travelin de

SEPT. 23, 2008 The differences between mountain life and valley life are striking. Spending the morning at the Lukla Airport all bundled up with hats, mitts and jackets then arriving in Kathmandu to the start of a 30+ degree day. The race for the showers was intense after 15 days gone without. We also had to sort all our laundry to be put in for washing and what we would take with us to Chitwan National Park and Pokhara. A mini bus picked us up at another hotel to take us to the Park, where my friend Alex has been teaching for three months. It was a beautiful drive- without A/C, and quite dangerous but beautiful none the less. Buses go off these roads on a daily basis due to rock slides, land slides, poor roads, ... read more

Sept. 9 2008 DAY 1 Our guide picked us up at our hotel at the crack of dawn to head to airport in Kathmandu. It was chaos, organized in it's own Nepali fashion. There were bags of trekking gear everywhere and people with their own packs. They threw our bags onto a massive retro scale and onto a tiny little cart that went out to our plane. The planes have an estimated time of departure, we went between 6:30 and 7:00. Once standing next to the plane for a few minutes and watched our bags get shoved into tiny compartments in the front and the back of the plane we hopped on and tried to sit on the left with hopes of seeing Everest as we flew in. It was a bit too overcast to see, ... read more

August 27, 2008 We arrived unscathed in Jaipur, but we didn’t leave in much the same state. We were envying our 30 hours on the train compared to Jaipur! We went to the old city- nicknamed the Pink City. It turned out to be more orange/brown than anything! I re-named Jaipur, India’s Dust Pan. We were haggled from the moment we left the hotel! Non-stop asking the whole day “you want a rickshaw ma’am?” “You like bangles?” “Come, you look my shop. No buying, just looking.” I think it was a combo of heat and dust that turned us cranky. We tried to cool off in a very fancy all vegetarian restaurant, LMB. There was an army of waiters that served me a great veggie burger! Our next attempt at coolness was hopping into a ... read more

Oman was an amazing break from India. It was clean, sunny, mosquito free... and did I mention clean? This country is the best kept secret of the middle east, hands down. The streets were lined with amazing white mansions, that belong to ordinary middle class families, and streets with beautiful new cars. Most of the men are in white traditional wear with a small cap, and the women in long black jackets and black scarves on their head. As soon as we stepped out of the airport the heat hit us. About 35*C at 11:00 at night. Nice. Our friend Salim picked us up and we stopped for some Turkish food! Dale developed a bit of an addiction to Mediterranean food while we were there! Salim has a great apartment about 5 minutes from the airport, ... read more

Through the rain, maybe it was hard to tell sometimes that we are in India! But then we would see someone urinating on the side of the road and then pass a stray dog and a bone-thin cow and realize... actually we are in India! It turned out that there was a car accident on the Nepal side of the Indian border, stopping us from our original plan of going to Varanasi! Quickly our plans changed and we bought a plane ticket to Delhi. August 3, 2008 HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!! Of course I had no idea what to expect when we arrived in Delhi, especially since our destination had changed very quickly. With a rough of idea of where our hostel was, it left us not able to find it- heading to a more expensive one ... read more