Wide-Eyed Wanderer Adventures

Yumthang Valley - North Sikkim, India Dear Friends,  Happy Holidays - in advance! I'm heading off for the Himalayan glaciers [the sacred Gokyo Lakes trek near Everest], and it's unlikely there's wi-fi there ;O) So..... May this year wake up new dreams in you, may it blow off the dust from the old ones and bring them to life. May it have more laughs and vivid moments - big and small - than ever before. May it be filled with unreasonable joy and may lots of love pour in from all kinds of surprise directions. May new horizons open up where none were seen before....may the gods of small things sprinkle each calendar page with wonder and beauty!  Thank you for being in my life - you make it so much brighter! Yumthang Valley

Pemayagtse Prayer flags leading up to Pemayangtse that were installed to honour those who perished in the world tragedies such as 9/11, Holocaust and Cambodian genocide Two miles of an enchanted evergreen forest – of those Himalanyan pines with long needles and trunks tall as the sky – and one reaches a curvy road lined with white and light blue prayer flags. It's they and the crickets that sing with the wind, making a frame for the perfect silence. That's exactly what the mind pictures as the ideal location for a monastery. So one enters the magestic Pemayagtse. “Pema” is another way of saying “Padmasambhava” [aka “Guru Rinpoche,” along with a few handfulls of other synonyms, together with the names for his 8 manifestations/incarnations – he is Sikkim's most beloved Boddhisattva, and is credited with bringing Buddhism to Tibet in the 7 th century A.D.]. Guru Rinpoche Everything about this place is tranquil. The wood-carved monk dormitories, the little lawn b...

10-24-2011 Pelling, Sikkim, India First sight upon rolling over in the morning - can you believe it? Today I've managed to extract myself from the cozy Darjeeling wormhole – the wee-bit over a month there has felt more like a day. The place has grown on me under the auspices of the great Kangchengzonga and in the family warmth of the wooden Aliment hotel with its yummilicious multilingual library [where I've found nearly all the books of Paolo Coelho and even "The Lost Horizon"! I guess, the folks who travel to this area tend to be into that bend of work]. But today I woke up and the Great Himalayas beckoned to me from 100 km away. So, I went in the most direct route – through the steep canyons and over the mountain rivers - all of 5 hours to Pelling in the Shangri-La-like state of Sikkim [it's that little “nipple” that India pokes out between Nepal – West, Bhutan – East and Tibet – North]. It is the very state where but a month ago the earth crust convu...

10-7-2011 Darjeeling, India Back into the Blue After 3 months of longing and never really adjusting to the sweltering heat of Indonesia, Malaysia and Burma, I have finally returned to the velvety, cool emerald hills of India. I knew, I had to go back to the Himalayas. So, the choice has naturally lay between Sikkim/Darjeeling and Ladak/Kashmir. Some friendly Kashmiris I met in Burma suggested that it would be snowing soon in their home – especially, if I desired to be in places higher up, like Leh. So, I busted out of Burma 1 week before my visa expired [a first on this journey – and it is a fair indication of how badly and I wanted to get out of the military state and into the ancient vibes of the Himalayas], I flew from Yangon to Kolkata and without much ado caught a sleeper train to NJP. From there, many a jeep was willing to make the 3 hour ascent to the tea land of Darjeeling. Normally, I found out, there is also a beautiful train ride on the famed Darjeeling-Himalayan Rai...