TravelSupermarket.com's annual Capture the Color contest is back, which is a great opportunity for me to watch other bloggers with much nicer photos than mine win some prizes. I actually wasn't going to bother entering at all, mainly due to laziness, but when Corrinne from Reflections Enroute nominated me, I resolved to go out and shoot five photos specifically for the contest. … [Read more...]
Survive New Delhi Station and the Rest of India is Easy
New Delhi railway station serves as a great introduction to India in that it combines much of what is annoying about the country into one location. Every visitor to India will have stories of annoying touts and scams and some people will have nothing but. In actuality, only a small part of the country provides the fodder for these stories; unfortunately, that small part is the … [Read more...]
Don’t Let China Into Your Home!
The concepts of manners and personal hygiene are viewed very differently in China. In my two years in the country, I saw people clipping their toenails at their restaurant table, grown men defecating by the side of the road, a pretty violent brawl between two old men on a bus and virtually everybody smoking everywhere all the time. Luckily, it's always possible to retreat to … [Read more...]
Tal to Chame: Falling into a Trekking Routine
As we were having breakfast the next morning, I realized my brilliant idea of ordering cornbread the night before to snack on throughout the day wasn't going to work out quite the way I'd hoped. I mentioned in the previous part of this series that the food at our guesthouse in Tal was the best of the whole trek and the cornbread was especially memorable. It was too good—I ended … [Read more...]
Jade Dragon Snow Mountain: Choose the Correct Chairlift or Suffer
When you imagine spending a day in the mountains, you don't generally picture yourself second-hand smoking hundreds of cigarettes amidst thousands of people in a large, dimly lit room, but that's pretty much what a day on the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (Yulong Xueshan in Chinese) near Lijiang in China's Yunnan province looks like for most visitors. Waiting times for a chairlift … [Read more...]