Christian Kaesler – you will be missed!

I was first introduced to Christian Kaesler by my good friend Rolf, who lives in Nepal. He told me, “you absolutely have to meet him, he has such good ideas and such a good eye”. I was intrigued, and Rolf does introduce me to a lot of amazing people.

One day, I had a call from Christian himself, who told me that Rolf told him exactly the same thing, the other way around. We of course decided we have to meet.

Christian walked into my office hand in hand about a year ago with his beautiful wife, Lata, who he had just married recently, and told me his story.

He had left pretty much everything in Germany and moved to Nepal, setting up a beautiful farm / tourism project up in the mountains of Sotang. We spent the better part of about two hours discussing how to integrate that into the tourism portfolio, and over the next two three months also corresponded to finalise the pricing and the plans.

I also found out that he was an amazing photographer, very talented and his eye for details was amazing. I was so impressed.

The other thing that struck me was his energy. He was resourceful, full of ideas, passionate about getting it done and knew the processes to take him there, qualities not many people have all in one.

We never ended up doing business, though we kept the product in our portfolio, ready to be launched as we got the green signal and everything was ready to go in the mountains.

Once the earthquake struck and everything went topsy turvy, I followed his efforts at fund-raising and helping in relief and recovery. I followed his exhaustion at this work and work even while relaxing in Sauraha.

Once I started working on tourism recovery, I automatically turned to him for his amazing post earthquake photographs to try to put it in a database, so that the entire industry could use the positive stories that this could bring out to the world of the strong, resilient people of Nepal. Without batting an eyelid, he said yes and donated his pictures – of faces of Nepal after the quake.

Rest well Christian. We did not know each other for long, but I had grown to respect you a lot, and got a lot of inspiration from you. You will be missed. I hope Lata will find the courage and strength to go over this difficult time.

His pictures are dedicated to Nepal’s Tourism Recovery process, free to be used by the industry at large. Do credit him, he deserves every bit of that honour.