The Further Adventures of Lauren - Nepal

Lauren’s flight to Nepal left on the Fourth of July.

It’s a long way from Istanbul to Kathmandu, which sounds like the first line of a Cat Stevens song but is an actual geographic fact, so she didn’t arrive there until the following day. Although when exactly that happened is a bit of a puzzle to figure out since while Turkey’s time zone is eight hours ahead of Wisconsin and therefore fairly easy to calculate, for some reason Nepal’s time zone is ten hours and forty-five minutes ahead of Wisconsin which makes no sense whatsoever. I suppose the Nepalese are fine with and it is their time zone after all, but while Lauren was in Nepal we just rounded it to eleven hours and figured we’d be close enough.

It's not like we needed to be that exact anyway.

Her flight required an eight-hour layover in Dubai – or, as it turned out, the neighboring emirate of Sharjah – and that was fine except that for some reason Lauren’s phone insisted she was in Iran for the whole time and you look at that and think … maybe? Did the flight get diverted for some reason? Did international politics get stupider than usual and I missed something? But no, it’s just technology being technology and eventually she was off on the next flight.

Also, all flights on Air Arabia start with a travel prayer, which is an interesting thing to know.

Lauren spent her first day or so in Kathmandu on her own, just exploring the place and generally having a good time in a new city. There’s a lot to see there.

The larger plan for this part of Lauren’s travels was that our British friend Ginny – who is Lauren’s age – would fly out to join her there, and then they’d go up to the Annapurnas for an extended hike around the mountains together. They’d found a tour guide for the journey since you’re not allowed to do this sort of thing without one anymore and you wouldn’t want to anyway because the reason you’re not allowed to do this without a tour guide is that the Nepalese government got tired of cleaning the bodies of tourists off their mountains and now they want you to have at least one person in your party that they know for sure knows what they’re doing out there so they can make sure people will get back safely. And once safely off the mountains Lauren and Ginny would go back to Kathmandu and be joined by our friend Richard, Ginny’s dad, for a few days before everyone split off in different directions.

It has to be said that this plan worked out very well.

Lauren and Ginny spent a day gearing up for hiking around the mountains, which is apparently a fairly easy thing to do in Kathmandu. A lot of tourists come out to Nepal with all sorts of expensive gear that they use just once and then decide they don’t want to go to the expense and trouble of schlepping back home so they sell it to second-hand shops. You can get some great bargains on things if you’re willing to do a bit of exploring.

It has to be said that there was a bit of nervousness regarding tour guide companies and mountains, since Lauren and Arden had had a fairly unhappy experience with the one they’d found to take them up a mountain in Guatemala in 2024 – a very long story that Lauren wisely waited until after she was safely back in the US to tell us – but this one worked out really well. The company that Lauren and Ginny hired is called Travel Maker South Asia, and if you ever find yourself in Kathmandu looking for a guide to take you up into the mountains we can recommend them wholeheartedly. The guide who went with them called himself Uncle and took very good care of them, to the point of bringing along fruit from the lower altitudes to share with them. They even made a little video where they stitched together a pile of photos from the hike and set it to music, which was really kind of cool to see.

Uncle is the guy on the left, below.

It was good that it worked out so well, because they spent over a week together on this trip in some pretty close quarters and it would have been fairly uncomfortable otherwise.

It was just the three of them on this hike – Lauren, Ginny, and Uncle – mostly because it was monsoon season and the tourist crowds tend to thin out around then. The whole time they were out and about in the mountains they saw maybe three other hikers out there with them, in fact. So if you’re not a fan of crowds, monsoon season is your jam.

Their first task was to drive from Kathmandu to Chame, a journey of about ten hours according to the itinerary they gave her. From there they’d slowly hike around the Annapurnas – going up but not summiting them as the Annapurnas are statistically the most dangerous mountains in the world with about a 30% fatality rate among climbers. The plan was to go to Pisang, Manang, Yak Kharka, and Thorong Phedi, with the ultimate goal of crossing the Thorong La Pass and then working their way slowly back down. There’d be some acclimatization time built into this schedule as well to get used to the altitude, since by the time they got to the Thorong La Pass they’d be at 5416 meters elevation and doing that in a straight shot would have required some actual training. 5416 meters is nearly 18,000 feet in Bald Eagle Units, and that’s about as high as the travel insurance would cover.

The dividing line for travel insurance, by the way, is carabiners. They ask if you are going to need them, and if you say yes then your rates go up. There would be no carabiners on this trip.

It was a long hike, but fortunately the monsoons mostly stayed away while they were there. It did give them some interesting cloud cover, and they saw a lot of really gorgeous scenery out there in the mountains. 

In the photo below you can almost see Pisang peak, which is obscured by the clouds. But you can see Lauren clearly and that’s a very nice thing.

Not everything was pure nature, though. People build things there, and that’s worth seeing too.

Some of the things that people build are bridges, which you need to have in a place as mountainous as Nepal. And if you have bridges, chances are you will need to cross those bridges when you get to them. This can be scenic. Yes, scenic is a good word. We’ll stick with that.

Along the way they stayed in tea houses, which were fairly basic in most ways but which seemed to be comfortable if often cold. When you’re that high up in the mountains it doesn’t matter that it’s July in the northern hemisphere – it’s cold. The people they met in those tea houses were friendly, and the tea houses themselves were nestled in some of the most beautiful places on earth.

Lauren is pretty fit – she goes to the gym regularly and walks pretty much everywhere on campus the way college students do – but Ginny runs ultramarathons though mountains and sometimes it was hard to keep up with her on these hikes.

Uncle took good care of them.

After much hiking and more than a few tea houses, they made it up to the Thorong La Pass. The Travel Maker people gave them certificates for this accomplishment when they got back down and really, that feels right. It’s quite an accomplishment, and it’s good to recognize that.

From there it was a long hike back down to Chame, but it went smoothly.

When you’re on a journey like this you have to keep yourself amused however you can, and they found ways to do that as well.

My favorite example of this, though, was when they were at one of the tea houses, relaxing and browsing the web as one does when there is actually an internet connection, and found a very old photo of the two of them on Dartmoor in England from the blog archives here – they’re both about ten years old in the top photo below – and decided to recreate it. And that’s why I write these posts, so the stories get remembered and, perhaps obliquely, relived. 

It has to be said that Lauren was not very happy in that older picture – Dartmoor is very wet, which meant that by the time we got to this point so were her feet – but she persevered, and one dryer load later all was well again. Lauren was much happier in the mountains of Nepal, but you can’t pass up a photo opportunity like that, really.

The original itinerary that Lauren got had them flying back to Kathmandu once they got back down to Chame, but in the end they drove because, as Lauren pointed out, during the monsoon season the flight path from Chame to Kathmandu is one of the most dangerous in the world and they just weren’t in that much of a hurry anyway.

There were cows along the way, which is just music to a Wisconsinite’s ears.

They met Richard in Kathmandu and he treated them to an actual hotel instead of the hostels and tea houses they’d been staying in. Lauren called us while she was there and gave us a brief video tour of the place, noting the beds and western-style bathrooms as particularly luxurious. The three of them had a good time together from what we heard, and we really do need to get back to England to visit Richard, Ginny, and Magnus again. Soon!

Eventually the Brits would return back to the UK, but Lauren would press on with her adventure.

Lauren sent us a lot of photos from her time in Nepal and we loved seeing them. It’s a gorgeous place, and she was very happy there, and there is no better combination of things you can see in photographs if you’re a parent. I think my favorites were these two, because they’re just beautiful photographs in every way. These are the ones I’d show people when they asked how she was doing. It is a strange and lovely thing as a parent to see your child half a world away having marvelous adventures when you remember them being so little even though that was a very long time ago, and when I’d look at these pictures I could see the young kid she once was and the adult she is now. I think we’ll call that a win.

The Further Adventures of Lauren - Sweden and Turkey

Lauren’s summer travels got off to a fairly slow start, all things considered, mostly because her graduate program got off to a surprisingly quick one. She had about a week and a half between her last class as an undergraduate and her first class as a graduate student, and while that class was only a few weeks long it was enough to keep her from accompanying us to Florence and Porto.

Sweden, however, was within range.

She figured out a flight from Chicago to Stockholm that would arrive on June 18, at more or less the same time as our flight from Porto, on the theory that we could meet up in the airport and then take the train together from there to Huddinge where our friends live. They’d pick us all up at the station, and then we would spend the week hanging out in the Stockholm area together.

Unfortunately nobody told the airline about this, and they were determined to keep Lauren away. It took five separate rebookings and a short layover in Amsterdam that didn’t appear on her original itinerary to get it all to work out but in the end she got there a few hours ahead of us and we met her in Huddinge. Kim and I were not really in a position to be of much help during most of this as we were traveling ourselves, so it all fell on Lauren to get that straightened out. The fact that she did so was a pretty good sign, I thought. If she could handle that right off the bat on her own, she’d probably be good to handle the rest of her trip.

I’m not going to go into our time in Sweden since I’ve already covered that pretty extensively in this space. We had a lovely time together, though given that the rest of her plans took her into Asia we were somewhat concerned by the reckless actions of the US government concerning Iran during that time and what that might mean for American travelers – or any travelers, really – who had to pass through that region of the world on their way to somewhere else. In the end things calmed down, but it was an unnecessary complication and just one more bit of infuriating nonsense to be laid at the feet of the current regime here in the US. There are a lot of those.

Also, sometimes it takes a few tries to get the eSims to work properly, because they’re technology.

Our flights out of Sweden were close enough together that Mats was able to drive us to the airport in one trip early on June 25. Our flight left a couple of hours before Lauren’s, so we said our goodbyes in the airport and wished each other well.

It’s something like 4:30 in the morning in that photo, but we managed to look pretty cheerful for all that.

Kim and I flew back to Wisconsin, an uneventful flight that seemed to last for days, and we were soon walking back into our own home to resume our regularly scheduled lives already in progress.

Lauren, on the other hand, was headed to Riga (Latvia), where she would catch a connecting flight to Istanbul, and – perhaps surprisingly enough, given the kaleidoscope of moving pieces that was her flight to Sweden – that worked out pretty well. The plan was that in Istanbul she would meet up with Arden, who was flying in from Madrid where she’d been teaching English for a year or so, and they would explore the city for a few days before flying down to Antalya on the southern coast of Turkey where the Turks go to the beach, as opposed to the western coast of the country where most of the tourists go to the beach. In early June when Kim and I were in Frankfurt waiting for our third and final connecting flight to Florence I ended up chatting with a Turkish man at the gate and he was immensely pleased that Lauren would get outside of Istanbul to visit Antalya. He was very proud of his country and wished her well there, and it was a very nice conversation to have.

Lauren and Arden spent a few days knocking about Istanbul and generally having a good time, from what I could tell. It’s a lovely place according to the pictures they posted.

It is also, as any proper city should be, full of cats.

Lauren and Arden didn’t keep us posted on everything they did because that would have been absurd, but we did get to hear some of the highlights. At one point they went to a traditional hammam for a spa day and enjoyed that very much.

And they visited the Blue Mosque.

They met some nice people in the hostel where they stayed and enjoyed a fair amount of good food, though this was the only place in their travels this summer where they ended up with food poisoning – a situation that Lauren blamed squarely on a lapse of judgement that led her to eat shawarma from a street vendor at 4am after a long night out. “That meat had probably been sitting there for ten hours,” she told me later, and in retrospect it probably wasn’t much of a surprise that it turned out the way it did. But lesson learned, and with a couple days of hamburgers and taking it easy she was back in traveler mode, ready to take on the city.

For the most part, though, Istanbul treated them well.

They spent about five days in Istanbul before flying down to Antalya. One of the things that really surprised me about all of this was just how inexpensive airfares are once you get outside of the United States. I don’t know how much this particular flight cost, but I do know that all of the flights that were on the original plan – five countries and ten regions – came to about same as the cost of Lauren’s flight back to the US at the end of it. Some of them were as little as $30. You can get a long way in this world if you are willing to look around a bit.

Antalya is another lovely city, to go by the photos I saw. 

The beaches there are lovely. Lauren reported that the water there was very salty even for seawater, and while that made it hard on the skin after a while it also made it pretty easy to float so there’s that as well.

And, like Istanbul, it is a city of cats, most of them three-dimensional but not all. Either this is something that is generally true of Turkey or Lauren is just generally drawn to cats, though honestly it could be both. Kitties!

There was also a rafting trip that they enjoyed.

At one point they decided to get out of Antalya and visit the thermal pools at Pamukkale, about a three-hour drive away. I know nothing about this place other than what I looked up online, but it is just astonishingly gorgeous in a brightly austere sort of way.

Not everything was glorious in Antalya. Staying in hostels was generally a good experience for Lauren on several different continents. There is a real sense of community there and often people find each other in different hostels across a trip. You can sometimes get good food there. And they’re phenomenally inexpensive – as little as $6/night in some places. On the other hand, one of the hostels that Lauren and Arden stayed at in Antalya had bedbugs, which they discovered the night that Arden was scheduled to leave. They did a thorough cleaning of their stuff and the hostel took steps to fix the problem – “We got moved to a room that just got gas chambered,” Lauren reported to us later – but Lauren did switch to a different hostel after that.

There was an odd consequence of that, though. While the room was being fumigated Lauren did some laundry so her stuff wouldn’t carry the bedbugs to the next place. She then set it all out on the roof to dry and left for as long as she could, hanging out in various sociable establishments until about 6am to avoid the bedbugs and the gases. But when she got back she discovered that most of her underwear was missing. She moved to a different hostel a few hours later and then left the next day so she didn’t really have time to replace it before she got to her next country and it took a while to do that even then, so there were a lot of very small loads of laundry during that part of the trip. There are some hazards of travel that the guidebooks don’t mention but which, on reflection, perhaps they should.

So there were a few bumps, but Turkey mostly treated them well.

Lauren was originally scheduled to fly back to Istanbul for a day or two after Antalya but here is where the first of the schedule changes happened – a minor one compared to the ones that came later, but good practice. It’s very easy to rebook hostels – apparently you don’t really need a reservation at all for most of them – and moving flights around outside of the US is much less complicated (and since they’re also much less expensive, the penalty for skipping a flight and booking an entirely new one is that much less as well). So rather than spend time in Istanbul again she simply extended her time in Antalya and departed from there.

Of course her flight went through Istanbul, so there you go.

Arden’s plan was to go back to Madrid, where she’d been living and working for a year, pack up her apartment and then return to the US. We will see her again on these travels, though.

Lauren’s plan was to head east.