He's been guiding since 1999, and remains, notably, the only person in Dolpa to have completed formal tourist-guide training — a credential he's since passed on, training twenty-seven others through a local NGO initiative. He finds more satisfaction in guiding than in his earlier work as a teacher, and stays with it despite the fact that local trekking work is scarce enough that he often has to travel to Kathmandu just to find agency work. When he does get hired, he charges between 600 and 900 rupees a day.
Tourism's benefit to local people, in his account, runs mainly through porters — work that pays, but faces real competition from porters brought in from neighbouring districts, some travel agencies even importing labour from as far as the Everest region rather than hiring locally. Local people, he's convinced, could supply nearly everything a trekking group needs; what's missing is training, particularly for prospective guides and cooks.
Dolpa has not yet faced negative effect of tourism because of inflow of very small number of tourists into the region.
Support staff face a quieter cost: shopkeepers routinely charge them more, simply because they're travelling with tourists and assumed to have money to spare. Beyond trekking itself, he sees real potential in diversifying Dolpa's economy — handicrafts, vegetable farming, and non-timber forest products like herbs and mushrooms could all reduce the district's dependence on tourism specifically.
Tourism's broader economic footprint remains modest, but not nothing — some schools and gompas have received tourist donations, and there's been a modest uptick in medical care, sanitation, and food availability. Change is happening gradually across Dolpa: better sanitation, more toilets, more shops, more vegetable farming, greater mobility, and improving language skills in both Nepali and English — English remaining the harder climb, with only about five percent of people in Dunai able to speak it fluently.
Infrastructure — trails, bridges — has improved, but services remain thin: one PCO telephone, a handful of radio-telephone connections, and little else. Education is where the gap shows most starkly: the region depends on teachers brought in from outside, some from as far as Darjeeling, and that shortage, more than almost anything else, keeps Dolpa from fully grasping the opportunity tourism represents.