Yangon, where we begin our two-week tour of Myanmar, is not for the faint of heart. And ‘faint’ is exactly how I feel when our plane touches down sometime after ten pm. For the past day and a half I’ve battled a bout of food poisoning – most likely contracted during our farmhouse stay in…
Today we’re heading to Inle Lake in northeastern Myanmar. We had the option of taking a 12-hour overnight bus ride, or paying extra for an hour flight. It was an easy decision, but one I found myself questioning once we arrived at Yangon Domestic Airport, an astoundingly primitive operation. Put simply: buses don’t fall out…
It’s after dark when we reach the farmhouse where we’ll spend the next two nights. An opportunity to ‘immerse’ myself in Bhutanese culture, it is an experience I’ve been looking forward to in the same way I might a community service project on a Saturday. I know it will be good for me – worthwhile…
I brought with me to Bhutan a pre-existing interest in Buddhism. I can’t really remember what compelled me, but last March I enrolled in an ‘Introduction to Buddhism’ class in San Francisco. Yes, I could have bought a book – but you cannot ask questions to a book, and I had lots of those. So…
Bhutan, for whatever reason, decided to set up shop smack dab in the middle of the Himalayas. There isn’t a plain in site. The airport runway is couched in barely a valley where a dozen ridges collide, a predicament so unusual that the pilot warned us before the descent that we should not be alarmed…
I’ve seen mountains. The Tetons and the Sawtooth. The Rockies and the Sierras. The Cascades and the Alps and the Andes. I’ve hiked them and I’ve camped in them and I’ve skied them and I’ve admired them from afar so it’s from an educated perspective that I tell you this: the Himalayas are the most…
Kathmandu is filthy. A fair statement and the only negative one I’ll make. Because the truth is: I quite like the place. I arrived at the Kathmandu airport after 10pm feeling a breezy air of nonchalance that can only be attributed to the fact that we’d been more or less ‘in transit’ for the preceding…
A few days ago I was boarding an enormous jet bound for Dubai. I stood in the jetway and admired the size of the engine, thinking about the rooms of my apartment that could fit inside of it, when it occurred to me that I’d forgotten a fundamental detail of my kitchen. “What are our…
It had been my assumption that Cape Town would be similar to San Francisco. This was based on nothing beyond the inarguable fact of it being a city built beside the ocean. But as I piloted our rented Volkswagen away from the airport (internally singing to myself: “left side, left side, we drive on the…
Never in my life have I been so aware of the sun’s comings and goings. We rose at the ungodly hour of 3:45am in order to make the drive from Cape Town to the seaside town of Gansbaai, where our day’s activity would commence. As we neared our destination, the sky began to lighten, illuminating…
Somewhere Seeking 