It’s a verbal punch to the pit of the stomach. “Namaste Corona!” shouts one of a group of local boys who are lolling bored against a wall at the two Germans. After shopping for groceries, Michael Moritz and his girlfriend Anna Baranowski are on their way back to their accommodation outside the village of Sedi in the Nepalese mountains, not far from Annapurna, the tenth highest mountain on earth.
“Hello Corona!” A lockdown will also apply in Nepal in spring 2020, the borders are closed. Welcome tourists have become dangerous, potential spreaders of the corona virus. “For the first time in my life I felt like someone else’s enemy,” writes Moritz in his memories of these weeks of forced standstill from his world trip. His book bears the very title of the call meant as an insult: “Namaste Corona!” However, its importance has long since changed for Moritz. But more on that later.
The first days of the lockdown throw Michael Moritz out of his inner balance. Too many supposed certainties are eroding at once. Moritz thought he was on the good, the right side. At the age of 30, he had given up his previous life, which had made him rush across Europe as manager of a tourism start-up, driven by the urge for efficiency and perfection. He has been backpacking since spring 2019, living in Scandinavia from supermarket rubbish bins: “At the time, I thought I could shed my western special status and connect with the poor people of this world.”
Privileged tourists compete with poor locals for the last few vegetables
A blatant mistake. Moritz would always remain a privileged man. With more money than most Nepalese have at their disposal. A passport that gives him access to the whole world. A government that saves him in a crisis. He becomes aware of something else when the corona virus slows him down: how lonely he has become on his journey, which has taken him further and further away from Germany. And his girlfriend Anna, who only accompanies him from time to time.
Michael Moritz felt free for a long time. That’s why he initially struggled with being stuck in a small stone hut with a corrugated iron roof: “I don’t like staying in one place; I want to move on, want to move and move forward, want what I’ve been used to for a year: new impressions absorb, meet new people, hear new languages, travel through new landscapes, taste new food and smell new spices of a new traditional cuisine.”
Suddenly? Does he live in a country that he was only able to enter at the beginning of the pandemic because he lied to doctors and border guards about his state of health and his travel route. A short time later, not even the Nepalese are allowed to return to their homeland. And he finds himself in a situation where food is running low and he and Anna are competing with the locals for the last vegetable.
The moment that is no longer possible, Michael Moritz realizes that up to now he has been able to afford to stay wherever he pleases. And to leave as soon as things get uncomfortable. “I’ve always been the rich tourist who shows up somewhere briefly, sticks his nose in, and then after a month at the latest, never to see you again… I never wanted to be a tourist. And yet I was always one.”
Moritz is hard on himself. Sometimes you want to protect him from yourself. Because of course it’s true when he writes that as a tourist “he’s directly involved with everything. My culture, my prosperity, my travels change the lives of people who were always far away for me before”. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing per se. One evening, for example, he is having a discussion with a neighbor who is involved in education because he wants to open up new perspectives for his fellow human beings: “And you cosmopolitan tourists will help us with that.”
“Namaste Corona!” Michael Moritz means completely seriously. Without the pandemic, without the forced pause in Nepal, he might still be wandering the earth and sticking one superficial impression to the next. However, his book is not a fundamental reckoning with backpacking. But a very conscientious reminder to be aware of what you do and don’t do. If you have a trip around the world and not only egoistic motives in mind, you are well advised with this book.
Michael Moritz: Namaste Corona! How a village in Nepal opened the world to me. Malik Verlag, Munich 2022. 256 pages, 18 euros.