Update: Stay tuned.
It’s true, I haven’t written in quite some time. Over a year, in fact. I drew up maps after I left Korea, following longtime dreams to travel on my own for an extended time. I flew from Seoul to Beijing with the intent to take trains across China, through Tibet, take a jeep to the border of Nepal, jump a bus to Kathmandu, work my way to India and train my way down the subcontinent to the very southernmost tip of India, where I would take a ferry to Sri Lanka and visit the tea fields by train before flying home for Christmas.
Not everything happened according to plan. I was foiled in Tibet and ended up spending the entire week in Lhasa city before flying, expensively and without much of an alternative, to Kathmandu. I flew over Mount Everest instead of visiting base camp by jeep. The pilot announced its presence as we flew over, and all the passengers stood up and rushed to the right side of the plane to peer through the tiny row of windows at the snowy peaks below us.
I volunteered at an orphanage in Pokhara, the experience both a blessing and a curse. I trekked to Annapurna base camp with a group of girls I was incredibly blessed to meet; their laughter, excitement, and optimism gave me the energy to continue traveling alone. I traveled to Lumbini, the birthplace of Lord Buddha, and walked through the jungle in Chitwan, searching for tigers but finding only footprints. I got e-coli in Kathmandu during a home stay in the house of a grandmother I met at a bus stop; I rode on the back of a motorcycle to the hospital, sick beyond belief, a week after neglecting to go to the doctor. I took pills and got better, shat in regulation, began to eat food other than oatmeal, bananas, and buffalo milk.
I crossed the border between Nepal and India in an exhausted blur. I rode trains through India, indulged in sweets in Calcutta, walked among the pyres in Varanasi, cried at the entrance of the Taj Mahal in Agra. I drank the most amazing lassi in Jaipur, met friends in Bangalore, sat with the cows on the beach in Gokarna, amazed at the starfish in the sand.
I flew to Sri Lanka, and in my week there did nothing but sit on the beach, ride motorbikes, eat mangos, make friends. I flew home for Christmas and slept through most of it, culture shocked and jet-lagged and exhausted. I hibernated for three months and visited friends across the states, in Madison, Wisconsin; Bozeman, Montana; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Pittsburgh, Boston, New York. I finally got a job, three of them, and haven’t stopped working since.
And now, it is almost time to leave again. My feet are itching, my brain whirring, my heart thumping in my chest.
