Martha Rotter's Blog

Tibet.  It’s full of new­ness, old­ness, chan­ging­ness and strange­ness.  The one-hour drive from Lhasa air­port to the centre of the city of Lhasa feels like some­thing out of The Hills Have Eyes.  It’s very bar­ren, very hilly and very brown.  We saw the occa­sional yak or con­struc­tion work team, but little else.  So arriv­ing in …

It’s a lot of work to get to Tibet.  Visas, money, paper­work, pho­to­graphs, travel doc­u­ments – all of these things are required with a lot of advance notice.  Not to men­tion the most expens­ive 45-minute flight I’ve ever pur­chased. Once you get there, it’s queues and inspec­tions and queues and wait­ing and more paper­work. Hope­fully …

We were delighted to have a couple of com­pletely unsched­uled days in Pokhara after our rig­or­ous trekking.  The only thing I really wanted to do here came from a small para­graph in Lonely Planet which men­tioned that Pokhara is the only place in the world you can go para­hawk­ing.  Not paraglid­ing, para­hawk­ing.  Para­hawk­ing is a …

The des­cent to Bireth­anti vil­lage was much more laid-back and leis­urely than the rest of our days on the trails.  There were still stone steps occa­sion­ally, but much of it looked like this: After arriv­ing at the end of our trek in Bireth­anti vil­lage, we took a short break for lunch and then Nawan, our guide, …