One of our favorite parts of hiking in Nepal was coming across one of the many prayer wheel walls. Some were ornate and meticulously cared for, while others were made of old coffee cans with the prayers hand painted on them. We always took care to walk down the correct side, and spin each wheel as we passed by.
We’ve spent the last week lounging about and stuffing our faces on Koh Tao, in Thailand. My brother has been living on this little island for nearly 10 years, and even though we’ve been to visit him before, we never get tired of watching the sun set from one of the many local beach bars. After three days of clouds and rain we finally got a hot sunny day and were happy to sit at my brother’s bar, Maya Beach Club, sipping mojitos and checking out the longtail boats as they bobbed around on the tide.
I first went to Angkor Wat in 2005, and while there were plenty of visitors, it was nothing like our experience there last week. Tourism is booming in Cambodia and has definitely brought some changes. One of them is the inability for people to go climbing about on the temples as they please. In 2005 I snapped this shot of a monk climbing up the central tower in Angkor Wat. There was almost nobody else around and he had stopped to catch his breath, or perhaps just to admire the view and I happened to look up and catch him gazing out at the front of the temple complex. Today, you can’t just make your way up the crumbling stone steps, they have built wooden platform stairs on top of the originals, you have to wait in a long line to go up, and you are restricted to a brief 20 minute visit. It was sort of a bummer to not be able to wander at our leisure, though the new rules do make it safer, and better for the preservation of the temples.
Hiking up to the Thorong-La Pass on the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal was one of the most difficult days of our 12 day trek. We were both feeling a bit loopy from the altitude, and I had been battling a little headache since the night before, which was creating a bunch of stress about whether I was going to suffer the consequences of altitude sickness before I managed to make it to the top of the pass. We were so immersed in our own thoughts that it took a while for us to notice that the thick fog that we’d been hiking through for the last hour was no longer surrounding us. We turned around and realized that we’d broken through the clouds and could finally see some of the peaks behind us. We had just a few minutes of this view before the clouds rose up and obscured the views again. It was a good reminder to stop every once in a while and take a look at the majesty that surrounded us.
The Parallel Life 