Week 10: Namaste from Nepal

Greetings from Kathmandu.  After a whirlwind tour of the local temples, I’m heading for a 7 day hike into the Himalayas.  You need a 6-hour jeep ride to get to the trailhead then I’m ascending into what the locals call ‘hill country’.  The max summit I’m going to in ‘hill country’ is 5001m (16,400 ft).  By way of comparison, the tallest peak in the continental United States is Mt. Whitney in California which is around 15,000 ft.  I think having Mt. Everest in the background really distorts what you end up calling a mountain.

Thailand was great fun, although I can’t say I roughed it.  Except for 3 or 4 days in the Bangkok, I spent my time scuba diving or staying in beach resorts.  Normally, I’m not a beach resort kinda guy, but when you couple the experience with amazing massages on the beach for $8, I just could not leave.  (BTW, these were public beaches – so no happy endings :)

When I was on the Island of Ko Tao, there was the Thai new years festival and a full moon party.  The new years festival is a celebration of water … which translates now to a drunken street battle with high powered water guns.  It was amazing good fun.  People did not think twice about blinding someone driving by on a moped with a water cannon … it was safe by burning-man standards, but not by any other convention.

I’m now a certified Rescue Diver – this means that I trained to assist people with all sorts of Scuba related mishaps.  My instructor informed me at 9am on the first day of training that he just woke up 2 hours earlier naked in a bar with no memory of how he got there.  It turns out that an average dive instructor in Thailand can really party!

During the training, tragedy kept striking one of the assistants.  In just a few days she was electrocuted in the compressor room, had panic attacks in open water, choked on a cookie on the boat, had decompression illness, and drowned at a depth of 30 feet.  The dive master meanwhile was having nitrogen narcosis most of the time and was trying to attack me underwater with a spoon and managed to pull my mask and fins off whenever I turned my back to him.  All the while people were yelling HELP, but so as not to confuse people between a pretend emergency and a real emergency, the word PIZZA was yelled instead of HELP.  It was a very unique experience, I will probably get jittery if I sit next to a wood-stove oven at an Italian restaurant anytime soon :)

OK, I have to get my bag ready for my Sherpa now.  I will likely not have internet until I make it to Darjeeling, India around April 29^th or 30^th.  Hopefully I’ll have great photos of a Yeti to share then.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Into thin air, Tony

Week 8: Greetings from Southeast Asia

I’m currently on a little island called Ko Tao which is located around 300 miles south of Bangkok in the Gulf of Thailand.  I’m here principally to scuba dive.  I start my Rescue Diver course tomorrow and we are going to simulate all sorts of emergency situations.  The running joke in the community is that a person is far more likely to get killed by a vending machine than by a shark or underwater mishap … however, it is still fun to train and build skills that I’ll hopefully never have to use :)

It was bitter sweet to leave New Zealand.  Its unspoiled beauty, coupled with the wonderful people I was able to camp and travel with, made for one of the best vacations in my life.  It was a pretty radical transition to leave from Auckland and land in Bangkok … it is hard to believe that both cities are on the same planet.

I picked a hotel in Bangkok next to foreign embassies since I needed some visas processed for my ensuing travel.  As it turns out, that landed me in the dystopic cesspool area of Bangkok.  It was hard to reconcile that days before I was wearing crampons climbing a glacier in NZ when I was in my new city tramping through oppressive heat with women & ladyboys offering massagi’s.  I enjoyed the blade-runner feel of the place for about 2 days before I made a break for the islands.

I plan on being in India from May 1^st to May 19^th, but other than that leg of the trip, things are pretty fluid.  I figure I will hang out in Thailand to dive and maybe make a brief trip to Cambodia and/or Vietnam before trying to make it over to Nepal then India.

The attached photos are from NZ and one from Thailand.  The first was ice-climbing on a fast moving glacier.  Minutes later our group did a sun salutation led by a yoga instructor who was in our climbing party.  The camping site was near a beach in Western NZ.  It looked like a scene from the show Lost … thankfully no smoke-monsters attacked us.  The third photo was as a rest stop on the NZ south island … words can’t describe how breathtaking it was in person.  The sunset photo is from a beach at Ko Tao … not a bad way to end a day :)

- Tony