Back to Barbados for NYE

We are back for 10 days at our rental house in Fitts Village, Barbados!!  And it's all spruced up for Xmas and New Years!!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top 8 pictures of my Bhutan/Nepal trip

In case you don't have the 57 hours required to browse through ALL the pics from my trip, I have assembled my Top 8 favorite pictures here..

1. Tigers Nest Monastery
2. Pho Chhu River with Punakha Dzong in the background
3. Khamsum Yulley Monastery (photo courtesy of Rich)
4. Looking down the Pho Chhu from Khamsum monastery
5. Young monks in training in Enduchholing at the residential palace of Sir Ugen Wangchuk the First King of Bhutan
6. Lower Mangde Chhu River
7. Everest
8. Himalayas above the clouds dwarfing the giants peaks below

 

 

 

JFK or bust!

14 hours Abu Dhabi to JFK!  At least I have food, movies (I watched Guardians of the Galaxy THREE times on the plane, becuase YES it is that good!!!) and leg room!

 

Abu Dhabi to JFK

After a quick stop in the Abu Dhabi lounge at 2 am to grab some food and fuzzy waters for the plane.  We're all settled in for the long haul stateside.

Kathmandu airport

Leg 1 of 4 on the way home!  Kathmandu to Abu Dhabi.

Signs of Kathmandu

These signs are just great.   Library or Money Laundering?  Partying everyday?  Extreme metal?  Yes, please!

Kathmandu traffic

We took a little walking tour of Kathmandu from our hotel.  The amount of people and vehicles and traffic was insane.  And these pictures are pretty "mild" traffic compared to what we saw in other parts of the city.

Hotel in Kathmandu

The last stop of our trip was 24 hours in Kathmandu.  Here is the pile of luggage the 5 of us have been dragging around the Himalays for 3 weeks - I don't think we did too bad on the packing considering the amount of activities we had to pack for!

Read the top of the coffee menu - "Beauty has a teste" -  poor beauty, it has balls :)

Rafting Bhote Koshi

We started rafting about a 20 minute drive down from the landslide.  Our guides said the river has definitely changed since the landside.  Our last rafting adventure for the trip was a pretty mellow river with a few exciting waves.

Sunkoshi landslide

So about an hour drive from the Last Resort there is a huge landslide that is not yet passable by vehicle.. So we had to get out of one car, walk our stuff about 20 minutes across the landslide where we met another car to drive us the rest of the way to Kathmandu.

To read more about the landslide...
http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2014/09/23/sunkoshi-landslide-nepal-continuous-disaster/

Nearly 2 kilometers of hillside collapsed in rugged northern Nepal at 02:36 local time on August 2 causing a massive landslide which buried dozens of homes in the village of Jure and killed 156 people. Some 5.5 million cubic meters (194 million cubic feet) of rock and debris tumbled down into the Sunkohsi (Sunkosi) River valley.
But this was just the beginning of the disaster. The landslide blocked the Sunkoshi River and buried the Araniko Highway. For nine hours after the slide, a gauging station downstream showed the Sunkoshi’s flow had stopped. Water backed up behind a 55-meter (180-foot) tall earthen dam, creating an ever-growing lake that submerged dozens of houses and a hydropower substation.
According to media reports, the loss of the power station led to a 10 percent decrease in Nepal’s electricity generating capacity, causing outages in the capital and elsewhere in the country.

Sunkoshi landslide

The pool that has formed behind the landslide.. and Dan carrying the "blue beast".