They’ll have you thinking you have to pay for the fancy tours going into Chitwan National Park. To get the guides and ride the elephants to see the one horned rhinoceros(rhinoceri?).  To stay in the all inclusive resorts with river bank sunset views. This can all feel discouraging and well, if you’re like us –…

Some funny things about India, and I use the word funny in the loosest of ways: 1) The roads are crazy (duh) but here’s why:  the goal for every driver is to go as fast as possible. To once again liken it to a cyclocross race, it’s similar to being a pretty fast guy in…

Pokhara.  The city that Nepal tourism loves touting as the most beautiful city in the country, with its lakeside setting and snow-capped mountain backdrop.  But after 4 days of hiking through the country, the full immersion experience back into tourist central was a shock to the system.  And with full on haze as the flavor…

Maybe it was the stories of “not uncommon” bus crashes, reinforced by a flamboyant Thai tourist’s tale of buses plunging dramatically and irrecoverably off cliffs wth goats tied barbarically to roofs by no more than their ankles. Or maybe it was our new found love of hiking. We had, after all, walked 20 miles over…

It’s nice to be off the tourist trail.  We’ve been going back and forth between tourist heavy towns and cities, and places that haven’t had a westerner since the Y2K crisis gripped the world. There’s no question that we prefer the latter.  However, as we found on the first day of the bike tour, not…