Monthly Archives: November 2012
Flying into Lukla: Feel the Fear
I’m not normally a nervous flier. But when it comes to flying into Lukla from Kathmandu, nerves are really the only appropriate response. I’d barely slept the night before, waking on the hour every hour with wild anxieties about missing our flight, I suspect a displacement for subliminal anxieties about a) said plane falling out [...]
Ready, Set? Errr, No….
We head off to Everest Base Camp tomorrow morning, flying into Lukla where, insha’allah, a porter awaits us on arrival. And, for all that the last three days feel like solid preparation, I don’t really feel prepared at all. Well, to say the last three days feel like solid preparation would be an exaggeration, verging [...]
Best Face Forward?
I have a really conflicted relationship with makeup. It’s not that I don’t wear it. You wouldn’t see me dead in a posh bar without makeup; I applied slap daily for a blogging conference I went to; and, of course, I did my damnedest for this travel blogging calendar thing. But my application skills are [...]
Happy Birthday, Son
Twelve years ago today, I woke up with a stomach ache. And, despite being almost nine months pregnant, I blamed it on a curry. (I looked it up in a baby book, you see. It couldn’t POSSIBLY be contractions. Not coming that fast…) About four hours after that, I was a parent. And, to be [...]
In Pokhara – with the Plague
Had things gone according to plan, Zac and I should have been heading up a glacier today, en route to Everest Base Camp. But… this is us. So instead I’m whining about my cold. For currently we are hacking up our lungs in Pokhara, looking up at the Annapurna range towering over Lake Fewa, already [...]
The Biggest Stupa in Asia?
“Look!” I say, coaxingly. “It’ll be interesting! It’s the biggest stupa in Asia! We have to see that, right?” “Oh, alright!” says my spawn. (Neither of us are at our best with colds.) “Yeah, I guess we do have to see that.” “And,” I interject rapidly. “There’s this other Hindu temple that’s very famous, on [...]
First Impressions of Kathmandu
The term “sensory overload” could have been designed for Kathmandu, a medieval hill city, dirt poor, rich in ritual, dragging its ass into the twenty-first century in a clutter of motorbikes and mass tourism, the air a rich soup of dust, vehicle emissions, riverside cremations and burning plastic, of incense, joss sticks, cardamom and, yes, [...]
Watching Skyfall in KL
There are many good things about urban Malaysia. Most notably, the museums, the malls, the cinemas and the food. And, as I pick up the boy from KLIA on a day so grey and rainy that I shiver in the air-conditioning and wonder whether I’ll need a coat against the imagined cold, I’m figuring we [...]
