After weeks of agonizing about Tibet travel permits, group tours, inflated fees and overbooked trains, I made the healthy decision to remove the plateau from my itinerary. A flight to Kathmandu cost me a fraction of the cost to make the trip overland, and will afford me more time in cheaper destinations (read: India). This will, hopefully, free me from the anxiety of scraping the bottom of the bank account barrel by the time my trip reaches its final leg in costly Europe.
So here I am in scenic Nepal, gateway to the Indian subcontinent, having a fairly easy time figuring out my visa and travel arrangements onward to Delhi and then Rishikesh. There, I'll meet a friend at a yoga ashram and try my hand (legs?) at the ancient art for a few days and figure out my next moves. Fifteen days after that, I'll be on a flight to Cairo.
It turns out I was a little naive to think that most of this epic westward journey would be doable overland. If I had a little more time and a lot more cash, I wouldn't think twice about hiring out a Land Rover and hauling around Tibet, or paying for the 24-hour guide/escort necessary for a U.S. citizen to get an Iranian tourist visa, or chartering an amphibious vehicle to navigate Pakistan's unfortunate Swat valley. For now, those will have to sit on the back burner.
But I take solace in the thought that in 2006 I was sitting in a cramped office in a double-wide trailer-office in Florida listening to the slow, monotonous progress of the scanner copying ancient slide photographs into a computer database. It was then that I would turn to the BBC news website to fantasize of visiting far off lands. I wondered glumly if the Nepal Maoist insurgent situation would calm down to the point that tourism could resume. And now, four short years later, I'm blogging from Kathmandu with a bellyfull of lentil soup and curry.
And my book exchange luck is holding up, to boot.
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