May 29, 2012
After four days at home getting caught up and cleaned up, we are about to begin the second chapter of our Summer of Wander. Tomorrow we will fly to Chengdu, China, via Seoul, Korea. The flight to Seoul is nearly 12 hours long, then a four-hour flight to Chengdu...China is a day ahead, so we will arrive in Chengdu very late Thursday night. (Interesting fact: China is vast enough to need 5 time zones...but the whole country runs on one time zone -- Beijing time, of course. So imagine being in the westernmost part of the country where the sun rises and sets five hours later, but your clocks are set to match the daylight hours that work five time zones to the east!)
This next adventure is a trip that will take us through Tibet, into Nepal, and eventually to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. We will be traveling with four other folks and a British guide who has lived in Nepal for twenty years. We will spend a few days in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, to get acclimated to the elevation (11,800 ft), and then travel around the country by Land Cruiser. (We hope that we can get into Tibet, unfortunately, things heated up a little over this past weekend...you can read about the self-immolation protests here...)
One of the key points of interest on this trip is the north Mount Everest Base Camp...elevation 17,000 feet...and hopefully the weather will be favorable and we will be able to see the world's tallest peak...if not, we'll just re-post this photo...!
As we make our way around Tibet, we will be staying in hotels and guest lodges...the hotels are not the same as in Europe or the U.S., and the lodges are very rustic. It is very doubtful that we will have wi-fi in any lodges, so there is likely to be a pause of nearly a week between some of our Tibet updates...we are not certain that we will be able to blog from Lhasa due to the heightened restrictions just put in place. We think we can blog from Chengdu, but we'll see how it goes.
In Nepal we will spend a few days in Kathmandu, down in the thick air of 4,600 feet...we'll see the sites and explore the city just a little bit before flying to Bangkok and on to Siem Reap.
And the last stop on our journey will be four days in Angkor Wat, one of the UNESCO world heritage sites, and an amazing, ancient temple complex built by the Khmer civilization...
We look forward to sharing our experience with you as we make our way along this journey...though we're pretty certain that we will not be able to do justice to these extraordinary places. Hopefully we'll create an entertaining amateur travelogue and occasionally make you chuckle with us along the way...
PS: For those of you who tried to post comments and had trouble, we've fixed it so now you can post your comments directly on the blog post!
After four days at home getting caught up and cleaned up, we are about to begin the second chapter of our Summer of Wander. Tomorrow we will fly to Chengdu, China, via Seoul, Korea. The flight to Seoul is nearly 12 hours long, then a four-hour flight to Chengdu...China is a day ahead, so we will arrive in Chengdu very late Thursday night. (Interesting fact: China is vast enough to need 5 time zones...but the whole country runs on one time zone -- Beijing time, of course. So imagine being in the westernmost part of the country where the sun rises and sets five hours later, but your clocks are set to match the daylight hours that work five time zones to the east!)
This next adventure is a trip that will take us through Tibet, into Nepal, and eventually to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. We will be traveling with four other folks and a British guide who has lived in Nepal for twenty years. We will spend a few days in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, to get acclimated to the elevation (11,800 ft), and then travel around the country by Land Cruiser. (We hope that we can get into Tibet, unfortunately, things heated up a little over this past weekend...you can read about the self-immolation protests here...)
One of the key points of interest on this trip is the north Mount Everest Base Camp...elevation 17,000 feet...and hopefully the weather will be favorable and we will be able to see the world's tallest peak...if not, we'll just re-post this photo...!
In Nepal we will spend a few days in Kathmandu, down in the thick air of 4,600 feet...we'll see the sites and explore the city just a little bit before flying to Bangkok and on to Siem Reap.
And the last stop on our journey will be four days in Angkor Wat, one of the UNESCO world heritage sites, and an amazing, ancient temple complex built by the Khmer civilization...
PS: For those of you who tried to post comments and had trouble, we've fixed it so now you can post your comments directly on the blog post!
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