When Leah and I got on the plane in October to fly to Nepal, neither of us had any experience with foreign travel. (Actually I had been to Canada a couple of times, but isn’t Canada the same thing as America, except that Canadians get hockey? Does Canada truly qualify as being foreign?)
Part of the reason Leah and I lacked travel resumes is where we live. The Pacific Northwest offers an ocean, islands, mountains, deserts--pretty much a lifetime’s worth of adventure and travel temptations. Why go anyplace else?
Then there is how we live. Leah and I are fairly simple people (a longtime friend teases us--only half-jokingly, I fear--of thinking we’re Amish, but my friend is incorrect: Leah and I think we are Hobbits.) As Tolkein might have written, travel kind of struck us as being for The Big Folk, not for a couple of country bumpkin Halflings.
To be sure, I had always liked the idea of travel. Many of my friends have been to Mexico, Europe, even Africa. Some of my mountain climber friends have been to the Himalaya in Nepal. I thought Nepal sounded cool and when I saw the pictures my friends shot there, it certainly looked cool. So when Leah and I decided to expand our Hobbit horizon, Nepal was the destination we chose.
While we were in the planning stages for our trip, I attended a couple of lectures in Seattle given by adventurer Willie Weir, an inveterate bicycle traveler. (By-the-way: Willie’s book Spokesongs is a wonderful read. Here’s a link: http://www.willieweir.com/) I remember Willie telling his audience that the best part of travel happens when we toss aside the guidebook and ignore our itinerary, allowing the unexpected to enter our trip experiences.
A trekking trip like what Leah and I did in Nepal is generally about movement, about hiking from one village to another. The photographs I’m posting today came into my life quite unexpectedly, most often when I stood still for a few moments:
Above: a group of Nepali students on holiday march along the trail at a spot where there is a large mani wall.
Below: Scenes from villages in the Solu Khumbu (Mt. Everest area.)
