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How to: spending a weekend in Thimphu, Bhutan - http://travel.paintedstork.com/blog/2012/09/spending-weekend-thimphu-bhutan.html
"Perhaps the only city that I am very familiar with, besides the place where I live, is Thmphu. And it is not because I have spent a lot of time there, but because it is a place small enough that in a few days, you can discover the city end-to-end. Here is your quick guide to spending two days in Thimphu..."
"Perhaps the only city that I am very familiar with, besides the place where I live, is Thmphu. And it is not because I have spent a lot of time there, but because it is a place small enough that in a few days, you can discover the city end-to-end. Here is your quick guide to spending two days in Thimphu..."
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Spiti Valley – days of walking high in the mountains and staying in the villages - http://travel.paintedstork.com/blog/2012/09/spiti-valley-mountains-villages.html
"It is not easy to convince myself that people actually live in these places. My GPS continuously recorded altitudes above 13,000 feet. We did not sight even one tree despite walking for hours together. The sun happily burned every inch of unprotected skin, peeling away flakes of epidermis. Oxygen levels were so low that climbing even a hundred feet felt like a day long arduous task. At times we climbed over 15,000 feet, where the thinning air laughed at our struggling bodies. Winter temperatures apparently fall twenty below zero or even lower. For the people of Spiti Valley, this was everyday life..."
"It is not easy to convince myself that people actually live in these places. My GPS continuously recorded altitudes above 13,000 feet. We did not sight even one tree despite walking for hours together. The sun happily burned every inch of unprotected skin, peeling away flakes of epidermis. Oxygen levels were so low that climbing even a hundred feet felt like a day long arduous task. At times we climbed over 15,000 feet, where the thinning air laughed at our struggling bodies. Winter temperatures apparently fall twenty below zero or even lower. For the people of Spiti Valley, this was everyday life..."
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Stranded in a Storm in Lahaul & Spiti – A Week of Uncertainties -
http://travel.paintedstork.com/blog/2012/09/lahaul-spiti.html
"Bridges had fallen and the roads were cut off. A long traffic waited for many hours hoping for things to get better. Buses were cancelled and they had no clear answers to when the services will resume. “It depends on the weather, sir,” was the fence-sitting answer from the person manning the phone at the bus company, who neither had any real-time information nor had powers to provide decisive answers.
Himachal Pradesh was seeing heavy rains in the past few days. As it happens every year, landslides had crippled the road infrastructure and there was a cloud of uncertainty over what happens next. Unpredictable as the weather here is, things might magically settle back to normal the next morning. Or things could very well turn worse if another line of dark clouds made their way towards the mountains..."
http://travel.paintedstork.com/blog/2012/09/lahaul-spiti.html
"Bridges had fallen and the roads were cut off. A long traffic waited for many hours hoping for things to get better. Buses were cancelled and they had no clear answers to when the services will resume. “It depends on the weather, sir,” was the fence-sitting answer from the person manning the phone at the bus company, who neither had any real-time information nor had powers to provide decisive answers.
Himachal Pradesh was seeing heavy rains in the past few days. As it happens every year, landslides had crippled the road infrastructure and there was a cloud of uncertainty over what happens next. Unpredictable as the weather here is, things might magically settle back to normal the next morning. Or things could very well turn worse if another line of dark clouds made their way towards the mountains..."
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A quick travel guide: Bhutan for the Indian Traveller - http://travel.paintedstork.com/blog/2012/10/bhutan-for-the-indian-traveller.html
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Visiting Ladakh in winters: http://travel.paintedstork.com/blog/2012/10/ladakh-in-winter.html
"As the temperature dips and the mountains prepare for a long winter, the transformation creates another kind of magic. It is made of deep blue rivers lined with ice on either banks, tall poplar groves that stand bare and parallel to each other, mountain peaks that keep changing colours from brown to white depending on the weather..."
"As the temperature dips and the mountains prepare for a long winter, the transformation creates another kind of magic. It is made of deep blue rivers lined with ice on either banks, tall poplar groves that stand bare and parallel to each other, mountain peaks that keep changing colours from brown to white depending on the weather..."
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Spiti Valley: a photographer’s search for heaven in the high mountains: http://www.darter.in/spiti-valley-photographers-search-heaven-high-mountains/
"In the year 2006, at a time when only the adventurous travelled beyond Manali in the Himalayas and only a small percentage of the population had heard of Ladakh, a chance encounter took me to the then-undiscovered valleys of Lahaul & Spiti. It was a cab driver, seated in a nondescript dhaba in Manali, who convinced me that I should be going to Spiti, where the places are extraordinary and landscapes are beyond imagination. He was good at convincing; it’s not easy to win over a of suspicious stranger about an unheard place in the nascent days digital cameras and travel information on internet was barely anything close to what we have today. His phone did not have a camera; my phone did not have a touch screen and there were no immediate means to ascertain his claims. Even if I rushed to an internet cafe and searched for ‘Lahaul & Spiti’, I would at best find a government website that might have vaguely talked about the geography of the region; no more..."
"In the year 2006, at a time when only the adventurous travelled beyond Manali in the Himalayas and only a small percentage of the population had heard of Ladakh, a chance encounter took me to the then-undiscovered valleys of Lahaul & Spiti. It was a cab driver, seated in a nondescript dhaba in Manali, who convinced me that I should be going to Spiti, where the places are extraordinary and landscapes are beyond imagination. He was good at convincing; it’s not easy to win over a of suspicious stranger about an unheard place in the nascent days digital cameras and travel information on internet was barely anything close to what we have today. His phone did not have a camera; my phone did not have a touch screen and there were no immediate means to ascertain his claims. Even if I rushed to an internet cafe and searched for ‘Lahaul & Spiti’, I would at best find a government website that might have vaguely talked about the geography of the region; no more..."
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Spiti Valley – days of walking high in the mountains and staying in the villages http://travel.paintedstork.com/blog/2012/09/spiti-valley-mountains-villages.html
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Stranded in a Storm in Lahaul & Spiti – A Week of Uncertainties http://travel.paintedstork.com/blog/2012/09/lahaul-spiti.html
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Images - Paro Taktsang (Tiger's Nest) monastery in Bhutan - http://travel.paintedstork.com/blog/2012/08/tigers-nest-monastery-paro-taktsang-bhutan.html
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Images from the Western Ghats, a world heritage site. http://travel.paintedstork.com/blog/2012/07/photo-essay-western-ghats-becomes-world-heritage-site.html
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