Nepal Trip 2007: Day 6 (trekking day 3): Phaplu 17 October 2007 9:14 am
Posted by Tracy in : nepal, travel , 1 comment so farHappy birthday to my aunt Beth! You are ten thousand kinds of awesome, and there’s no way we would have gone on this trip without you, so thank you very much for everything. Readers, if you would please direct your blessings and good thoughts her way, that would be super-cool, and I thank you for that as well.
Phaplu (2,470 meters high) is in the Solu region, (more…)
Nepal Trip 2007: Day 5 (trekking day 2): Jantarla 16 October 2007 9:41 am
Posted by Tracy in : nepal, travel , add a commentMy guess is that the place names on our itinerary are the towns nearest to where we’re scheduled to end, but they could just be places we’re passing through. Also I should have mentioned earlier that we’re trekking in the Khumbu region, which is to say: the valley that leads up to Mount Everest. No way in hell, however, are my parents, my brother, and I going particularly close to the big mountain, or even Base Camp. The hardcore kids continuing on past Namche Bazaar will get much closer than we do, and I look forward to hearing the story of their adventures.
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This post was written and scheduled for automagical posting in the week before I left on this crazy adventure. I hope to write many more posts about the trip — you know, with more actual details and pictures and stuff — but for now this is all we’ve got while my intergoogle access is all kinds of sporadic during my travels from October 9 until November 6.
Nepal Trip 2007: Day 4 (second trekking day): Chitre 15 October 2007 9:41 am
Posted by Tracy in : nepal, travel , add a commentToday is our first full day of real trekking, and the first day that doesn’t involve, y’know, staying in a hotel. Later in the trip we’ll be staying at the home of one of our Sherpas, but first we’ve got a few days of high-altitude super-swank luxurious camping, with Sherpas and porters and cook staff, no kidding. My mind is sort of blown by the fact that there will be Sherpas and porters and cook staff, honestly. I don’t know what to make of that except that I have to keep remembering that my Western-style wealth is basically equivalent to having superpowers, and with great power comes great responsibility and all. If only that great power didn’t mean haggling over prices, which I hate. I know I’m supposed to pretend it’s a game, but my instinct is to say “fuck it” and pay the higher price and move on with my life — except that I couls end up paying orders of magnitude too much and that could screw up entire local economies for people with non-Western-superpower levels of wealth, and that’s not okay. Dangit. My plan is to enlist a haggler surrogate — my aunt Beth claims to really like the whole price war game, so any time I can designate her as my representative sounds okay by me.
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This post was written and scheduled for automagical posting in the week before I left on this crazy adventure, and updated just a tad at Kathmandu airport on October 14. I hope to write many more posts about the trip — you know, with more actual details and pictures and stuff — but for now this is all we’ve got while my intergoogle access is all kinds of sporadic during my travels from October 9 until November 6.
Nepal Trip 2007: Day 3: Kathmandu-Rumjatar Camp at Aaderi 14 October 2007 12:30 am
Posted by Tracy in : Kathmandu, nepal, pictures, travel , add a commentFirst and foremost, I uploaded a few pictures to my Flickr pages today. Not many, because internet cafes have sporadic connection speeds and also we were about to get on a plane flight, about which I will provide a little more information below. Yes, I probably need a Flickr pro account just for this trip alone.
Fun fact! Please note that my spellings of place names are generally based on the itinerary I was emailed, but that doesn’t mean they’re spelled correctly (not that anything can be transliterated correctly considering I’m not using the right freaking alphabet). What that means is that this trip can be very hard to follow along on Nepal websites or library books like I tried to figure stuff out with all last month. Anyway. Like I said before, today is another air travel day, but within Nepal this time, I believe on the national airline, Yeti Air. Awesome! We’re flying from Kathmandu to Rumjatar, on a tiny little 12- or maybe 16-seat puddle-jumper airplane so small it has very strict baggage weight limits (except if your trekking party is so big that they take over an entire flight, as is our case; we’ll still have to be careful on the way back). The last time I flew on a plane like this it was between Vieques and Culebra, little islands southeast of Puerto Rico (and it may have been from Culebra to Vieques — I’m not entirely sure anymore). On that flight they actually arranged passengers by weight, to make sure the plane was evenly balanced. Whee! (more…)
Nepal Trip 2007: Day 2: (almost) LIVE POST! 13 October 2007 12:00 am
Posted by Tracy in : Kathmandu, eating, friends, nepal, travel , add a commentGreetings from the future! I am writing this at 10:30 AM on Saturday in Kathmandu and today’s post wasn’t scheduled to go out for another 10 or so hours but I’ve shifted it to go up at the earliest possible moment on Saturday Pacific Time so y’all can be almost as confused by the time change as I am. Speaking of time change confusion, just for giggles, here’s what I wrote last week or whenever it was I tried to predict what I’d be doing on this trip (it feels like a lifetime ago):
I really, really do not know how to number these days. I’m still getting over the fact that I lost one to the flight from LA-Bangkok. Also, the time change between Nepal and the West Coast is almost exactly 12 hours, but considering all the madness of the travel schedule, I give myself 50-50 odds of just randomly resetting my internal clock by today because it’s going to be such a relief to have regular ol’ 24-hour days again.
On the schedule for today is a day trip to Patan, in the Kathmandu Valley. Patan is one of the three ancient royal cities of Nepal: the other two are Kathmandu and Bhaktapur.
Turns out we actually went to Patan yesterday, but not before eating a delicious breakfast and learning a whole lot about the traditional arts and crafts of the Kathmandu Valley, which in turn helped us appreciate the sights in Patan, and it was awesome. (Also, I am so tweaked out by the time change that I am waking up at 5 AM here, but I’ll have more on that in a bit. Long story short, the crazy early morning internal clock wakeup has already come in handy once.) (more…)
