I have had the good fortune to travel all over the world—for both business and pleasure, not that those are mutually exclusive. This blog is about my unique experiences around the globe. It is not intended as a paean to the wonders of the locales themselves, as there already exist volumes that more than do justice to the magnificence of virtually every corner of this earth. Here, I simply recount small, personal moments of surprise, embarrassment, stupidity, excitement, fear, heroics, and other stuff like that.
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Delhi, India…March 1996. I have always been fascinated by India. Yet, whenever that country comes up in conversation, it is usually met with negative comments about overcrowding, lack of cleanliness or, in more recent times, frustration that the local cable company’s customer service representatives all seem to live there. None of that was on my mind in the spring of 1996 when Sande and I, and two female friends, set off on one of the most fascinating holidays of our lives, at the heart of which was ten days in neighboring Nepal, featuring Himalayan mountain trekking, white water rafting, and the jungle tracking of rhinos and tigers while perched safely (if bumpily) atop an elephant’s back. That Nepalese adventure, and Nepal’s magnificent capital city of Kathmandu, which still houses the “Living Goddess” and its fair share of ‘60s hippies, was indeed extraordinary, but Delhi was its gateway and our days there were no less memorable. While unequivocally reinforcing the negative perceptions of so many, it only reinvigorated the allure of this very foreign land to me personally. »Read More