kmorton

Greetings folks! Having just returned from the Mt. Everest trek, I realize that it's been a little while since my last posting here. A lot has transpired, but I'll ty to keep it brief here and just stick to the main events. Since my last entry, my friend Elaine and I headed back from Pokhara to Katmandu (about 185 km east) to line up our permits and make necessary arrangements to begin our trek to Mt. Everest (i.e. Sagarmatha) base camp at about 17,000-ft elevation. Our journey got off to an inauspicious start with me battling a vicious but thankfully short-lived boute of food poisoning (bad goat meat) and a fairly rough bus transit back to Katmandu. I think that since my last trip to/from Katmandu, the road workers have been industriously installing new pot-holes in ... read more

Namaste from Pokhara, folks. It's been a while since my last post, I realize. I just finished my volunteer teaching (and farming, as it turned out) assignment in the village of Sarangkot, and am just now getting around to writing. Well, it was a good experience, living up in the village and getting in with the local folks who really welcomed me very warmly. After a couple of rough days in the teaching arena, I settled into a groove with grades 7, 8, & 9 and began to enjoy myself in class. My host family, Yam Thapa (whose name I misspelled as Am in my last post, his wife Bindu, and their two young kids, were fantastic. They really opened up their home and kitchen to me. I think I ate my own bodyweight in rice ... read more

Namaste from Kathmandu, in the heart of Nepal! Well, since my last posting I've been doing a fair amount of moving around: From Kuala Lumpur through Bangkok for a couple of days, and then on to Kathmandu (KTM) where I'm at right now. Ironically, I really haven't too much to report since then, primarilly since I've been pretty much sidelined due to a bacterial infection of my foot that became fairly serious. Dr. Syed's $14 treatment that you may remember me recounting in my last posting wasn't too effective, apparently. I also don't have too many pictures this time, but I'll fix that for at next posting. While in Bangkok, I mostly just hunkered in my hotel room, although I did get out a bit (although I probably should have seen a doctor and just stayed ... read more

Hello and selamat pagi from the Malaysian province of Sabah on the island of Borneo! I've been here for about a week now, had the opportunity to do some snorkeling at a couple of the islands just off of Kota Kinabalu (on the north coast) and some mountain trekking to Kinabalu National Partk, including Low's Peak (13,400-ft). Since then I've hoofed it over to the east coast and the city of Sandakan, although I really don't think I'll be staying here very long. I'll get into that later. First, a few words about Borneo. It's the second largest island in the world, I recently learned, and is split between the sovereign nations of Indonesia (to the south) and Malaysia (in the north). There's also a tiny little country called Brunei which is about the size of ... read more

I think it was Friedriche Nietzsche (I'm sure Imangled the spelling here) that said, "Little maketh the best happiness." Well, seeing the sunrise from the top of a volcanic mountain certainly validates that claim. My last few days on the island of Lombok have been spent trekking the area around Ganung (Mount) Rinjani, a 3,700-meter (11,000-ft) inactive volcano whose crater is now a lake measuring about 3 to 4 km in diameter. But first, a word about extended travelling: It's not wall-to-wall excitement. In fact, for every day spent doing something really special and exhilarating, there's almost as much time spent in transit, waiting for transportation, or just taking care of mundane tasks like washing one's clothes in the shower or checking up on email (or writing travel blogs that may never be read!). This may ... read more