Rural. Artisanal. Pristine.

Two of those of those three words apply to the cheese factories we visited Wednesday.

Located in Bakhor, a tiny village north of Ilam, they are part of a growing industry in Nepal. Western styles of cheese are still new here but they’ve begun catching on with restaurants and consumers in Kathmandu.

In Bakhor, which is 10 miles away from Ilam but more than an hour’s drive along a winding road, several businesses have responded by opening “cheese factories” — actually small facilities like the one you see here with the green sign.

The factories we saw were — how shall I phrase this? — less obsessed with cleanliness than in, say, Wisconsin or Switzerland.

Each produces a single variety of cheese. There’s no Camembert, Fontina or mozzarella, just “cheese.” Artisans in other parts of Nepal do produce fine cheeses, some made from yak milk, but not here.

Still, we were impressed by what we saw: wheels of cheese and strings of churpi, a traditional local cheese so hard that two Nepali entrepreneurs in the United States now market it as dog treats, as featured on “Shark Tank.”

I bought a string of churpi from Kusum Rai, the girl you see here, and plan to bring it home for our dog, Bailey, and perhaps for some other lucky dogs.

You can see strings of churpi drying above Champa’s head.

Let me close with a personal message to my brother-in-law Joel, a cheese enthusiast who is joining us in Nepal along with several other members of our family later this month. Joel, we’re sorry you couldn’t join us today for the tour. On the other hand, since we know you love cheese so much, perhaps it’s just as well.

Finally, a travel note: We leave Ilam tomorrow for Samalbung, a much smaller town located on Nepal’s eastern border with India. I’m not sure about the wifi situation there. As with everything in Nepal, we’ll see what happens.

We have been embraced by Champa’s family since the moment we arrived in Ilam, her home town in Nepal. In fact, the welcome began even sooner, at the airport south of here, where Champa’s brother, Raju, was waiting to greet us with ceremonial katas, or prayer shawls. That’s him in the blue shirt along with Khagendra, Champa’s cousin and neighbor, who took the same flight. We then traveled by jeep from the airport to Ilam.

Let me introduce you to some of the family. Here’s Champa eating lunch with Raju and his wife, Sanjaya, who has been cooking great meals and generally spoiling us without pause. (My former colleagues in Duke’s Office of News and Communications may recognize the blue ONC “Rapid Response” water bottle, which has joined us on the trip.) You can see in the next photo some of the many delicacies that have awaited us in Sanjaya’s kitchen.

Just down the street are several other relatives. Champa is sitting here between Bal Kumari (in the purple) and Chandra Kumari (on the right), two of her cousins. Chandra Kumari was a student in one of my English classes when I taught in the Peace Corps here. To the left is Bindu, who traveled with us here along with her husband, Shankar. We stayed with the two of them in Kathmandu.

While in Kathmandu, we also met Manis, one of the two sons of Raju and Sanjaya, who visited us with his wife Ranju and their daughter, Romisha, all shown here.

On Monday evening, we ate a fabulous dinner with one of Champa’s cousins, Sharda Shrestha, and her husband Madhav. Here’s the two of them along with their son, Pukar, and his wife and daughter.

It’s been great fun to watch Champa walk down a path or through the marketplace, and see people suddenly recognize her. They call out with delight to welcome her home and ask how she’s doing. Needless to say, they also look at me with interest. (You can almost see them thinking: So that must be her American husband.) When I join the conversation in Nepali, they inevitably break into big smiles.

We’ll stay in Ilam until Friday, when we’ll travel to Samalbung, a village located on Nepal’s eastern border with India. We’ll meet up there with Shankar, Bindu and other members of the family, spending a few days before returning to Kathmandu.

Let the reunions continue!

SInce Friday, we have been in Ilam, Champa’s home town in eastern Nepal. It’s where I was initially posted as a Peace Corps Volunteer, at the school where Champa was among the other teachers.

If you think Durham and some other American cities have changed a lot in the past few years, you should see what’s happened here. Ilam has grown from a sleepy district center into a bustling town with hotels, restaurants, cell phone stores, computer centers, bakeries, travel agencies and schools. There are two newspapers, a radio station and countless satellite television dishes offering everything from local soap operas to American movies.

Located just across the border from India’s Darjeeling, Ilam is Nepal’s tea-growing center. Its tea gardens have expanded greatly yet remain as picturesque as ever. You can now take a pleasant stroll through the main gardens to a new observation tower where for 100 rupees — just under one U.S. dollar — you get a great view of the surrounding area. Next door is a coffee shop offering hot beverages, spicy snacks and free wifi.

When I first moved to Ilam in 1977, I lived in two rooms on the first floor of the house shown here. A new family now owns the house but was very welcoming and let me peek inside.

My school headmaster moved me after a few months to the building shown here, where my room was on the second floor, behind the current sign. It was miserable. Below me, another tenant cooked every night on an indoor wood stove. Smoke rose through the floorboards, filling my room and exacerbating the asthma I’d developed during training. I was unable to get the situation resolved and, before long, got pneumonia and was medically evacuated to the United States. I was able to return to Nepal only by agreeing to move to a new post near Kathmandu. Just seeing the building again brought back all of those bad memories.

They were far outweighed, though, by Ilam’s many attractions. It’s a place that deserves far more attention from foreign visitors, who could spend a couple of pleasant days in a beautiful location and stay in modern hotels at bargain prices. The market days, on Thursdays and Sundays, are especially photogenic, but there are also great local hikes, temples and places to visit.

You can fly in less than an hour from Kathmandu to Bhadrapur, south of here, and then drive to Ilam in less than four hours in a modern vehicle on a good road, for less than it probably costs you to take a taxi from your local airport to your house.

Put it on your list, folks: Ilam, Nepal. As Champa notes in her shamelessly loyal new T-shirt, it’s a town you can quickly learn to love.

Are you planning to attend the documentary film festival this coming spring?

Durham’s Full Frame festival promises to be better than ever, but I’m referring to the 9th Nepal International Indigenous Film Festival, which opens in Kathmandu on March 3.

Last year, about 20,000 people gathered for four days along Kathmandu’s Exhibition Road to watch 48 films from 18 countries. Selected from more than 100 entries, the films ranged from full-length features to short documentaries, animations and music videos. All  depicted indigenous communities; 12 were produced here in Nepal.

The festival is part of a larger effort to help filmmakers from overlooked ethnic groups share their stories. On Tuesday, I spent several hours with some of them.

Nabin Subba, the group’s leader, shown here, produced and directed Numafung, a feature film screened at several international festivals. A decade ago, he and several friends established the Indigenous Film Archive (IFA), a nonprofit organization that provides training, rents equipment and organizes events where young filmmakers can interact. They’ve reached out especially to women filmmakers, whose recent short films explore topics such as divorce in the Gurung community or how Limbu girls learn weaving.

You have to climb four flights of stairs to reach IFA’s small office, where you remove your shoes at the door and then hope the electricity stays on. Sanjog Laaphaa Magar, shown here at one of the editing computers, helps run the office and manage the annual festival. He also organizes a growing library of local and international films.

As in our own country, most Nepalis prefer big-budget films with lots of action and melodrama. Working on a shoestring with a less popular format among marginalized groups in one of the world’s poorest countries, Nabin and Sanjog say it’s a struggle to keep IFA going and still produce their own work. Yet they push forward, as with a new project that will show how indigenous groups suffered the most casualties in the recent earthquake yet received relatively little of the subsequent international aid.

They are eager to expand their ties with documentary filmmakers in the United States and other parts of the world. If Full Frame, the Center for Documentary Studies, or others with appropriate expertise could come to Nepal to provide free workshops, for instance, they’d welcome the assistance.

If anyone reading this is interested, please contact me offline (djarmul@gmail.com) or Nabin (nabinsubba@hotmail.com; he speaks excellent English) to follow up, or forward this story to someone you know. These folks are doing amazing work and they need some help.

If your idea of adventurous shopping involves a local mall, you need to broaden your horizons and come to Kathmandu.

With the exception of small neighborhood shops that resemble bodegas, almost all of the shops here in Nepal’s capital specialize in jewelry, kitchen goods or something else. They’re conveniently bunched together, with spice shops here, shoes there and books around the corner.

Merchants display their goods not only in shops, but outside of temples and on corners. Narrow streets lead to even narrower alleys lined with bangles, televisions, office supplies and beads. Motorcycles and rickshaws squeeze by. Horns blare. Fumes fill the air.

Some shops have curious specialties, like nose pins or unlocking iPhones. Others proudly display names such as “Swastik Plaza.” 

On Monday, Champa and I joined our niece-in-law, Bindu, on a shopping trip that began on New Road and wound through Indra Chowk and other bazaars. We stopped at a jewelry store to repair a ring, a kitchen store to buy metal plates and a hat store for a Nike cap. We climbed two flights up an insanely narrow staircase to an attic stuffed with fabric. While there, I kept thinking to myself, “Please, don’t let there be another earthquake now.”

Along the way, we visited a temple and snacked on momos, samosas and cold drinks. Then we drove across town to one of Kathmandu’s few department stores, Bhat-Bateni, where Bindu bought some kitchen appliances and we bought decorative shopping bags made from rice paper. Finally, we drove to visit Kumar, a tailor who works near our nephew’s office, to pick up a shirt I’d ordered two days earlier — $14.50, custom-made.

By the time we reached home, after 7 p.m., the electricity was already cut off, so we turned on a battery lamp and collapsed on sofas, our purchases strewn around us, waiting to be unpacked the next morning. Our day was a success. We’d shopped ’til we dropped.

What’s in your wallet?

Mine is now filled with Nepalese rupees — thousands of rupees! Since the exchange rate is about 105 rupees for one U.S. dollar, however, that’s less impressive than it may sound. Back when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the late 1970s, the exchange rate was 12 rupees per dollar. Now, exchanging dollars can mean receiving a stack of money as thick as a brick.

The appearance of Nepal’s currency has changed, too. No longer does it feature the king’s portrait.  Since the royal family was removed from power, the money highlights Nepal’s yaks, rhinos, elephants, tigers and other animals, and, of course, Mount Everest. The coins have evolved as well.

My wallet also holds my bank debit card, which I used to obtain rupees at a local ATM in less than two minutes, a transaction that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. In addition, I have a Visa card that enables me to make foreign purchases without an extra fee, although credit cards remain less common here than back home.

My pants pockets contain other insights into Nepal. I carry tissues in case I need to wipe my nose or other parts of my body. Similarly, I have a small medicine bottle that contains diarrhea medicine, if needed, along with Tylenol and vitamins.

A small flashlight is invaluable when electricity disappears, as it does regularly due to planned “load shedding” across Kathmandu’s neighborhoods.

And since air pollution here is even worse than when I visited five years ago and got a throat infection just from breathing, I carry a mask and asthma inhaler. Many Nepalis now wear masks as well. (Fortunately, I’ve barely needed the inhaler so far.)

Not surprisingly, I’ve brought jeans with enough space to accommodate everything I’m carrying. However, we’ve been eating so well that I may need to start spending those rupees faster to give myself more room.