I stumbled across this video this morning and it got me thinking about one of the questions my wife and I were asked at various times, as we travelled across Turkey, Greece, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Mongolia and Nepal in the last 7-months. The question was this:
“Well, how do you do that?” (As in, travel for so long?).
When I was first asked this, I was a bit taken back because the answer was so obvious to me. You work, save more money than you spend and then book your plane tickets.
At its core, this questions is about money. And while I agree having a certain amount of money is important to meeting one’s basic needs of shelter, clothing and food, beyond that, I view money as a tool to help me do what I want to do in this life.
One of those things was doing a multi-month trip travelling overland across a big chunk of the world.
Once I knew that, the rest was easy.
Flew from the mountain airport of Lukla to Kathmandu yesterday morning. At the same time, a plane carrying 19 people took off from Kathmandu bound for Lukla. That plane hit a bird on take off and despite the best efforts of the pilots, crashed, killing all on board.
Hearing the news as we waited for our flight out of Lukla, was incredibly sobering news after an amazing three weeks in the Everest region.
A sad, sad day.
RIP trekkers and flight crew.
After making the hop from Mongolia to Kathmandu Nepal (via Seoul), I’m off to Lukla and the Three Passes trek in and around the Everest region early Friday morning.
That means no posts until the 30th September 2012.
In the mean time, below are some great photos and reading relating to Everest. Well worth a look.
Field Test: On Everest with National Geographic. Click on the photo to view the site.
