Archive for October, 2009

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I arrived in Pokhara yesterday. So far I am really enjoying Pokhara; the air is the least polluted I have breathed in ages. I also have a wonderful view of the Himalayas from here. The clouds are usually partly shrouding the snow-capped peaks giving them an almost ethereal quality as they fade into the background.

Pokhara is the gateway to a lot of the trekking in Nepal and many backpackers …

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The cold weather in Nuwara Eliya came as a welcome relief after the humidity and mosquitoes in Colombo and Kandy. Nuwara Eliya is a former British hill station and one of the largest producers of tea in Sri Lanka. It is also nearby to some of the most famous trekking areas in Sri Lanka like Horton Plains and Adam’s Peak.

I was just about to give up on trekking when …

Tomorrow I will be flying from New Delhi to Kathmandu, Nepal thus marking the end of the India portion of my trip. The six or so weeks that I allotted for India struck me as slightly daunting before arrived, and was definitely the portion of my trip that I had the most concerns about.

I found India to be surprisingly manageable. There were often issues of language, but in the …

I arrived in Sri Lanka without a specific plan. Time and weather seemed to dictate that the Hill Country area would make the most sense for me to visit. Thursday I set off by train for Kandy, the capital of the Hill Country region. Reaching Kandy proved slightly problematic. The train stopped a few hours into the trip and then stayed stopped for about two hours. I was never exactly …

I’d been told that Sri Lanka is one of the most beautiful places in the world and a place that I absolutely must go to at some point, but when I first started to plan this trip the civil war was still going on and I assumed that I wouldn’t be able to visit. By the time I left home it looked like the war was over and I started …

The backwaters are brackish canals, streams, and lakes that run from Kollam (Quilon) to Alleppey (Alappuzha) and Kottayam to Kochi in southern Kerala, slightly inland from the Arabian Sea. I’d heard that they are a must see place, and after spending two days there I have to agree.

The pace of life took me a bit by surprise. I arrived on Sunday and went on a search to find Internet; …

On Friday I headed further south in Kerala to the Payyannur area and visited some mangrove swamps that are part of a mangrove swamp conservation effort.…

Throughout India there are a lot of issues currently facing wildlife and wild areas due to factors such as poaching and habitat loss. Nature reserves and sanctuaries have been set up to help preserve wildlife and wild habitats in India. I spent Wednesday and Thursday in the northern part of the Indian state of Kerala viewing some of the wildlife sanctuaries.

Wednesday I went to the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary. I …