Under the cloak: Creepy crawlies

Wood carvings might be the world's most ubiquitous souvenir. You can find "traditional local crafts" made of wood nearly anywhere with trees and tourists.

My collection of wooden geegaws from around the globe includes a Buddhist prayer wheel from Nepal, a foot-long manatee from Belize and infant-sized clogs from Brittany.

But the Masai woman from Kenya, pictured here, cured me of carvings and is the last one I will ever buy.

When we returned home from Africa I displayed the carving on the sideboard in our dining room alongside other souvenirs of our travels. One night while we were eating I glanced at the sideboard and noticed that the top of it seemed to be moving.

I got up to inspect and let out a scream that made Mike drop his fork. "Bugs! Bugs are crawling out of this carving!" The Masai woman was alive with tiny critters that were spilling from behind the piece of intact tree bark that had been shaped into a cloak that ran down her back. I picked her up and threw her into the kitchen sink while Mike ran a Pledge-dampened rag over the sideboard to collect the insects.

I ran hot water over the infested carving and watched scores of beasties fall out of it and disappear down the drain. Scalding and drowning the bugs was probably sufficient, but for good measure I ground them up in the garbage disposal. Then I took the piece outside and pried the bark cloak that housed the critters off with a butter knife.

I scrubbed the area that had been under the bark with a Brillo pad, then shot half a can of Raid ant killer all over the carving, steps I later repeated.

It took a few hours for the wet, Raid-infused carving to dry in the July sun, but I kept it outside on our concrete stoop for a few days, checking it often for signs of life.

When I was satisfied that my eradication methods had been successful I returned the cloak-less lady to her perch on the sideboard.

I do like her but admit to feeling a hint of the heebie jeebies when I look at her.

There's a world of wood carvings out there waiting for us tourists, suckers for traditional local crafts. You've been warned; some harbor stowaways.

Caveat emptor. And if you do buy, keep the Raid handy.

www.LoriHein.com

Our Lady of the Landslide

When we arrived at the airport gate to meet our fellow travelers for our tour to Tibet, my husband Mike and I rested our eyes on the only group there, an animated knot of senior citizens. We, then in our 20s, exchanged eyebrow raises. Our journey would include a 700-mile overland drive from Lhasa, Tibet to Kathmandu, Nepal across some of the planet’s harshest high-altitude real estate, landscape so challenging that the tour brochures contained warnings to consult your physician before booking. We trusted that everyone had.

We bonded for a few days in Hong Kong before heading to the roof of the world. Except for us and 30-year-old sheep farmers John and Wimpy, our cohorts were septa- and octogenarians. We connected with raven-haired Lois, who wore dresses, hose and heels nearly every day, even in the Himalayas; Morris and Christine, sweet South Dakotans; elf-like Clarence from Calais, Maine, who wore a peaceful smile but rarely spoke; and Bob, who brought yellow balloons that he blew up whenever kids were around. We were 32 in all, well-traveled and open to adventure.

Our first Tibet days brought magic: the hilltop Potala, once the palace of Dalai Lamas; temples lit with yak butter lamps and filled with chanting monks and earnest pilgrims; prayer wheels turning and prayer bells tinkling; yak skin boats and fields of golden mustard; aquamarine lakes and Earth’s mightiest mountains.

But as we moved farther from Lhasa and up onto the otherworldly central plateau, where nomads roamed, settlements sat a day apart and roads ran at 15,000 feet, things changed.

None of us had expected creature comforts. We were prepared for the dust, wind, rough roads, washouts, intense sun and altitude sickness that are the minimum price of admission for visitors to this astounding land. But we were unprepared for other costs that accrued as Lhasa began to feel like a distant memory, Kathmandu like a far-off dream. We had a tough in-between.

Food and water went first. When we passed through towns we’d stop at local restaurants and eat sausage, barley dumplings and acrid yak butter tea. Otherwise, we ate from the back of our microbuses, which had purportedly been packed with enough staples to last until Nepal. We enjoyed the spartan picnics until the day we realized that rationing had begun. The guides no longer opened the tailgate and let us take what we wanted. Instead, they’d place broken bread and a few cans of Spam, stewed tomatoes and mandarin oranges in a box, lay it on the ground, and invite us to divvy up the contents. The canned tomatoes and oranges were prized because they contained juice. Our water was almost gone, and for days we’d been traveling across Tibet not only hungry, but dehydrated. And, if you were Morris and Christine, who’d quietly mentioned they were diabetic, scared as well.

Leadership went next. We had two guides: the tour company’s American guide, whom I’ll call Bert, and Lu, the Beijing-based guide assigned by the Chinese government, which rules Tibet. Each wanted to be top dog. Instead of cooperating, they stopped communicating. We would pay dearly for that.

We’d been told before leaving home that a landslide had rendered impassable a stretch of road just beyond the Tibet-Nepal border crossing. Helicopters, we were told, would meet us and airlift us over the slide.

We arrived in the Tibetan border town that sits on a mountainside above the bridge linking Tibet and Nepal. Everyone hikes down, as there’s no road. We settled into a hotel at the lip of the border trail and slept.

In the morning we joined a parade of border-crossers. Queued up to exit China were traders with boxes strapped to their backs; laborers; local families; chiseled French couples in technical fabrics; sturdy Germans with walking sticks; backpacking Americans; a young solo woman with a beaming face and hair tucked under a white bandana; us, and the porters Bert had hired to carry Lois, Clarence and our baggage. Clarence, whom I feared would be catapulted from his porter’s back and into the ravine below, smiled the whole way down.

Mike and I reached the border in under an hour. It would be four hours before the last of our seniors, Morris and Christine, stumbled into Nepal. They were spent, unsteady and starving.

We turned to Bert, expecting to be led to helicopters. There were none. Bert was to have called the air station from Tibet to give our expected arrival time, a call that required dialing through Chinese channels. But because he and Lu weren’t speaking, he’d never asked for the help needed to make that call. Lu, who’d said goodbye up in Tibet, was on his way home to Beijing. We were in Tatopani, Nepal with Bert and no helicopters. It started to rain, and some of us started to cry.

After securing lodging in the grain lofts of a dozen Tatopani homes, Bert announced that in the morning we’d walk over the slide. Five miles. We scrounged food at a Tatopani shop, watched Bob blow balloons for Tatopani’s kids, then turned in, using our clothes as blankets. Mike and I shared a loft with Morris and Christine, who said a prayer in the dark.

Landslide day dawned hot, and before we’d tucked away the first rough, uphill mile, we knew that for this group, average age 68, coming out the other end whole was not a given. Clarence, Lois and a few others had arranged to have themselves carried over the slide on porters’ backs. I don’t know what they paid, but had it been the moon, it was a bargain.

Morris and Christine walked. Mike, John, Wimpy and I stayed with them. Hours passed, and things turned bad. Unforgiving sun, relentless up-and-down, no food or water. Morris and Christine began sitting a lot, and we did what little we could to keep them moving forward. After about two hours, Christine’s body quit. She fainted on the trail. Morris sat on a rock and wept.

“Hello. I’m Bea. I’m a nurse. Can I help?” From nowhere appeared the woman I’d seen the day before, the solo traveler in the white bandana. We told Bea about the diabetes, lack of food and tremendous recent stress. Bea comforted Morris, then set to reviving Christine and checking her vitals. Bea, a New Zealander who was in the Himalayas “just wandering,” produced a bag of granola and a canteen of water. She fed Christine and swabbed her head, and Christine’s color returned.

Bea said she’d “heard” it was still a four-hour hike from where we sat to the landslide’s end. “She can’t walk that,” said Bea. As if on cue, three Nepalese men in shorts and cloth shoes appeared. Bea, whose talents included fluency in Nepali, discerned that they were porters, and she hired them to carry Christine. While one carried Christine on his back, the others supported Morris, then they’d switch off.

When we finally came off the slide at the village of Bhirabaise, our group and half the villagers rushed to greet us. When we turned to thank Bea, she was gone.

www.LoriHein.com

Prisoner of Pokhara

Some people come to Pokhara, a small Nepalese city some 130 miles west of Kathmandu, for trekking adventures on and around the Annapurna massif, a broad and stunning grouping of Himalayan peaks that rise to about 27,000 feet.

Trekking wasn't on our itinerary when Mike and I visited Pokhara years ago, but we did have our share of adventure, much of it unpleasant. The nasty things that happened were tempered, though, by the killer view of full-in-your-face Himalayas. We spent a lot of our Pokhara time on the roof of our fleabag hotel -- a concrete cellblock called the Hotel Asia -- drinking bottles of Star Beer and gawking at the Annapurna range. I shot the photo above from the hotel roof.

Besides being a trekking gateway, Pokhara bills itself as a lakeside resort, with Phewa Lake touted as a recreational beauty spot. Following a hand-drawn map in my Lonely Planet guidebook, I dragged Mike on a long, hot walk from central Pokhara through mustard and wheat fields and apple orchards to Phewa, where I thought we might sit on the shore in the sun or even take a swim.

What we found when we reached Phewa was a sad, polluted body of water and a depressing collection of dilapidated shops. And there was nowhere to sit, as the "beach" was a garbage-strewn strip of mud. Deflated, we trudged back to our hotel and repaired to the roof to contemplate Annapurna and suck down a few more Stars.

The next day we rented bikes and tooled around the city and surrounding countryside. We had fun until the sun's UV rays, intense and unfiltered at this altitude, began to burn my un-sunblocked skin to a red crisp. My hands were screaming, and I couldn't hold onto the bike's handlebars, so Mike took off his socks, wet them in a stream and gave them to me to wear as gloves. When we got back to our gulag-with-a-view, Mike went to the roof alone: sun poisoning, complete with fever, chills and mild delirium, laid me low for the next 24 hours.

The morning of our departure we got up before dawn to catch the bus to Kathmandu. The daily bus, a first-come, first-served operation, was scheduled to leave Pokhara's main street at 8 AM, and we knew the seats for the 6-hour journey would fill fast, so we'd best be early. We washed and dressed, threw on our packs and headed to the Hotel Asia's front door.

Locked. From the outside. And the crude reception area was dark and unmanned. We darted around the place looking for another exit and found none. We called for staff, but they were home, sleeping, while their guests were locked inside the Hotel Asia.

A backpacker bound for the same bus came down the unlit steps to the ersatz lobby. When we told him we were locked in, we three panicked. The day's only bus to the capital -- and to our international flights home -- was filling up as we stood there. We were prisoners of Pokhara. For a half-hour, we ran up and down the concrete staircases, shouting for help and looking for any egress -- a window would do at this point. Finally, our fellow prisoner found a maintenance man asleep in a basement broom closet, and the maintenance man had a key to the front door. As he let us out, he shook his head like we were crazy, and I thought, Man! Had there been a fire in this dump last night we would have died. Who's crazy?

We made it to Main Street and found the parked Kathmandu-bound bus, seats still available. We paid and settled in, the scheduled 8 AM launch less than an hour away.

At 10 AM, there we still sat on Main Street as the driver worked to cram three times the number of passengers that vehicle was built to safely hold, obviously pocketing the fares of every passenger over the company-ordained and legal load limit. We were three or four to a seat, grandmas sitting in the aisle, men standing on the rubbery exit door steps. I couldn't breathe. Up top, on the roof, were bundles and bags, thin Nepali men, and a giant blond Swede. Before we ever set off from Pokhara, I was terrified. We would die, I was sure, on the high, Himalayan Prithvi Highway that connects Pokhara and Kathmandu. The bus was so overloaded and top-heavy that it swayed even while we were still and unmoving on Main Street. And we were about to spend half a day driving on a narrow, twisting, high-altitude road. I felt sick.

Sometime after 10, the 8 AM bus left Pokhara. The advertised 6-hour ride would become a 9-hour nightmare.

The bus lurched and groaned. The Swede vomited intermittently from the roof. About an hour in, we stopped to look down an embankment at the still-spinning wheels of a truck that had gone off the road, driver's condition unknown. Then we ran out of gas and sat on a hillock on the side of the road until a trucker stopped and siphoned enough petrol into our tank to get us to Mugling, the main stopover point on the Pokhara-Kathmandu highway.

After he filled the tank at a Mugling gas station, our driver announced we'd be stopping in Mugling for a half-hour.

I watched him make his way to a restaurant with a Star Beer sign and wished I were still a prisoner of Pokhara.

www.LoriHein.com

On Top of the World

Eureka. I fixed the blog. Took only a week of my life.

I hope you like the new design and the new sidebar that lets you easily cruise stories by clicking on a country name. (My work as blog doctor isn't quite finished -- I still have to restore the RSS feed buttons. A glass of cabernet might give me some ideas...)

But I'm feeling good. On top of the world, even. Which reminds me of a travel story.

That's the real top of the world, Mt. Everest, in the photo. It's not a bad photo, but it's not as good as the one that got away.

Mike and I were in Kathmandu, Nepal, and we had tickets for one of the Everest flight-seeing tours that take off, weather permitting, early each morning. The day we were scheduled to go, the Everest flights were cancelled due to extreme wind, and we were told to come back to the airport the next day to see if the weather and our luck would change.

When we arrived under thick, gray skies at 6 AM, no flights were leaving. The agent at the Royal Nepal Airlines counter told us to relax at an upstairs cafe from where we could see the giant departure board hanging on the terminal wall. "If your flight shows a departure time, come immediately to the gate. The plane will board and take off quickly." When the mountain gods open a clear window of opportunity, you make your move before they close it.

Just before 8 AM, we watched numbers drop into place in the slots next to our flight listing. We were going. In five minutes. We slapped some rupees on the table to pay for our Nescafe and hightailed it to the tarmac.

As we took off, the day lightened, the sun burned through the fog and sent it packing, and the sky turned a blue that was a cross between cobalt and cornflower. The next 90 minutes were utter majesty, and the heart-stopping grandeur of the Himalayas sitting right outside the window of our 14-seat prop plane canceled out the heart-stopping fear of being in a 14-seat prop plane with the Himalayas sitting right outside the window.

I burned through rolls of Fujichrome. These were Earth's highest mountains. I felt humbled by them. And blessed to lay my eyes on them. These were mountains I'd read about all my life in first, my grandmother's, and then my own, National Geographics. I knew their names and their snowy, stony profiles. I recognized and named them as we flew past: Gauri-Shankar; Melungtse; Cho-Oyu; Nuptse; Lotse; Ama Dablam; Makalu.

My Nikon purred, and I clicked off frame after frame. When Everest appeared, I shot what was left of the roll I was working and loaded a new one. Just after the roll was loaded, Mike and I were tapped to come up to the cockpit. Hard to believe, but Everest flight passengers are invited, by turns, to spend a minute or so in the cockpit with the pilot. The pilot names and discloses altitudes of the peaks filling his windshield, and, although he does this perhaps a hundred times a week as each open-mouthed tourist on all of his flights enters the tiny instrument-filled sanctum to gaze on the top of the world, he does it reverently. He loves and honors these mountains, sacred to both Buddhists and Hindus.

Mt. Everest straddles the Nepal-Tibet border, and in her people's cosmology, she's the Mother Goddess of the Universe, called Sagarmatha in Nepali, Chomolongma in Tibetan.

Everest was outside the window as we walked to the cockpit, and as we entered the pilot banked the plane to begin the turnaround back to Kathmandu. The flight route was up the Himalayan spine to Everest, then back down the spine to Kathmandu. As the pilot turned the plane, he flew straight toward Everest, and we were the ones in the cockpit at that incredible moment. Mt. Everest filled the windshield.

I raised the camera and clicked the shutter. Nothing. Frozen. Everest was full in my face, and my Nikon, which had been around the world with me several times over and had never failed me, was dead.

I looked out the windshield and sucked in every inch of Everest I could get my eyes on, hoping I could imprint her face and summit and every one of her cols and crevasses forever in my mind.

Our cockpit visit ended and we went back to our seats. I lifted the Nikon and pushed the button. Click. Frame advance. The camera performed like a star for the rest of our journey.

My Nikon and I have been together for 30 years. The only time she's said, No, I won't capture this for you, was when she came face to face with the Mother Goddess of the Universe.

Tatopani: Beautiful yellow things

We'd been traveling across the Tibetan plateau for over two weeks. Tibet, the rugged roof of the world, is one of Earth's most fascinating destinations, but travel there is physically punishing. Tibet fills you up. And saps you utterly.

Our journey was ending, and everyone in our small tour group looked forward to crossing the border into Nepal. Kathmandu held the promise of hot food and hot water, and we dreamed of these. We'd savored our trek across Tibet, but we were spent.

Tibet had dealt us a deck of broken roads, landslides, rabid dogs, power failures, lengthy document checks by Chinese officials, hotel water that ran for two hours a day (you had to guess which two...), monotonous canned meals of mandarin oranges and stewed tomatoes pulled from cardboard boxes stashed in the back of our bus -- we'd suck down every drop of liquid to relieve our dehydration and take in every available gram of vitamin C. We couldn't count the times we'd helped our driver, Pinzo, with his shock of thick black hair and huge, patient eyes, push our vehicle out of mudholes and swollen streams and flooded roadbeds, and we couldn't remember the last time we'd bathed.

At Zhangmu, Tibet we made our way down a mountainside to the Friendship Bridge that links China to Nepal at Kodari. The hike was too steep for a few older members of our group, so they hired nimble-footed porters to carry them across the border on their backs.

Our itinerary called for a bus to meet us in Kodari and take us to a site where helicopters would ferry us over a severe, wide landslide area, completely impassible by road. Once over the slide, another bus would meet the helicopters and take us to Kathmandu. That was the plan.

Plans go awry. Our minimally competent guides had spent most of their energy on the journey squabbling amongst themselves and had forgotten to call the helicopter dispatch office to announce our arrival in Nepal and confirm the helicopter pick-up. We sat on a mountaintop near the landslide area for three cold hours, until the sun began to inch below the hills, waiting for choppers that the guides delayed admitting were never coming. We would end up walking over the slide the next day, a grueling, waterless, foodless debacle that would take 10 hours.

But first we had to find somewhere to spend the night. We were driven up a steep, cliffside dirt road to Tatopani, Nepal and left in the middle of the town's dusty main strip. Trekkers on Nepal's Annapurna climbing circuit use Tatopani as a rest stop, and when we arrived there weren't any rooms left in the town's few basic lodges. We were filthy, frustrated, parched, hungry and exhausted, and there was no room for us at the inn.

As we began wandering the main street, cursing our luck and wondering what to do with ourselves, the village of Tatopani embraced us.

First, a handful of farmers, herders and merchants offered us space in the lofts of their wooden houses. They led us to their homes, rolled crude mats onto straw-covered plank floors, and told us we were welcome.

After we'd all laid claim to a mat somewhere, we gathered in the street. We hadn't eaten since morning, so we made plans to buy and share whatever we could find on the shelves of Tatopani's few tiny shops.

As we prepared to fan out to find food, a man called to us from the stone stoop of a narrow wooden house. He opened his front door and windows wide and invited us all inside. The man had transformed his home into a makeshift restaurant, just for us.

As he showed us to tables and benches he'd set up in his front room, his wife was cooking something hot and wonderful-smelling in a kettle that hung on a tripod over a wood fire in the kitchen. Steam that hung heavy with a rich, vegetable aroma billowed from the pot. A few minutes after we sat down, the woman began delivering platters of deep yellow skinless, boiled potatoes and bowls of salt to each table.

Warm and butter-colored, with a velvety mouthfeel. Coated with chunky salt. Eaten with dirt- and sweat-creased fingers under the smoke-blackened rafters of a tiny house that clung to a Himalayan hillside. The Tatopani potatoes were the finest meal we'd ever had.

Sated to our bones, we thanked the family, left some rupees to help cover the cost of what had been shared with us, and moved outside. At this point, everyone in the village knew about us and our unplanned overnight stay, and a group of children, some with tiny brothers or sisters in bundles on their backs, waited in the street to inspect us.

One of our fellow travelers reached into his pack and produced a bag of yellow balloons. As he blew them up, the children moved closer, and their cautious curiosity turned to grins and laughter. Within a few minutes, nearly every kid in Tatopani held a yellow balloon.


www.LoriHein.com

Happy Birthday, Dalai Lama

I wasn't planning to post today. I just finished an article on deadline and was looking forward to a day or two of writing absolutely nothing. And, OLN's Tour de France broadcast starts in 25 minutes.

But I just heard on the radio that today is the Dalai Lama's 71st birthday, and I couldn't let the day pass without wishing one of the planet's kindest souls and gentlest peacemakers a happy birthday.

Wherever we went in Lhasa and across Tibet, people would whisper, "Dalai Lama pic?" hoping we westerners had tucked a forbidden photo or two of His Holiness in our backpacks. We, the tourists, hadn't. We'd been ardently advised not to in the travel documents provided by our tour company. Attempt to enter China with photos or writings about or by the Dalai Lama and prepare to potentially spend a whole bunch of time in a cold cell was the message.

So we left our Dalai Lama pics at home. But our tour guide hadn't.

He stunned us when, at a monastery outside Lhasa, after a gaunt monk in a crimson robe peered around a painted pillar and uttered a hushed but hopeful "Dalai Lama pic?", he produced one and handed it to the monk. I shot a photo (which I'd inserted in this post then deleted, knowing this blog is read in China) of the guide giving the glorious contraband to the monk, and I held my breath from that moment until we crossed the Nepalese border two weeks later, knowing that if, for some reason, my film were seized and developed, the guide and I might go to jail. And the monk might die.

When we got to Kathmandu, I bought a bright red t-shirt with an embroidered Tibetan flag on its front, under the words, "FREE TIBET." We'd been in Kathmandu two days when I picked up a newspaper and read that, the very day we'd crossed the Tibetan-Nepalese border, two 20-something Americans had been arrested in Lhasa's Barkhor Square and imprisoned.

Their crime? Wearing "FREE TIBET" t-shirts.

www.LoriHein.com

Tatopani: Balloons and boiled potatoes

We'd been traveling across the Tibetan plateau for some two weeks. Tibet, the raw, rugged roof of the world, is one of Earth’s remotest and most exotic destinations, but travel there is physically punishing. Tibet fills you up and saps you utterly, all in the same moment. Our journey was nearing its end, and we all looked forward to crossing the border into Nepal. In Kathmandu there’d be hot food and hot water, and we dreamed of these. We had savored our trek across Tibet, but we were spent.

We’d had our share of broken roads and landslides. We’d helped Pinzo, our strapping driver with his thick shock of black hair and patient twinkle in his eyes, push our little bus out of countless mud holes and swollen streams. We’d dodged rabid dogs. We’d been eating cold stewed tomatoes straight from the can for days, sucking down the juice to relieve our dehydration and to take in every possible gram of vitamin C we could get our lips on. We couldn’t remember our last shower or change of clothes.

At Zhangmu, Tibet, we made our way down a mountainside to the Friendship Bridge that links China to Nepal at Kodari. The hike was too steep and grueling for a few older members of our group, so they hired nimble-footed porters to carry them across the border on their backs. Our itinerary called for a bus to meet us in Kodari and take us to a site where helicopters would ferry us over a wide, severe landslide area. Once over the slide, another bus would meet us and take us to Kathmandu. That was the plan.

But plans go awry. We had inept tour guides who squabbled amongst themselves and failed to consider that helicopters don’t just appear from thin air to pick up tourists. Somebody has to call them first. And nobody had. We’d end up walking over the slide the next day, a challenge that would take 10 hours.

But first, we had to find somewhere to spend the night. We were driven to Tatopani, Nepal and left in the middle of the town’s dirt main street. Trekkers on Nepal’s Annapurna circuit use Tatopani as a rest stop, and when we arrived there weren’t enough rooms in the town’s few basic lodges to house us. We were filthy, frustrated, hungry and exhausted, and there was no room for us at the inn.

Then something remarkable happened. The people of Tatopani opened their hearts and homes to us. A handful of farmers and herders and merchants found space for us in the lofts of their wooden houses. They rolled crude mats onto the straw-covered plank floors and told us we were welcome.

After we’d all laid claim to a mat somewhere, we gathered in the street. We hadn’t eaten since morning, so we made plans to buy and share whatever meager edibles were available on the dusty shelves of Tatopani’s few tiny stores.

But before we could start shopping, a man called to us from a narrow wooden house. He opened the door and windows as wide as they would go and invited us all inside. A woman stood over a kettle that hung on a tripod over a wood fire. Steam billowed from the pot, and something smelled fresh, hot and wonderful. The man had set up a few tables in his front room, and we all sat down. After a few minutes, the woman set a huge platter of boiled yellow potatoes on each table. And a bowl of salt. We had no plates or cutlery. Just fingers, beautiful, round, creamy, butter-colored potatoes, and salt. We picked up the hot, skinned potatoes, dipped them into the salt, and ate the best meal of our lives. I will never forget how those Tatopani potatoes tasted, coated with healthy chunks of salt, as they slid around my mouth in that dark, smoke-filled room turned into a makeshift restaurant just for us.

Sated to our bones, we thanked the family and moved outside. By now, everyone in the village knew of us and our unplanned overnight stay, and they smiled and nodded as they passed us in the street. A group of children, some with tiny brothers or sisters in bundles on their backs, stood studying us. One of our fellow travelers reached into his pack and pulled out a bag of yellow balloons. He began blowing them up, and the children moved closer. Within a few minutes, nearly every kid in Tatopani held a yellow balloon.

Some of the balloons got away and bounced down the dusty road. I watched them roll away, like giant, magical, yellow potatoes, and thought how lucky we were to be stranded in Tatopani.


Where shall we go next?

Border run: Zhangmu, Tibet to Kodari, Nepal

Why is Clarence from Calais, Maine smiling? Because 86-year-old Clarence, right, was the first person in our group to make it down the rocky, precipitous two-mile border crossing between Zhangmu, Tibet and Kodari, Nepal. Mike and I (that's Mike in the middle) came in a close second. We waited 4 1/2 hours for everyone in the group to negotiate the killer crossing. And how did 86-year-old Clarence beat us? He was carried by two Nepalese porters, who switched off. They hoisted Clarence onto their backs, piggyback style, and took off running down the cliffside. There was more than one switch-off that made me look away and pray. The porters hoisted Clarence onto their backs with so much power that I honestly thought he'd go flying over their heads and be hurtled into space. Clarence occasionally looked concerned, but generally had a ball. Just what you'd expect from a near-nonagenarian who vacations in Tibet... That's one of Clarence's porters on the left enjoying a well-deserved post-workout cigarette.