25 January - 5 February After a few days in cold snowy London I flew into sunny and warmer Barcelona and settled down in the La Rambla section of old Barcelona. Barcelona is a beautiful old city that has been enchanting people since Roman times. It pulsates with a creative energy that fed the careers of Picasso, Joan Miro, Antonin Gaudi and many other outstanding artists and architects. It´s an eminently walkable town, as I learned when I started to explore the city with an Argentinian roommate from my hostel. Fernando was in town for only three days before he [View Full Entry]

---

---

4-23 January How lucky can one man be? First I find myself in the ludricously wonderful position of having more money and fewer responsibilities than I have ever had in my life, which allows me to travel the world for a nice long time. Next I am fortunate to have the best luck in meeting the nicest people and having the most fantasic experiences. And then, to top it off, my parents realize that I´m really not coming home for Christmas and that if they want to see me they will have to come traveling to see me. So they organize [View Full Entry]

---

---

14-24 December My next stop in New Zealand was Payne´s Ford and the soon-to-be-internationally-infamous Hangdog Camp. Both places are in Takaka in the far northern portion of the South Island near Abel Tasman National Park. Again the intention was to visit a climbing area, and I found out about both places on the internet, and I´m very glad that I did. Let me explain. First of all, Kiwis are generally just fun-loving people. Then you have to consider that Takaka is the epicenter of all the freaks/hippies/crackpots on the South Island - basically anyone who wants to do things their own [View Full Entry]

---

---

24 November-12 December First of all, apologies to all readers (both of you!) for not posting on to this blog for so long. Part of it is laziness, part is having too much fun over the last two months. My New Year's resolution, however, is to update the blog more often over 2007. I cut short my time in Australia so that I could spend more time in New Zealand, and it turned out to be the right choice. New Zealand is a beautiful country with some of the nicest people in the world. Really, I can't recommend it too much. [View Full Entry]

---

---

1-17 November November 1st brings me into Sydney and the comforting arms of the Commonwealth. Travelling in a foreign country where everybody speaks English (or some variation thereof) seems so easy now after the last 7 months! Scrap the guidebook, scrap the maps and the phrasebook, now all I have to do is ask someone and it's done! I spent the first few days wandering around Sydney, seeing Sydney Harbor, the aquarium, numerous parks, and visiting a coffeeshop or 12. I also saw three movies in the theaters, I guess I had some unconscious entertainment cravings that needed sorting out. Sydney [View Full Entry]

---

---

14-31 October A two-hour flight from Kunming, China and all of a sudden I'm in Thailand. While I was on the plane I was reading a newspaper and that's how and when I learned that there had been a peaceful coup by the Thai military the day before. What? A quick look around the plane produced an inventory of the most indifferent, unconcerned faces so I figured all was well. When I got into the airport and Bangkok general there was no sign at all that anything had happened, and the entire time in Thailan was uneventful. (There was and still [View Full Entry]

---

---

1-12 October Yanghsuo is a wonderful little city in the southern province of Guangxi. It is famous for the numerous karst limestone towers that, well, tower over the otherwise flat landscape. Two beautiful clear rivers flow through the countryside also. If you have ever seen old Chinese silk paintings with big towers in the mist, that's Yangshuo. My first morning in Yangshuo I was looking for a cheap place to stay (everything was 2-3 times more expensive because of Golden Week) when these two teenage Chinese girls asked me if I was looking for a place. When I told them I [View Full Entry]

---

---

25 September- 1 October <----- VIDEO Before leaving Dharamsala I had promised a student that I would deliver an English dictionary to her brother, who is studying at a university in Xining, China. Which I was happy to do, but it had some strings attached. The first issue I was able to spot right away. It wasn't just any dictionary, but the latest and most comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary for students, and this thing was massive. It weighed a good 5-6 pounds and took up loads of space in my backpack, but I carried that thing all through Nepal and Tibet [View Full Entry]

---

---

23-24 September Jampa and several of my students in Dharamsala are from Ganden monastery and they were very proud of the fact, since Ganden is one of the four main Tibetan monasteries and is where the current Dalai Lama took the equivalent of his Ph.D. examinations. So I was very interested in seeing the monastery and taking some pictures for the Ganden monks. The three main monasteries in and around Lhasa are Drepung, Sera and Ganden. After the Chinese invaded Tibet and it was obvious that things were not going to improve, it was decided to move as many monks, books [View Full Entry]

---

---

12-22 September **I have some photo issues for this entry. Hopefully I'll be able to add photos later on from this part of the trip, but if I can it'll be a while. I have them, it's just problematic burning/copying/transferring these files as the motherboard on my laptop has taken a turn for the worse.** The only way to get from Nepal to Tibet is by an organized tour out of Kathmandu, so organized tour it is. Thirty-two foreigners pile into Land Cruisers and away we go. And stop. For nearly two hours we stand in intermittent rain on the Friendship [View Full Entry]

---

---