Annapurna Circuit

No blogging for the next 24 days. Sandie and I will be trekking the Himalayas on the Annapurna circuit and sanctuary (Annapurna Base Camp), starting in Besisahar and finishing in Nayapul. My life for the next 24 days will consist of daal baht, sleeping in tea houses and trekking an amazing mountain range.

Maximum elevation is 5416m (17,769ft) on the formidable Thorong La. Will be the highest I have ever been in my life by 3,500 feet... Yikes! If its anything like climbing a 14er, I will be trekking slower than snail. Of course we will be climbing slowly and stopping for acclimatization rest days.

You can view the itinerary on www.yetizone.com. We will be starting in Besisahar and going counter clock-wise with a stop in the Annapurna Base Camp before finishing in Pokhara.

See you soon with tons of photos. Hopefully no photos of Sandie or I getting the heli-vacuation... (Just to get your blood going mom!)

friends at Boudhanath

My favorite photo from an afternoon I will never forget.

Hilltop villages

Majuwa is a village of 300 people situated on a ridge above the city of Kathmandu. My first full day in Kathmandu, my guide Expansion called to say his brother Ganesh was going to a village above Nepal and I was invited to come along. Ok... Why not! Ganesh has been working on a pipeline system with a Dutch company to deliver water from a spring to the village of Majuwa. Today he was delivering a couple more rolls of tubing to the village. So I got a tour of the plastic tubing factory and we strapped a couple rolls of tubing on the top of the taxi...

Its a wonderful village full of such friendly people. We enjoyed a cup of tea at the village tea house. We enjoyed a taste of rice whiskey hot off the distillery.

We hiked up to see the pipeline and fix leaks and to see the storage tank and cement tank near the spring. We stopped for tea and a thukpa lunch in the village above named Jaikuti. School had just finished for the term and kids were playing carrom in the courtyard area in front of the school. This is a photo of the school and a woman carrying water to her home.

Janarama Soda

Homemade lemon flavored soda. Pretty good with a slight aftertaste of rotten eggs. Funny guy. Family is famous in Kathmandu as is the soda. Making soda has been a family operation for several generations here.

The bottles have a little glass bead that seals the soda inside with the pressure from the CO2. When he wants to open one, he smacks the bottle on the top and the bead falls down enough to let the gas out. Homemade soda, delicious! Next time I''ll try Khus or peppermint or ross morry flavor...

Book Report: Three Cups of Tea

A book about the life of Greg Mortensen - a mountaineer turned director of the Central Asia Institute. His failed attempt to summit K2 in 1993 led him make a promise to build a school for the village that nursed him back to health. He returned and built a school in eastern Pakistan to fulfill that promise and has been building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan ever since.

An interesting read that seemed relevant to my life at this point.

tastes like popcorn

Day two in Bureerum village the gang set out again. Doan drove the pickup with the six of us riding in the back sweating like it was a sauna. We stopped at a market on the outskirts of town, and now I understand why they wouldn't let me out of the truck to explore. They wanted to break me...

The road trip snack for the day was fried crickets. Tastes like popcorn. And that's how Thai people eat them, by the handful like popcorn!

I have to admit my stomach did the "are you sure you want to do this" flip-flop as I put the first squeaky jumper in my mouth. They actually do taste like popcorn... Well, I suppose anything fried in oil and doused with salt tastes like popcorn...

But by the time we had reached our destination I was eating the tasty little buggers by the handful too...

Bureerum

Bureerum, not a mixed drink, it's a small village in northern Thailand you probably won't find on a map.

An took me to meet some friends of hers in Bureerum, a great trip to a little town in the Isaan countryside. We hopped a few buses and met her friend Jak and her adorable three-year-old daughter Namfon. The four of us rode the over sized tuk-tuk into Bureerum and met the friends where I was given the standard tests. Can the farang speak Thai and can it eat spicy food... Well, I must have passed both tests because they decided to buy me beer and let me sleep in their home.

It was a rather cool afternoon of 39 degree Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit). We piled into the back of the pickup and went to the river for swimming - probably because I was just sitting there sweating. Floating around on inner tubes on a river was heaven for this farang. What a lovely afternoon eating food in the shade along the river and swimming.





Dinner was it's own adventure. Ant egg soup. But that's a different blog entry...

Dad - 10 years gone

Ten year anniversary of Dad's death today. Just the same as an other day but I have been dreading this day and wondering what it would hold for me for a long time. I awoke from a dream about Dad, not the emotional and saddening dreams I've had before, but a simple conversation about my plans for the future. I don't feel sad or angry, rather, I feel at peace with him being gone. First time in ten years I have stopped fighting the reality of his death. It simply is. I will always love him and miss him and yearn for his advice but I accept the only place I will be able to see him is in my mind's eye and the only place I will be able to converse with him is in my mind's voice. This may not sound like a major milestone but it is.

At a time when I want my father's advice more than anything I stumbled across a quote in the journals of Jack Kerouac:

The most beautiful idea on the face of the earth is the idea the child has that his father knows everything, knows what should be done at all times and how one should live always.

- The Windblown World: The Journals Of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954 by Jack Kerouac

I decided to open my copy of the Tao Te Ching to a random page, this is the page to which I turned:

Empty you mind of all thoughts.
Let your heart be at peace.
Watch the eternal turmoil of beings,
but contemplate their return.

Each separate being in the universe
returns to the common source.
Returning to the source is serenity.

- Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu; translation by Stephen Mitchell

Boogers with a Brain

Went hiking in Khao Sok National Park. The leeches were horrendous. Other than a couple of self-imposed adventures playing with leeches from ditches as a child, I have never really interacted with them before. They are tenacious little snot balls.

We started down the path and were enjoying swinging from the lianas vines and watching for monkeys and chasing iridescent butterflies for a photo. But before long Sandie got a small hole in her leg that refused to quit bleeding. We shouldn't have spent so much time trying to understand what created it; the answer was looking for us - voraciously...

After it started raining, we really started getting bit. We were pulling at least one of the blood-suckers off our legs every fifteen minutes. In a fit of rage, I had the quote of the day, "It's like flicking boogers with a brain!"

We had hopes of seeing a rafflesia flower, the biggest flower in the world that smells like a rotting corpse, but were turned back by rain and impending darkness. Not quite ready to spend the night in the rain forest...

High point of the day:
Sitting in a whirling dervish of butterflies on the beach of the Sok river. Amazing.








Low point of the day:
Pulling a leech off my big toe and realizing that it was going to bleed for a long time. And then realizing that I was going to get sucked many, many more times before we made it back to the road...

Snorkeling in Krabi

Sandie and I went on a four-island tour to do some snorkeling. Saw more schools of red-skinned farang than schools of fish but did see a horde of fish feeding on a rock and dove down to pick up some pearlized shells. Sandie showed me a blue, zigzag shaped clam that snapped shut when you got too close.

In the end, it was a relaxing day bobbing on the waves. The views of the limestone cliffs rising from nowhere in the ocean from my wooden plank in the long-tail speed boat were amazing.

A beautiful sunset from the Ao Nang beach.

Rock-climbing in Railay

Its a world-famous climbing place, you gotta do it...

We went to the 1-2-3 wall which was easy enough for me to climb the and easy enough for Sandie to lead climb. Met an entertaining Aussie who convinced us to climb a 30 m pitch. I climbed the easier first half without much trouble but tired out before I got going on the second half. Sandie bounced (from joy) when she finished the route.

Since Sandie didn't feel it was necessary to take a single photo of me while I was climbing, I will reward her by posting a photo of her climbing. Actually, I shouldn't complain, I would rather she keep a firm grip on the rope than the camera...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my SISTER

สุขสันต์วันเกิด








Go nuts on your birthday. Miss you and love you.

Sandie Arrives

My friend Sandie arrived to travel in Southeast Asia for 3 months. It has been her dream for many years to climb the cliffs and relax on the beaches in southern Thailand; to trek the Annapurna circuit; to explore Tibet... She arrived a little groggy and without my luggage! Hopefully it arrives tomorrow... I forced her to explore Wat Arun and Wat Pho up the Chao Phraya River before I lost her to jet lag

I feel lucky I am invited to tag along on the coattails of her dream. I am excited to have someone with whom to travel and speak English.



Sandie just started a blog of her own: Sandie Says It will be interesting to see how our blogs compare as we travel together for the next few months...

Hmong Village

On the way home from the elephant festival we stopped at the home of Seealee's sister in a Hmong village. They pulled fish out of their pond and fried them in a puddle of pork fat in the biggest wok I have ever seen over a wood fire. Simply the best fish I have eaten.

This is a photo of one of the little girls (not sure if she is related to Seealee or not) that was running around while we were there. I like how it came out.

Wat Nong Wang Muang

The view from the nine story Wat Nong Wang Muang located on the lakeside of Bueng Kaen Nakorn lake in Khon Kaen, Thailand. The ninth floor houses relics from the Buddha and affords a wonderful panoramic view of the lake and Khon Kaen city. The carved wooden doors and window covers are simply amazing.

An, my friend from the Roma Hotel took me by motorbike to see the temple and take me out for breakfast. Thanks for a wonderful morning!