Tashi Delek, Bhutan!

After a successful but exhausting trek up to Chomolhari base camp, we were happy to spend our last few days in Bhutan doing more of a cultural tour. Most of the trekkers left immediately after the trek (since they’d done their cultural visits beforehand), but a few – Pete, Bernard, and Jennifer – joined us for a few days in Thimphu, the capital “city” of Bhutan (population 60,000), and Punakha. We enjoyed having a chance to get to know them a bit better since we weren’t able to trek with them. We were also totally blown away by the thoughtfulness and intelligence of our main guide, Tsewang, and we were thankful to have a chance to see Bhutan through his eyes before we left.

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Into Thin Air (Finally!)

After a rough start to our precious two weeks in Bhutan, Laura and I were finally feeling better and were eager to get out and do some trekking in the Himalayas. Geographic Expeditions and Yangphel (their local partner in Bhutan) had worked a minor miracle and lined up a completely separate, somewhat abbreviated trek for the two of us that would still get us up to the Chomolhari base camp and back to Paro in the seven days we had to work with.

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Gross National Happiness

We said farewell to Tsewang and our six fellow trekkers on Saturday, and spent the rest of the day watching random American sitcom reruns on Indian TV channels. (We get why they’re still airing Friends, but why anyone thinks that Yes, Dear and Just Shoot Me are shows worthy of television immortality is a mystery we’ll just have to chalk up to cultural differences.) By the next day, Dustin was feeling a lot better, and by the day after that, he felt strong enough to tackle the steep, vertical climb up to the stunning monastery called Tiger’s Nest (a day hike we’d missed out on when our tour group did it a few days earlier). The hike ended up being a fantastic introduction to the Bhutan that had been taunting us outside the windows of our hotel room, with everything from beautiful mountain scenery to fascinating Buddhist culture.

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The Land of the Thunder Dragon

The first thought you have after your plane lands in Bhutan is: I’m never flying here again. No one prepared us for the approach and landing at the Paro airport (the one and only commercial airport in the country), which is probably a good thing because I’m not sure I would have gotten on the plane had I known what was in store for us at the end of our hour-long flight from Kathmandu.

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The First 100(ish) Days – LM Edition

I began writing this entry (when it was supposed to be our “three month update”) over a month and a half ago, back before I started having daily conversations with my husband about the status of our bowels. That is to say, back when this was a different kind of trip. The trip we are on now, on day #117, is not the same one we were on back then. Not better or worse, just different.

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The First 100(ish) Days – DF Edition

Now that Laura and I have been traveling for almost four months (which is hard for us to believe!), we thought it might be interesting to write a bit about how we’re doing living life on the road — the joys, the challenges, the surprises, and what we may have learned about ourselves and each other. We each have a somewhat different perspective on the trip so far (obviously), so we decided it would be best to subject you to not one, but two “state of the traveling union” blog posts. We flipped a coin, and I won (or lost, I can’t remember), so I’m first up.

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Trekking to Chisapani and Nagarkot

Even with our somewhat overwhelming introduction to Kathmandu (re-introduction for me), we were still excited to spend a couple of days doing some light trekking northeast of the Kathmandu Valley. We’d hired a guide and porter through Himalayan Holidays — the same company that Room to Read was working with for their anniversary trek — and they met us that Monday morning to start our trek. Laxman (our guide) and Jhalak (our porter) introduced themselves as cousin-brothers: their fathers are brothers (making them first cousins), their mothers are sisters (again, first cousins), and as it turns out, their wives are also sisters (making them brothers-in-law)! Pretty funny. They both spoke English well enough, and after a short drive out of the Kathmandu Valley, we started our trek up to Chisapani.

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K-K-K-K-K-K-Kathmandu

First, we want to apologize for the radio silence during our last two-plus weeks on the road. We’ve had some serious travel challenges to contend with — multiple illnesses, volcanic ash over Europe (yes, it impacted us even in Asia), developing world chaos, the near-complete shutdown of the entire country of Nepal, and now a serious lack of reliable internet in our hotel in Thailand — but we’re back in our (mostly) happy place and trying to catch up on catching you up on our travels.

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Travel Blues

Lest you, our gentle readers, think that our Vanuatu travels were full of nothing but erupting volcanos, amazing shipwreck dives, rainforest cave spelunking, and crazy land-diving locals, we thought we should mention the other side of our time on the islands. This is the side of our travel adventures that rarely gets documented on our blog because, well, it’s kinda boring. It’s when the glamour of international travel gives way to monotony, routine, and the daily annoyances of being on the road. It’s when we start fantasizing about being back in our own home, eating a Mission burrito, and not having to worry about drinking out of the tap or where our passport currently is. It’s when we want to be anywhere but where we currently are.

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Lustin Versus the Volcano

It’s a little weird to still be writing about Vanuatu now — technically we’ve been to four different countries since we were on those lush tropical islands (though we probably shouldn’t count our brief overnight stays in Australia and Thailand). Such is the nature of travel blogging, I guess — we’re kind of always in a multi-dimensional temporal state: writing in the present from a new place about a place we’ve been to in the past, while also thinking about all of the plans we have to make for the next place we’re going. But I digress. We wanted to close out our Vanuatu entries with a few thoughts about our four-night stay on the fourth and final island we visited: Tanna. Tanna is famous for its volcano — Mt. Yasur — and after meeting this angry, spewing beast up close, it’s easy to see why.

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