a small hotel charged 14,000 yen per

day. Each breakfast, lunch and dinner at that time cost at least 600 yen. As for the training, it included preliminary issues from undergraduate courses in highway engineering. I was forced to undergo six weeks of mental and financial torture, looking for cheap food and winter clothes in the ‘posh’ Tokyo byla-nes. Then, back in class, it is purgative to remember the glances of those who came to lecture with wholly bored looks on their face and the tennis-ball eyes (which perhaps missed things to watch out for when constructing roads in our own country) of dark South Asians and Middle Eastern road engineers.

Not really reciprocal

The other would-be travel opportunity was a visit arranged by a Swiss agency in Nepal. I had guessed what my personal status would be, though I thought it imperative to ‘self-aggrandise’ my government status as from a ‘poor’ Asian country. Alas, I could not fulfil my dream of going boating in Geneva Lake, just like I did in my own dear Phewa Tal because there was no status relevant call from the concerned.    

Otherwise, I was feeling like a royal and not someone on a sponsored travel as an under/post-graduate student around the world. Looking at the greater stress of status problems in developed countries, I always proposed my junior colleagues for overseas assignments. The only times I winced were when I signed business-class airline travel perks for my ‘foreign resident engineers’. Despite being DG with a nice, big office to myself, I had to travel economy.

Sharma is an infrastructure specialist