11-19 November Boy, the compartment sure seems big without two Italians, eight Mongolians, 27 packages, snacks and drinks. With Sarah and Dalila missing the train, I have an entire four-person compartment all to myself for the five-day journey. So, I stow my gear, make some tea and start watching Mongolia pass by. We travel through the evening and in the middle of the night cross into Russia, which will be last country on my trip. The train is quite empty, with about half of my car full; and all the time I sojourn into the dining car I never see more [View Full Entry]

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1-10 November What can I say about Mongolia? Well, let's start at the beginning. We took a short bus from the Chinese border town to the Mongolian town, a trip of about 15 kilometers that took almost five hours because of customs and inspections on both sides of the border. On the bus we met a Mongolian woman who was coming back from a massive shoe-buying binge in China, where she had bought hundreds of shoes (she owned a shoe store in Ulaanbataar). She approached us in order to practice her English, which could really use some practice. Plus she was [View Full Entry]

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24 October - 6 November Beijing - the big city that has the whole world's attention, now and throughout history. We settled into a hostel tucked away on one of the narrow alleys that are known as hutongs. These alleys are fantastic, with stores, teashops, restaurants, schools, police stations, markets and everything else set up along the narrow lanes. The hutongs are arranged as a maze of east-west thoroughfares and are almost as old as Beijing itself, being implemented as defensive measure against calvary swooping in from the north. One common phrase from histori [View Full Entry]

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19-24 October After Chengdu we went by train to Xian, home of the famous terra cotta warriors. It was meant to be a short stop before going on to Beijing, but Dalila got sick again and we spent an extra three days until she got better. It turns out that her illness was a lot like my own - 2-3 days of feeling really bad and then 2-3 weeks of feeling well until the next round of illness hits. Only it seemed to be a little worse for Dalila. She not only saw every other doctor in Asia but also took [View Full Entry]

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15-18 October After a few days in Kathmandu for sightseeing and travel arrangements, we hopped on an Air China flight from Kathmandu to Chengdu, China. I was in Chengdu briefly last year on my mad dash to Yangshuo before the holiday madness of Golden Week and didn't have the chance to see much of anything, so it was nice to see some of the sights in this city.A nice thing about finding people that you like to travel with and have the same interests and travel pace is that it is easy to do very little, take all day to do [View Full Entry]

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Before meeting the girls in Pokhara I made a quick overnight sidetrip to Kushinigar, the site of Buddha's death. While there I stayed the night in the Burmese temple - maybe the closest I'll get to Burma on this trip. Just like Sarnath and Bodhgaya, Kushinigar is a study of contrasts. Outside the park is dirty, noisy, smelly India and as soon as you walk through the gates it is green, peaceful and quiet. At the ripe old age of 80 (at a time when 50 was considered to be very old) Buddha was walking home to his birthplace to die, [View Full Entry]

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21-30 September One day it's the holiest place in Buddhism and the next the holiest place in Hinduism. And what a change - from a quiet peaceful park with a temple to a raucous city with shouting, singing, smiling pilgrims. And a change from two goofy Vietnamese monks to goofy Italian girls. Varanasi bills itself as the oldest living city in the world and, although all of the really old structures have long since been destroyed it does boast some formidable antiquity. I had been reading a book titled "The Historical Buddha" in advance of visiting the pilgrimage sites and when [View Full Entry]

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6-20 September Well, you know you have been traveling a nice long while when you have the offer to travel with two Vietnamese monks with limited English skills to one of the poorest and most dangerous states in India, with none of you having a guidebook, and it sounds like the most natural and obvious thing to do. And with the acceptance of that offer Dang and I took the bus from Dharamsala to Delhi to meet his brother, sister and cousin, who are all living in Delhi and studying at the University of Delhi. Dang´s brother and cousin are a [View Full Entry]

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25 August - 5 September When I returned from Pangong Lake I found a wonderful surpise at my guesthouse in the form of two lovely women from Torino, Italy - Dalila and Sarah. What began with an impromptu English lesson grew into spending more and more time together until at the end of the two weeks we would easily spend 12-14 hours together enjoying Leh and the surrounding area. I don't know if I have ever felt so comfortable so quickly with any other people as with these two, and every moment was pure fun. Un bacio grande a voi due [View Full Entry]

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13-24 August When we returned to Leh it was just in time for the Dalai Lama's teachings in Choklamsar, which is only 8 km down the road from Leh and the place for his summer palace. His teachings here were different from those in Dharamasala in that the crowd was mostly Ladakhis form near and far, the place was a large open field backed by beautiful snow-capped mountains, and you could actually see the Dalai Lama while he was talking, whereas in Dharamsala unless you had a very fortunate seat there is no way to see him talking. Just like in [View Full Entry]

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