Hi All, Sorry again for the long delay. But this one is a biggie. After spending a week laid up in Manali, hobbled by stomach pains, I was dying to get moving. My gut had made a fairly miraculous recovery after a bold self-diagnosis and subsequent self-medication. I had about two weeks left before I had to fly home to New York, and what had once seemed like an infinite span of time for my travels suddenly felt very crowded. I had one more place that I dreamed of seeing in India. You see, I have always been a lover of [View Full Entry]

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At the end of my last entry, I was pulling in to Amritsar, home to the holiest temple of the Sikhs. This was a bit of an unexpected detour - I had thought I was going to go straight for the mountains, but I figured that the Golden Temple had to be on the cover of the Eyewitness Guide to India for a reason. After some inquiries, I learned that it could be arranged to make it a stop on the route to the mountains, and it's always advisable to make a stopover on a bus trip that would otherwise take [View Full Entry]

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Hello All, I'm disappointed with myself, because I'm still more than a month behind on my blog. This means that I can't relate my travel experience with as much freshness as I'd like. Funny. It's only a month ago that I was there, and it feels like years ago. Time really stretches out when your moving from one place to another so quickly, and between such different places. When you're on the road like this, experiences stack up inside you very quickly, the new ones compressing the old ones. Like when the packer at the grocery store puts the rice, soup [View Full Entry]

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My next three destinations all occupy the southern section of the very large state of Rajastan. After leaving Bundi, my next destination was a whistle stop tour of Chittorgarh, a town boasting what is billed as the finest fort in Rajastan, as well as some one-of-a kind architecture that you just have to visit to appreciate. The town isn't supposed to be that great to stay in, so I went to Udaipur that evening, which is widely considered to be most romantic city in the 'Stan. I wanted to describe an experience I had riding the train - I had to [View Full Entry]

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When last I wrote, I was about to bid farewell to the eternal Taj Majal to begin the heavily touristed Rajastan circuit. Well, I'd like to clarify that statement. It is heavily touristed *in the right season*. It is unlikely that the present time would qualify as that. I deliberated for quite a while about whether I was prepared to endure the 100 - 110 degree weather that I could expect. (that's 38-43 for the non-Americans reading this). It would be, I decided, a character building experience. Besides, it is a dry heat, which makes it much more tolerable, and I [View Full Entry]

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I've started this entry and aborted it several times because it's hard to know where to begin with a country as enormous and complicated as India. I'll just have to jump in and start writing, or else I will be forever stuck in Nepal. I touched down in Delhi on March 20, about two weeks ago. On the taxi ride from the airport, I felt a sense of the energy and vibrance of the city. Delhi actually has modern infrastructure, a fact which impressed me greatly coming, as I did, from Kathmandu. There are major construction projects everywhere. Perhaps it was [View Full Entry]

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I slept badly that night, partly due to the pounding rain, and partly due to the hope that it would stop (and, of course, the everpresent crappy mattress situation). I woke up at midnight, and again around 1:30 (among other times), and remarked with dismay that it was still raining. When 4:45 arrived, and it was time for us to begin our walk to Poon hill to collect our prize (a spectacular view of the Annapurnas and Dhauligiri) we didn't even bother getting out of bed. The rain had not subsided one bit. We were presented with the choice of hanging [View Full Entry]

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When we last left our intrepid travelers, their ragged band was breaking up on the jagged the rocks that crown the mountains above the Annapurna trail... When you are on the trail and have little to do at night but read and write, plus, it gets freezing cold, and the only warm place is your sleeping bag, you go to bed early and get up early. So I got up not long after Eddie and Michelle woke up at 5:30. I was dismayed to note that the pain in my left knee that I had noted the previous evening, the consequence [View Full Entry]

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The menus in the Annapurna trail restaurants all seem to have been copied from Protocols of the Elder Trekkers of Annapurna guide, as they are all pretty much identical, save for the prices, which seem to vary in proportion to altitude and remoteness. They have standard Nepali fare like Dal Baht (lentils with rice), Tibetan specialties like Tibetan bread, breakfast food like pancakes, omlettes, porridge, and spaghetti, lasagne, pizza, Indian food, potatoes, fried rice, chow mein, and even a handful of Mexican options. Sounds like a pretty good variety, but, I assure you, after a week on the [View Full Entry]

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Hi there, Friends! Sorry for the long delay. The access road of the information superhighway hasn't managed to penetrate the rugged mountain passes of the Himalayas just yet, so this posting has languished in my primitive offline word processor called a "note book" or some such. Apparently, these were once used extensively for composing. Anyway, I'm going to break this up into two or three installments, to make it a bit more readable. On the morning of Thursday, March second, Eddie, Michelle and I set off for Pokhara by airplane. The linear distance is no more than 120 miles. One [View Full Entry]

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