Deborah
Devali
Deborah
NEW ENTRY BELOW!!! With directions helping you to access the different places I've put my photos!!!
Well, looks like I've finished my midlife crisis odyssey... but not in my chosen destinations of emigration - New Zealand, Australia or Canada - as I'd thought. I don't feel ready to leave Asia yet, so I've compromised by choosing the relatively Westernized city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand to live in for a year or so. Nice to be somewhere where most things function most of the time again (say I bravely after teaching a 4 hour class yesterday in a power cut when the temperatures were hitting 42 - no air con, no fan, no fridge-cooled water, no audio or visual props to give one a breather...).
So, I'm busy looking for a nice wooden house to live in (like the one I had in Pai for a month), doing daily yoga classes and swimming for an hour every day to keep fit, and working as an academic English language teacher while I wait to take up a position as English literature teacher for one of the International schools here as of next autumn. I'm also looking into doing a Masters in Education with the Open University. And possibly knuckling down to learning Thai... So, all in all, I'm gradually leaving the world of 'being' and falling back into the world of 'doing'... with a vengeance! Hello again salary street, insurance (?) ville, tax nation... 'cept in Thailand we only pay 3% tax!
I've spent the last few days catching up on posting the new journal entries you'll find below covering the travelling I started eight months ago by taking the Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Beijing. From Beijing I travelled in a zigzag down through China to teach English for 3 weeks in the fairytale countryside of Guangxi province. From there, I travelled up west into the mountainous region of Yunnan and took a first flight out of the far North West corner to Tibet (the roads were closed for the winter). From Lhasa, I travelled south overland to Nepal, where I first ventured east, 'white water' rafting down 270 kilometres of river, and then west by plane, bus, foot, elephant, jeep, bike, motorbike and tuc tuc into northern India. There, I did a quick hop trip up into the foothills of the Himalaya by 'toy train' and then rushed south to the warmer climes of Rajasthan, shedding wooly hats and sleeping bags as I went. Then, having completed a circuit of the main sights of Rajasthan, I took three more flights from Delhi to the Maldives for a Dhoti fishing boat cruise around the Maldivian atolls for the New Year. And then a sixth flight back to Sri Lanka where, after catching my breath oon the beautiful beaches in the south, I again taught English, this time to adolescent monks in a Buddhist monastery. Toward the end of February, I flew to northern Thailand with a view to settle. I've been in the Chiang Mai ever since, apart for a week-long trip to Vientiane and beautiful Luang Prabang in Laos.
Due to special request from some of you, I've included more photos of myself in the entries below. Very nice of you to want to see my fisog and bod, but if you knew what work it is trying to find decent shots in amongst all the ones showing me to look falsely middle-aged and obese... These new-fangled digital cameras are really not all they're hyped up to be...
Uhmmm.... I recently discovered that I've been using this travelblog all wrong (well, the time I used it way back last November!). I shouldn't have been putting my photos and comments in the gallery albums, but in the journal part of this site below. Oh, well.
So here is a recapitulation of where to find my pictures and commentaries of my trip from Russia to Thailand:
TRANS-SIBERIAN FROM MOSCOW TO BEIJING (PEKIN): http://deborahodyssey.blog.com (scroll down until you see 'albums' and click on them. Click on the refresher button often!)
CHINA AND ARRIVAL IN LHASA, TIBET: the photo albums on this site (click on the 'gallery' icon below and then on the two pictures to open up the albums behind). Click on the photos if you want to see them enlarged.
PROVINCIAL TIBET, NEPAL, INDIA, MALDIVES, SRI LANKA, THAILAND, LAOS: the journal on this site. Access by scrolling down from this page. The journal isn't the best format in the world as you will see, but I'm beginning to get the hang of it. Unfortunately it isn't possible to make sure the photos appear next to the appropriate bit of text, so you'll have to stay alert! Click on the photos if you want to see them enlarged.