Relocating

My virtual blog presence is changing to another site. I expect that the content on this site will remain intact.

The Road to Samarcand…

…by Patrick O’Brian, is my current read.

The trek from Sundarijal to Chisopani

Come just as you are…

As song by Crystal Lewis.

Vegan..

It so happened that I greatly enjoyed the company and conversation of a vegetarian — and it has so happened that I declined to pursue a conversation on ChristianCafe with someone who thought that she needed to follow the OT dietary laws. I’m an omnivore; and I’m a flexible person who respects how people go about feeding themselves. I wouldn’t find comity, though, with someone who thought “meat was murder” or that what goes into a man’s mouth is what defiles him.

Turn your head and cough..

My friend DingoEnlish gives me this link about the TSA; not revealing anything that I didn’t know already. But it is worth a read; and it illuminates my thinking a bit as well. When I was in Bahrain in transit to London we all got patted down (women passengers, as well – by a female officer wearing a kind of half-veil over her face) and frisked. It was, ah, rather personal. I joked in the departure lounge with some American oil workers that I was tempted to turn my head and cough, but that the Bahrainian security either a) wouldn’t get the joke or b) would get it and not take it kindly.

Pilfered

So, my lost baggage came to my house by courier – it was found in Newark; apparently it never left the country. I seem to have most everything, but one thing is not accounted for — a 70$ rucksack purchased for the trekking part of my trip. Simply gone from the suitcase. It is evident that the contents were gone through. (While there, I purchased for about 20$ a Chinese knock-off rucksack in the tourist warren of Thamel, where I was staying; which I left behind with a German-run charity when I left). It is distressing when theft touches you.

Edit: It turns out my micro-shortwave radio was also taken. Arghh.

Soldier and sailor, too

I’ve only met a few ex-Royal Marines, but they each impressed me greatly. I had the pleasure of adventuring with one a few days in Nepal (he was on my raft crew) and also interacting with him back in the capital city. Thus I am also reminded of this poem I have favored by Rudyard Kipling about that breed of man.

The road not taken

from Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Day 8 of 10

I have rafted on rivers fed from the Himalayas (with some hair-raising moments in the water), sat in buddhist and hindu temples, and walked the countryside for three days in the company of a local guide. A small spot of health problems overcome with locally procured medications. More to come.

CHISOPANI MOONLIGHT

A Chill mountain wind
Both close and far to heaven
Riot of starlight