Robin Shields estimates that it will take approximately three months to trek across the entire 900-km distance of Nepal on foot.
The UCLA alumnus said he’s not daunted about leaving in the middle of monsoon, the wet, season, when dry dirt trails turn into angry rivers of mud and slush.
“It’s the only time I could get off,” Shields said, jokingly.
He’ll be armed with waterproof clothing, a satellite phone and helicopter rescue information.
The alumnus studied Nepalese education in rural areas for years, traveling back and forth to Nepal five times, until he published his dissertation in 2008.
He received a doctorate in education from UCLA that same year.
Currently, he lectures at the Education department at London Metropolitan University, and it’s now his last chance to return to Nepal before he has a family.
“My wife has been very supportive. … It’s better to do it now, while I still have the chance,” Shields said.
During his trek, Shields said, he hopes to gain a holistic perspective of the world of Nepal, visiting districts that are neglected by much of the Nepalese government.
“I’m going to places a lot of government officials don’t go,” Shields said.
His journey, which begins in the border town of Dhulabari, ends in the mountains in northwest Nepal, towards the Chinese border.
The distance will surely be strenuous.
Shields said he is familiar with the work of Sherry Ortner, a UCLA anthropologist who has conducted research about Nepal.
Though he’s never met Ortner, he said he’s familiar with the anthropologist’s research on Sherpas in Nepal.
Ortner explained what sort of geographic obstacles Shields might face.
Nepal is “extremely mountainous. And the country contains the highest mountains in the whole world,” Ortner said. “Anyone trekking in Nepal is doing very serious trekking.”
But Shields isn’t too concerned about the distances he will trek and he isn’t concerned with proving how far he can walk, he said.
Instead, he said it’s an emotional journey, because Nepal is responsible for enlightening his outlook on the world beyond the West.
“I used to travel a lot in Europe and North America, but the rest of the world was kind of a black hole to me,” Shields said.
This was before he traveled to the Nepalese mountains to teach English in 2002 at the Himanchal school in the remote village of Nangi.
“When I first got there, I was totally freaked out by Nepal. I thought, “˜What am I doing here? I can’t do this,'” Shields said.
But it was the language and culture that changed his mind, setting the course of his life for the next 10 years.
“When I began, I didn’t speak a word of Nepali,” Shields said. “Learning Nepali really opened my eyes.”
In the morning before school would begin, children and community members would clamor around him, teaching him to count in Nepali before he would teach them to tell time in English.
“I taught between five and six classes a day, all different grades. … The textbooks were simple. Third-graders would learn time, seventh-graders would learn short stories,” Shields said.
After school, he would return to a guest house made of painted rocks and mud, or go to his pupil’s houses for dinner for a simple meal of rice porridge.
The school, he said, was the center of the community.
He added that learning English was often seen by the community members as a way to a better life, though he didn’t always agree.
It was while teaching in Nepal that Shields noticed a nation-wide problem in education, prompting inspiration for his dissertation years later.
“There’s a great discrepancy in education between rural and urban areas,” Shields said, adding that elite private schools afforded their students a much better chance of passing the “School Leaving Certificate,” a gate-keeping device that determines who had a chance of social mobility.
He said that though he’ll be bringing a camera, he’ll be perfectly happy just to walk through all three geographical regions: the Terai, or plains, hills and mountains. He also said he plans to break up the journey into three distances, separated by towns with which he is familiar, according to his Web site.
As he travels, Shields will be chronicling his entire journey on his blog, which can be followed at walkacrossnepal.com.
With reports from Neha Jaganathan, Bruin contributor.