Well, I’m definitely not in Kansas anymore… Greetings from what may as well be Tibet…minus the actual border (and all the bureaucracy associated with it)! I’m in a beautiful little city called Kangding (pronounced kawng-deeng), my first stop on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway, which eventually leads all the way to Lhasa (though I hear that at […]
Tag: Asia 2010
Meet Dafo. He’s just a regular, ordinary, guy. Don’t tell anyone, but I think he’s just a little bit tall. And by tall, I mean he’s kind of a giant. After all, he’s only 71 meters or 233 feet tall! Dafo is the claim to fame of Leshan, a smallish city a couple of hours […]
Remember Bhutan’s Tiger’s Nest Monastery? Yeah…that was a warm-up for what I accomplished over the past two days… China has four Buddhist peaks dating back to the 7th Century, when Buddhism first arrived in this country. One of the more famous, Emei Shan (Mount Emei), is located a couple of hours south of Chengdu, so […]
Ah, China. Though I left your borders a month ago, it feels as if I never left, even down to the chilly temperatures that we are experiencing here in Chengdu, the capital of the famed Sichaun province. From the stark language barrier to the only TV option being the state run media and Mao’s mini […]
What if you could take the sheer serenity of a capital city like Vientiane and add a wee bit of Bangkok’s spice (minus the sheer chaos of it all) and you end up with a city like Kuala Lumpur. For a teeming metropolis, it feels incredibly calm and laid back, a sheer contrast from the […]
Bangkok is a great city. I’ll just go right out and say that. I know that sounds like quite a statement to make, but I’m not the only one who thinks so! Practically my entire family agrees! This place can be amazingly overwhelming (even more so than New York) but it’s just brimming with character […]
There is one picture that is immediately identifiable with Bhutan. A Buddhist temple perched on the edge of a sheer cliff. This is the Taktsang Monastary, more commonly known as the “Tiger’s Nest.” It is the holiest site in Bhutan and a place of pilgrimage for many Mahayana Buddhists, as well as a must on […]
Would you believe me if I told you I had spotted the most bizarre creature in the world? Bhutan is a wonderful country for spotting rare and endangered wildlife. We had already seen plenty of bird and monkey species throughout our trip, but had yet to spot Bhutan’s national animal, a unique creature called the […]