The Bucket List

Real time update today: we leave for Nepal in exactly a week. Next Wednesday!

Yep, Round 3 is nigh. We plan to spend roughly two months in Nepal, with short stays in Bangkok bookending our trip. Why Nepal?

Six years ago (almost to the week), we came up with our first version of our travel “bucket list”. We were staying in a small hotel outside Rocky Mountain National Park. Vacations are excellent times to dream, to break from routine and ask new questions. Travel was on our mind. We asked ourselves “where do we want to travel in our lifetimes?”, and then opened up an atlas and got out a blank sheet of paper. Thirty minutes later the paper was covered.

Next we broke the list into different categories, which came out along these lines:

1. Places we can go when we’re old. Countries with good infrastructure, tour groups, and good healthcare. This included most of the places we wanted to go in Western Europe and North America.
2. Places we can go with children.  With kids, access to healthcare is still important, but as we will be relatively young, we still can be a bit adventurous. Countries included in this category are Mexico, Costa Rica, Australia, New Zealand and most places in the Caribbean and South America.
3. Places we can’t get to when we’re old or with children. Let’s face it; our bodies aren’t going to work well forever. There are some places where robust health and good knees are necessary to travel. Nepal is one of those places. Many places in Asia and Africa fall into this category too.

So now is the time for Nepal. We plan to do at least one big trek while we are there, a route called the Annapurna Circuit. A New York Times travel writer hiked it last year, and his article is (we hope!) a close approximation of what we will experience. We expect the trek will take us 3-4 weeks, which is a little longer than the 17-21 day estimate given in our guidebook.

We plan to go slow, take days off to acclimatize, and explore many of the scenic side hikes along the way. There’s no gold star for finishing fast; the joy lies in the journey. A traveler once asked if it is possible to complete the Annapurna Circuit in 14 days. The reply: it is also possible to complete it in 40 days.

Before and after our trek, we plan to visit other parts of Nepal.  We hope to see Buddha’s birthplace (the small town of Lumbini), as well as the areas around Pokhara and Kathmandu. We are also exploring volunteer opportunities. No plans to visit Everest Base Camp, or do anything Everest related except gaze appreciatively from a distance.

We still have adventures we want to share from our summer trip – Istanbul! Slovenia! Salzburg! Vienna! Amsterdam!!! UK! And we will. We’ve noticed that our motivation to keep up our blog wanes somewhat when we are home. So many fun distractions, like visiting with friends and family and catching up on movies (I finally saw Toy Story for the first time last night).

And here is a photo of the original travel bucket list…

Oh, the places we'll go...

…to be continued!