John Flinn on ‘the Coolest Six-Buck Souvenir I Ever Got’
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 12.13.06 | 2:25 PM ET
San Francisco Chronicle travel editor John Flinn gets around. Not only was he recently on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, but not long ago he was in Nepal and was robbed by a Maoist rebel—sort of. As Flinn recounts in Sunday’s paper, he was on a bus from the Tibetan border to Kathmandu when the weaponless Maoist boarded and demanded cash. Flinn knew that rebels had been funding their insurgency by robbing visitors, and at the urging of his English-speaking guide, he turned over 400 rupees—less than $7. But it gets better.
“Then [the Maoist] pulled out his receipt book,” Flinn writes. “The official-looking piece of paper he filled out and handed to me bore the name of the United People’s Revolutionary Council and depicted the heads of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and someone I didn’t recognize, all lined up as a sort of revolutionary Rushmore. It noted I had made a ‘tax/donation’ of 400 rupees to the district people’s government and concluded, ‘Thanks for your help.’”
A few weeks after Flinn’s visit, the Maoists signed a peace accord, so their robbery days just might be behind them.
And what of the receipt Flinn got?
It “now hangs on the wall above my desk,” he writes, “the coolest six-buck souvenir I ever got.”
Related on World Hum:
* John Flinn on Telling the Travel Tale
Photo courtesy of John Flinn.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
