Bootstrappin’

They don’t have the whole “electricity” thing figured out yet in Nepal. The power lines here are a tangled mess of coroded wires, hanging like cobwebs, loosely strung in every which way with no semblance of a plan. The guy in the photo above is working on the power lines, apparently ignoring all the little [...]

Long cow is looooooooong! We’re now about halfway through the second half of the Annapurna Circuit (the “Jomsom Trek”), and this gigantic bovine showed up out of nowhere! My friend Brian (from Ireland) took this photo, and Hans is the one in the middle.

The Dabur Foods Company owns rural Nepal. The tiny towns that dot the Annapurna Circuit are relatively untouched by modern commercialism and marketing, with one exception: Real Fruit Juice ads. The the yellow logo of the Real Fruit brand is plastered EVERYWHERE along the Jomsom Trek portion of the Annapurna. (Otherwise, there isn’t a billboard [...]

These goats don’t know it, but they’re headed for the dinner table. While we were trekking around the Annapurna Circuit, the Nepalese people were in the middle of the 15-day national festival of Dasain. Dasain (sometimes “Dashain”) is a Hindu harvest festival, where families gather together, feast and make merry, recite mantras, and worship the [...]

This is a short video I recorded from the window of our jeep while we drove from the China border to Kathmandu. Nepal is a really great country to observe through the window of a vehicle. All the houses are built right up next to the roads (because the canyons are so steep that there [...]

Crossing the Nepali border from Tibet was a really interesting experience. The Friendship “Highway” is a windy, usually one-lane gravel road on the edge of a sheer cliff, precariously inching its way down a narrow river valley on the edge of the Himalayas. The road is full of sheep and yaks, is often flooded or [...]

As we drive along the bumpy gravel track of the Friendship “Highway” between Tibet and Nepal, we are constantly confronted with roadblocks. The most common? Gigantic herds of goats! Apparently, the goats that people eat in Nepal are raised in the grassy plains of Tibet, and then marched along the highway down the steep, precarious [...]