also true in 2009. An Australian who traveled in the mid-198os told me twenty years later of the "gold run" that existed in Chungking Mansions at that time, with notices posted on guesthouses' walls seeking recruits. This involved travelers receiving gold in Hong Kong and taking it into Nepal, where owning gold was illegal, by hiding it in their rectums. In late 1985, the Nepalese police corralled a group of young travelers and made them squat and jump until the heavy tubes of gold came out; some apparently received substantial prison terms. The "gold run" nonetheless contin-ued, I have been told by old-time travelers.
learning some fun things about the 80s from Gordon Mathew’s “Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions”:
