DHAMPUS, NEPAL - On a foot-worn path in the Himalaya Mountains, there is a small checkpoint. Set up alongside a busy trekking route banked by terraced fields of grain, it consists of a stone wall used as a table and a red hammer-and-sickle flag drooping from an old shed. It demands money to pass: 300 rupees, the equivalent of about $5.
Aside from that Communist flag, the makeshift operation has all the menace of a high school car wash. The young Nepalese who staff it - three men and a woman no older than their 20s - are an amiable bunch, greeting hikers with smiles and making small talk with trekking guides. They even issue handwritten receipts, documents thanking the bearers for their "voluntary donation."
The name at the top of the receipt, printed in bold red lettering, is the United Revolutionary People's Council. The $5 payment funds a Maoist insurgency group formed to wage a guerilla-style "people's war" in Nepal.
For the growing number of tourists who visit this Asian nation each year, encountering Maoists on the popular Himalayan backpacking circuits has become a rite of passage of sorts. The checkpoint fee is a minor expense, like a tip for a cabbie or a trip to
I was one of those tourists.
Six hours into a three-day hike in the Annapurna Circuit in October, accompanied by a friend and a Nepalese guide, I hit the checkpoint. While the Maoists describe the donations as voluntary, hikers who have resisted paying have had their guides detained, so we didn't really consider saying no. My friend, a government health worker fluent in Nepali, negotiated a two-for-one rate. After handing over the cash, she was given a payment slip torn from a small booklet. Then we hiked on.
At the time, I was almost giddy about the whole encounter. I'd never felt unsafe, and I now had a sensational souvenir: a personalized memento from guerilla fighters! The leaf of paper wasn't just from another place; it was a sliver of obscure political history. The Maoists, barely past puberty, even let me snap a few pictures of them wearing their red lanyards and holding their receipt book.
But with time something began to gnaw. That little receipt really did mean we had kicked in funds to an armed insurrection.
To me, five bucks is small money, but it's a significant sum in Nepal, and the Maoists aren't exactly a charity. Their decade-long civil war, fought with the help of child soldiers, ultimately claimed about 13,000 lives. Their arsenal includes self-loading rifles, hand grenades, and light machine guns. I wondered: Would our $5 purchase a firearm for a 12-year-old?
As travelers push into ever more remote and unstable places, thorny ethical dilemmas are often placed squarely in their hands. With package tours, you rarely know who gets paid off behind the scenes. With solo adventure travel, on the other hand, requests for baksheesh are made directly to your face.
Roy Peter Clark, who started the ethics program at the Poynter Institute, a media think tank, calls my dilemma "the problem of invisible consequences." Thinking optimistically, my checkpoint fee could end up buying a warm meal for a hungry Nepali family. Or it could be used to acquire an AK-47.
When I tried to boil it down to strictly legal terms, my $5 receipt remained murky. The US government sees the Maoist rebellion as flat wrong, and the State Department considers the Communist Party of Nepal a terrorist group. In theory, this could expose me to prosecution, since multiple laws, including the USA Patriot Act and something called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, prohibit US citizens from funding terrorism.
I made a round of calls to the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the State Department to ask about my legal status. They squirmed a bit, told me Americans are advised not to travel to Nepal, mentioned the Maoists' terrorist status, and noted the relevant statutes. But their underlying message was this: Don't worry about it.
Ethically, though, I didn't feel in the clear. I was flaunting my Maoist receipt to co-workers like a show-and-tell item, but then wringing my hands - not quite because I felt guilty, but because I didn't think I felt guilty enough.
I started to realize I had brought back another souvenir, an invisible one: the lingering uncertainty about what, exactly, I should be feeling about that money and my decision to pay it.
Maybe I should chalk it up to the mind-expanding effects of travel. That's the value of going to new places, right? To discover the unfamiliar and, in that discovery, learn more about yourself? Or maybe I needed to put this in wider perspective. After all, whether it's a carbon footprint or a payment to a Maoist, the effect of traveling is never purely neutral.
"It affects the environment, it affects culture, it affects the people around you," said Greg Benchwick, who authored a Lonely Planet guidebook to Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and says he's had to pay bribes to cops and at border crossings around the world.
Occasionally paying to grease the skids is "part and parcel of travel," he said.
Clark, of Poynter, notes that I've also found myself ensnared by a long human tradition: the attraction to forbidden objects. Americans who visit Libya buy anti-US stamps as a novelty. Allied soldiers brought home Nazi memorabilia after World War II.
My hiking companion suggested that the Maoists know this. They offer a receipt not because they're meticulous record-keepers, but because they're savvy marketers, and they're aware tourists will want the souvenir. Those kids on the stone wall, posing for my camera, knew that I would pay if I got something out of the deal, and, at some level, I did too.
Ultimately, my encounter with the rebels was a little creepy, a little unresolvable, and - as my receipt still reminds me - a little thrilling.
"We do find ourselves sort of surprised and delighted by our own bravado," Clark said. And, truthfully, my family, friends, and co-workers would rather hear about my illicit mountaintop payment to Maoists than my predictable reminiscences about Himalayan vistas.
After all, Clark added, "the villain is always much more interesting than the hero."
Sacha Pfeiffer, a member of the Globe staff, can be reached at pfeiffer@globe.com.
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