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, …

Our second-to-last day of trekking was spent in Ghandruk vil­lage, the highest alti­tude we reached.  Ghandruk is a very cute little vil­lage, and it’s big­ger than I expec­ted.  The vil­lage and sur­round­ing areas include around 6,000 people, which seems huge for an area where you only come across a hand­ful of people. Ghandruk has a …

Our next few days of trekking involved all stone steps.  It’s not that I thought this was going to be an easy haul, but I seem to have inven­ted in my head a more leis­urely trot through dirt trails.  We were actu­ally ascend­ing and des­cend­ing moun­tains from vil­lage to vil­lage, so I should have expec­ted …

  Gandruk Vil­lage: We’re on day three of our Annapurna trek, and it’s cur­rently pour­ing and thun­der­ing out­side, so it’s time to take a short break and reflect on some of the things we’ve done and seen so far.  I wrote a short quiz and had both of us fill it in blindly so we …

Any day that starts with you being told you’re going on a five-hour bus jour­ney and ends with you hav­ing been on a bus for almost ten hours is a tough day.  At 6am this morn­ing, Karen & I set out to begin our trek into the Annapurna hills.  We first had to take a …

It’s my third night in Nepal, and it’s all still a bit of a blur.  Actu­ally the entire last week is quite a blur.  My last day in the office  was Fri­day.  I spent the next three days check­ing off to-do lists, pack­ing, run­ning errands and mak­ing phone calls.  Then it was a 5am trip …