Travel
The Road to Salvation: Muktinath
I set off the following morning at ten, in a beat up car that passed for a taxi. After the gruelling ten hours drive up from Pokhara, it was only around an hour and a half to Muktinath on roads…
The Road to Salvation: Paris in Jomsom
The journey upwards took some ten hours in total, with a brief stop for lunch, and we rattled into Jomsom at six in the evening, just as the light was starting to fade. No city this, more an extended village…
The Road to Salvation: Ascent
The Sanskrit word ”Mukti” (also Moksha) broadly translates as ‘salvation’. In Eastern religions and theological traditions with their implicit belief in reincarnation, salvation is understood rather differently to the way it is in Christianity, with its emphasis on hellfire and…
The Raw Edge of Life
I almost always travel alone, excepting for earlier years when my daughter was younger and sometimes accompanied me. It’s better that way. There is absolutely nothing between you and the real experience of the world you are moving through. If…
Infinity Dining
The monsoon has been unrelenting this year, pretty much since I arrived in Nepal, certainly in Lakeside Pokhara. Happily, however, there have been occasional respites and it’s important to be ready to take full advantage of these as you never…
Monsoons, meat and mountains
The journey from Tadapani down to Ghandruk took around half the time as it had going up, unsurprising given the precarious speed of the steep descent. Ghandruk itself is around 500 metres lower in altitude than Tadapani and, until the…
The Road to Annapurna
We left early on a Wednesday morning nearly three weeks ago now. We had to make it up to Ghandruk from Pokhara with enough time to trek onwards up to Tadapani before evening or bad weather set in. The land…
Where Mongooses Play
I often see them running along the edges of the paddy fields here and have spent sometime trying to identify them properly, but whether they’re the Indian Gray Mongoose, or the Small Asian Mongoose, they wreak the same havoc amongst…
Head in the Clouds
I’m up in the clouds now. Literally. Yesterday I moved from the family guesthouse where I’ve been holed up these last three weeks in Lakeside Pokhara, up to the heights of Sarankgot, which, during these months of heavy monsoon, spends…
The Lotus Eaters
It’s now three days since I returned from Sarankgot and life has predictably settled back down into much the same rhythm it had before I left. But I’m hopeful I can manage the challenges of commune living with a little…
