Dreamchaser's 2015: Seeking Manta Rays, Magical Sunsets, Mantras and Music
a trip by Bev and Stan
From: January 8th 2015
Until: May 4th 2015
Although we were first introduced to Asia in 2006, when I had a year of sabbatical leave and we spent seven months travelling to Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, New Zealand and Australia, those adventures were unfortunately not recorded in a travel blog. As such, the first official blog of the Dreamchasers Adventures Series -- Dreamchasers' Great Adventure - began in February 2013, a mere four days after I completed my career in the teaching profession. Our first adventure lasted five months, and took my husband and I on adventures to six countries spanning over 52,000 kilometres, Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, and Bali, Indonesia.
So when we were planning Dreamchasers 2014, we titled it "Slow Down, You Move Too Fast", and managed to extend our average stay in one place from three days to a week or so, but we still ultimately travelled to four countries - Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, and more extensively throughout Indonesia - and took in a wide range of whole new adventures, like meeting orang-utans; doing night walks in the jungles of Borneo; and facing the Komodo Dragons on Rinca Island, Indonesia.
This year we will be seeking, among other things, under water adventures, returning to our beloved Gili Islands in Lombok, Indonesia to take a diving course that will allow us to experience the exhilaration of swimming with giant manta rays, and witness the elegance of an octopus dance and countless other amazing discoveries to be made in the silent underwater world. But we would also welcome the opportunity to bathe an elephant, see an orang-utan in the wild, and check out some volcanoes, so there will definitely be more adventuring to do throughout yet undiscovered Indonesian islands before we settle down in Ubud, Bali, to resume our Mysore Ashtanga Yoga studies for six weeks prior to returning home.
The Yoga experience this year will include a week long Ashtanga Yoga Bali Conference where I will have the enormous privilege of practicing with some of the Yoga gurus I have read about my entire life, plus an additional week of study with Sri Manju Jois, son of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, the guru who inspired the Mysore tradition of Ashtanga Yoga instruction. This is truly the Yoga Super Bowl for me, and I am over-the-top pumped about it.
We remain very much adventurers at heart, so slowing down will always be a challenge, but we are working on it. . . slowly. The music will be with us at all times, my guitar in hand and songs in my heart, magically reinforcing the concept that music is indeed a universal language everywhere we go. But always, it will be the people we meet along the way that will bring us the most deeply resonating experiences, and their smiles the reason we keep on keepin' on.
Trip Length: 4 months
Blog Entries: 20
Photos: 176
Words: 12337
Blog Entries
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