Category: Sabbatical
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Annapurna Trek: Day 1 (Pokhara – Nayapul – Hile)
One of the primary reasons for any visit to Nepal is trekking, so once Ayu and I were committed to going there after India, I started researching treks and trekking companies. I was initially discouraged as most popular Nepal treks are rather lengthy (2+ weeks) compared to what I wanted to do (3-5 days). After some research, I decided that the five-day Ghorepani-Ghandruk (a.k.a. Poon Hill) trek was perfect, as it fit within my time limitations, left from and returned to Pokhara (where Ayu was doing her six-day yoga retreat), and offered plenty of natural beauty. Since I didn’t feel…
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Gokarna, Goa, and Mumbai
Gokarna Upon arriving at the train station in Karwar, we hired a taxi to take us to Gokarna, about a one-hour drive away. The drive through the countryside was similar to the other taxi rides we had taken (more on that in a bit), but for the first time in India, we were witness to the concept of stray cows. A bit unnerving at first, the sight of lazily lumbering bovines interrupting traffic with their slow road-crossings and zero-fucks-given attitudes has since become quite normal. While in Gokarna, another pleasant beach town with minimal crowds, we stayed on Om Beach,…
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Kerala
Trivandrum After saying goodbye to Chiang Mai, I started a 24-hour travel day: a quick flight to BKK followed by a six-hour layover, a 3-hour flight to Sri Lanka followed by a 9-hour layover (most of which was spent sleeping in an impressively uncomfortable position in airport lounge chair), then finally a short flight to Trivandrum. Getting out of the airport was a challenge as I had to wait to get my visa on arrival (a very recent program within India’s immigration system), leave the airport building to use the only ATM, reenter the airport, break the large, effectively unusable…
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Another Chiang Mai Winter
After a lot of fast-paced traveling over the last five months, I was craving some time to slow down and be productive with all my backlogs before starting the next adventure. Ayu is going through yoga teacher training this month, so this was a perfect chance for me to go back to Chiang Mai; it’s familiar and very livable, it’s cheap even for Thailand, it has coworking spaces, and the weather this time of year is absolutely perfect. Jeans and a t-shirt for days. It’s really no surprise that Chiang Mai is perpetually at the top of Nomad List. Since…
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Against Football?
With a week to go until the Super Bowl and news headlines filled with stories of saggy balls, this seems like a good time to take a departure from my normal travel blogging and write about an excellent football-related book I read recently. If you don’t live in Boston or Seattle, you probably don’t care about this year’s matchup, so you might as well read this instead. Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto by Steve Almond was recommended to me by, coincidentally, a Seattle friend when I saw him and his wife over the summer on my west coast tour.…
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More Bangkok, More Islands
Bangkok A few days after seeing Becca off, I linked up with a different group of friends (all from the States) in Bangkok for a few weeks through Thailand. Several had never been to Bangkok before, so they had the usual touristy days while I busied myself with some errands and much-needed clothes shopping. (My personal recommendations are Platinum Fashion Mall and MBK Center.) Nightlife included another beautiful trip to Moon Bar and another meh trip to Khao San Road (though without the stomach illness this time). One of my favorite memories from this time around in Bangkok was an…
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Bangkok, Cambodia, and Thai Islands
Bangkok Becca, Michael, and I flew into BKK on a pleasant Friday afternoon and the two of them were immediately introduced to the urban jungle of Bangkok as we suffered through the first of many hour-long taxi rides through the massive city with its dense, standstill traffic. After finally reaching our hotel, checking in, and getting some food, we decided to go to the Chatuchak weekend market. Friday night at the market was very different from Saturday or Sunday; only a subset of the clothes shops were open and all the non-clothes shops were closed, there was very little food…
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Chiang Mai: Halloween, Lantern Festivals, and the Bruggmans
The last two months have been filled with lots of fun times with friends, some relatively quick traveling, and many a poor Internet connection, resulting in zero blog updates. Now that I have time and a normal Internet connection, I can finally catch up. Here’s my best attempt at transcribing what’s happened since the end of October. After Australia, I flew to Chiang Mai so I could attend the lantern festivals again this year and to await the arrival of Becca and her brother Michael. You may remember Becca from our fun adventures through Chile last year. Becca had allotted…
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Bali, Gili, and Brisbane
After the conclusion of the bloody (and delicious!) chaos that was the Vegetarian Festival, I stuck around Phuket Town for the weekend to go through all my photos and write up the story for the blog. My original plan was to finish all that work in Phuket Town, then travel to the western side of the island for a couple weeks of relaxation on the beach. And then the rain started. The day after the last day of the festival was not one of my favorite memories from this trip. During the 24 hours of constant precipitation, I had to…
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Phuket Vegetarian Festival (a.k.a. HOLY FUCKING SHIT)
Where to start with this one? The story of my attendance at this festival actually goes back almost a year. During my last trip through Southeast Asia, I had read about the vegetarian festival, but after it had already happened. Once I learned more about what happened there and saw some photos from it, I immediately put it on my list of things to see if I was back in Thailand at the right time. Conveniently, my last wedding obligation of the summer was only a couple weeks before the start of the festival, so I took it as a…
