Greetings from Nepal, land of the monsoon! It started on June 10th, and well, there's been a lot of rain. It's not so bad in Kathmandu and in the Valley, but everywhere else, it rains SO much. My clothes are probably permanently mud-splattered, and it's almost pointless to carry an umbrella because you'll get drenched anyway. In the midst of this lovely weather, we decided to take off for another remote village. Well, we didn't think it was that remote. We were told a four hour bus ride from Kathmandu and then a thirty minute walk. Wrong-o, my friends! Apparently it's [View Full Entry]

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Montreal and Kathmandu are a world apart. Excluding stop-overs: 6 hours to Los Angeles, 17 hours to Bangkok then 4 hours to Kathmandu adds up to 27 hours worth of leg cramp, and not much sleep. It would actually have been slightly shorter (but more expensive) to fly the other way around the world. But before I can start trekking, there's a 10-hour public bus ride to survive, switch-backing for hours as we climb to a high pass then dig-zagging down to a river crossing, only to repeat the cycle over and over again. Other than a ruptured break line [View Full Entry]

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Dear Loyal Readers, I apologize most abjectly for my failure to post anything on this blog about the last three months of my trip last year. It's not that it hasn't been in my thoughts. I think my reticence stems at least in part from the profound difficulty of summoning memories of places so different from New York that they seem little more than a fantasy. However, of all the places I marveled at, the one that returns to my thoughts above all the others was my trek to Mt Everest base camp, in the remote reaches of the mountains of [View Full Entry]

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Then it was off to the Everest Region for a 12 day trek from Jiri to Tengboche and back to Lukla for our flight. We hired a fabulous Nepali guy - Santosh - who was our guide, porter, friend and family for a month while we trekked. Not only did he take us along the mountain trails for over 500km but he also taught us the local lingo - a great Nepali teacher! If anyone is looking for a Nepali trekking guide in future...! Our first encounter with the Maoists was in the first couple of days when they tried to [View Full Entry]

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