NEPAL by JIM ROSEMBERG

Jim Rosemberg is a French photographer and director specialised in fashion, portrait and travel. He worked for clients like Cacharel, Christian Dada, Pimkie, Karl Lagerfeld. While shooting video for Double Sens, a tourism company that promotes a more durable type of toursim, based on exchange, he travelled around the globe to countries like Cambodia, Benin, Peru, Vietnam. On top of that, for the past ten years Jim has been an accomplished musician. He used to be the lead singer of Balinger and now he’s working on his first solo album.

Jim Rosemberg links: Instagram / Vimeo / Website.

“I arrived in Kathmandu on a very hot and dusty evening, my body shivering from excitement and exhaustion from the trip. I never realise that I'm traveling until I'm out of the local Airport. Some places instantly make you feel alive, alert and open.
Kathmandu is a busy, vibrant, and loud city, I spent a few days there, visiting temples, eating a lot and getting lost in the crowded streets that compose its heart.

After three days, I left Kathmandu for a four days trek in the Himalayan mountains, the Annapurnas.
I then took a 14 hours local night bus to Bardia national park, a protected forest where you can find, if you're lucky, tigers, elephants, rhinos, leopards and many birds.

Bardia is very close to the border with India, only a few kilometers separate them and you can definitely see that the population looks very different from the one in Kathmandu. 
Tharus are an ethnic minority that lives in this region and has very singular beliefs. Most of the Hindus pray to gods and goddesses whereas the Tharu directly pray to the ghosts and devils, asking them to spare them, asking for protection.

In the village I got to experience their lifestyle, I ate with them, drank very sour rice wine and smoked ganja with the elderly men as it's part of their traditions. I stayed three days in the village and we built a shed for a family, to protect their goats from predators. Because they live next to the national parc, predators are a massive problem for the villagers. Leopards kill their goats and, during the rice season, elephants come and try to steal the rice. Every night, some people sleep on high wooden sheds in order to scare the elephants with fire and shouts. One elephant can eat up to 50 kilos of rice per night. All the villagers depend on that rice to feed their families so you can imagine the tension whenever there's an elephant at night.”