It's no laughing matter: stealing Himalayan artifacts from ancient Buddhist cultures. 
KATHMANDU (TNN) - It sounds like an implausible April Fool's Day stunt. But after almost a decade, a centuries-old Buddhist monastery struggling in the foot region of Mt. Everest is now going to get a fresh lease of life, thanks to the yeti (Pali, yakshi, female ogre, in Buddhist cosmology).
Pangboche Monastery, built around a rock in Khumbu in northern Nepal, called the gateway to the world's highest peak, survived for centuries on donations given by foreign trekkers and mountaineers who visited the over 600-year-old edifice lured by tales of it possessing the skull and a hand of the yeti, the legendary beast who inspired an expedition by Sir Edmund Hillary himself and was the subject of a book by another Everest hero, Reinhold Messner. 
"I saw the skull and the hand in the late 1980s after I returned from New Zealand," says Ang Rita Sherpa, senior programme manager at The Mountain Institute that last year helped restore the crumbling down monastery with financial assistance from the US Ambassador's Fund. "Both were stolen in the early 1990s. After the monastery lost its main source of tourist attraction, it fell into hardship, barely able to sustain itself." More
