Susan and I arrived safely in Bhutan where it was beautiful and sunny but a steady rain has been falling all afternoon. I’m posting this from the office of the Gantey Palace where we are staying and I’m not able to check email for some reason so don’t expect any personal email from me until [...]

Yesterday afternoon I headed back up to Swayambunath (a.k.a the Monkey Temple) and shot 250 more pictures. I’ve created a monkey gallery of some of the better ones (suprisingly few considering how many hours i’ve spent up there).

While I had no intention of buying anything more in Kathmandu I couldn’t help myself. [...]

Yesterday’s big Nepali news was that the head of the Maoist Insurgency gave an extremely rare interview to the BBC. The analysts claim his image is extremely well crafted in a not entirely accurate way but he comes across as quite moderate, rational, and progressive. I can only imagine what the political situation will be [...]

Every Nepali I talked to last night (all of which were selling me things) told me they might not be open in the morning cause of a called bandh. “It’s 9 p.m. and you don’t yet know If you’re opening tomorrow?”, I asked. “How do you find out if it’s ON? Is there a phone [...]

So far, I’ve been pretty dependent on ATMs despite their on-again off-again operation in Kathmandu so it is with great relief that I report the retrieval of my “captured” card from the Himalayan Bank. After answering several questions about when and where it was captured (made me smile everytime they used that word) I was [...]

When I ordered my latte at the Pumpernickle this morning the reply was “no latte, nescafe.” The power was out, yet again, and with it, the espresso machine. Yes, I sound like a primadonna but there are so few creature comforts here I really needed that latte. I settled for the ubiquitous black tea and [...]

I started my day with a little Nepalese bureaucracy when I tried to confirm my flight to Bhutan as instructed by my tour operator. I was told the only way I could confirm would be in person. After emailing my Bhutanese tour organizer in the states he wrote back that the Nepalese were a bit [...]

It’s been a really bizarre couple days here in Kathmandu. Yesterday was Election Day as called by the King but nobody else really wanted to play along so he resorted to various draconian tactics like shutting off the cable tv & forcing public employees to vote. Some of his measures were laughably self-defeating: in an [...]

I might be getting into the flow of doing nothing and since nothing is what I did today I have no choice but to share my internal world. scary. It not news that I’m a bit of a navel-gazer but I usually share the fruit of my introspections with one person at a time. Since [...]

Gradually businesses are opening in Thamel on day 2 of the strike. I’d say almost 20 percent of the storefronts were open by this afternoon. It was a pretty slow day here for me though as I woke up with a sore throat, expectorating a color of mucus that should not be discussed in polite [...]