Day 5: Khibang to Tatopani: 6 hours, 850m elevation loss What should have been a 2.5 hour downhill stroll turned in to a 4 hour ordeal down terraced fields, sandy roads, across landslides, over the ridge of a mountain, and down, down, down switchbacked stone steps on a tiny ridge, culminating in two long suspension […]
Day 4: Ghorepani to Khibang: Down, Down and Down some more (8 hours, 1,050m elevation loss With our rest day over, we left Ghorepani after numerous goodbyes between Austin and his gaggle of friends, including Rihanna, the girl about his age whose father is a Gurkha in the British Army. She’ll be joining him in […]
Poon Hill: 3 hours, 3.5 miles, 350m elevation gain We woke up at 4 am on a chilly and clear morning in Ghorepani, ready to start our 1.5 mile climb up to Poon Hill. This viewpoint is the “money shot” of the Annapurnas, with Dhaliguari, Annapurna Soutn and others, all coming into perfect view, one […]
Hille to Ghorepani: (9 hours, 1800 m total elevation gain) There are moments as a parent when your child surprises you with such immense amounts of resilience and taps into depths of the human psyche that you can’t believe you’re speaking to a 6 year old. Your precious offspring cries glitter tears and shits rainbows […]
(4 hours, 400m elevation gain) Today, the first steps I took across that rickety bridge with prayer flags flying in the wind, were the realisation of a long-term dream. As I sit here in our first tea house with my luscious Masala tea, looking up as the mist rolls down the steep green hills over […]
I have dreamed about trekking in Nepal since about the time I started reading Kerouac, Borroughs and Ginsberg. Nobody reads the Beats until they hit their first existential crisis somewhere around their mid-twenties, which means I’ve been dreaming of trekking the Annapurnas for at least 15 years. A lot has passed in that 15 years. […]
We arrived in Kathmandu during a power outage, a regular occurrence since the earthquake in 2015 that killed over 8500 people. The country is still rebuilding and recovering, and that includes the power grid, which cuts out occasionally to help manage the load – particularly at night. While the airport was on generator power, the […]
Let’s travel the world. With our kid. How awesome will that be?? He’s well travelled and travels well. It’s a low risk proposition. Turns out our kid is a right arsehole. Or possibly a better way of putting it is that he’s not adapting well to the change and is taking it out on mom […]
Istanbul has more than 2000 mosques, and its skyline, with all of its domes and minarets, resembles a humped hill punctured by upright spears up and down its seven hills. Some, like the little one directly across from our hotel window was a little local mosque. Modest and made of rough brick and mortar. The […]
After our beach holiday in Antalya and Cirali, we set off cross country up to Gallipoli on the North Coast along the Dardanelles, a long strait running between the Asian and European continents. We knew we had a long drive ahead of us, and weren’t entirely sure what to expect of the roads. Much to […]
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