A bunch of Nepal photos

Jing arrived back last Friday, and here's some of her photos.  They went due North of Katmandu, 4 hours by bus, and trekked in the Gosainkunda Route, part of Langtang National Park, up to about 4,200 metres... (a couple of these photos double up from the last post...).
They're not in any particular order, I'm afraid...

Note the Latitude and Longitude are reversed.  The above coordinates
put you in the ocean, north-east of Greenland....

As opposed to, say, Monkey Fit...

Monkey Temple

High skies, clear air

Jing at 4,200 metres.

Lovely sunset at 4,200 m.

The guide, jams

Spring

Jing with a local

Cloud crowd in

Jing, 4,650 m

Higher skies, clearer air

Half kilo of Yak cheese.

Shop on a head

Porter poker

Local handicrafts

Jing with the handicraft lady

Ding dong merrily on high

Scary suspension

Tibetan village in the north

Tibetan village square

Tibetan couple, with butter churn

Flags and colours everywhere in the mountains

Nepal New Year's Day (same as Chinese)

Glacier

At times the snow was waist height

Himalayan Chuffs

With banner signed by the group

A high pressure chamber.  The guide carried this (deflated!) all the way
around the trek, in case of altitude sickness.

Bubbling brook

Watching a waterside cremation

Sadhus

Our bus

Jing's Nepal photos

Heard from Jing last night by SMS and she's now sent some photos.  Still don't know where in Nepal this is....  She's due home tonight, flight from Katmandu, so may find out then...
Here's some nice pictures she sent by phone and email....

Jing, somewhere in Nepal....

Nice photo.  Note moon and surrounding aura.

The map might provide a clue to where they are!....

Trekking somewhere in Nepal....

What is it: a musical instrument or Nepali food processor?..

The guide

Jing and ?...

Wheeere's Jing??

Well, she's trekking, somewhere in Nepal.   And out of mobile contact, one assumes....

She didn't seem to know much about the program, save that she was going with 9 others, was setting off from Katmandu, and trekking direct from there, to somewhere North, and staying in Tea Houses, not tents.

I did confirm, though, that she was not flying to Pokhara, and thence to the Annapurna Base Camp, as I did in 1995.  Her trek was taking off direct out of Katmandu.

She left on the 2nd February, and now it's the 17th.... I thought she was only going to be away for 10 days.  Oh well....

The last I heard from her, was when she sent the photos below from Katmandu on the 5th Feb.  Of which she just said, by SMS: "very dusty".... And was heading off to a backpacker's restaurant.  

I wonder if she'll like Nepali food, which as I recall was pretty much potatoes and lentils, with the occasional buffalo meat and rice.

I note, by the way, that they've started growing coffee in the Nepali foothills.

Anyway, the photos reminded me of the Katmandu I saw in 1974 on the way back to Oz from the UK, after our epic cross-Asia car trip, and then in 1995 when I trekked to Annapurna base camp.  By that timing, seems I'm about due for another visit, as yet another (nearly) 20 years have flown by between '95 and now....

Talking to Mutti this morning: she, Anne and Bub heading off to New Zealand at the end of the month, luck sods!....  

Here they are, Jing's caption-less iPhone photos of Katmandu:

Super Bowl Ads... fun and funny mini movies

Super Bowl ads are famous.  Click above for the Budweiser ad, a cute one.  As one of the commenters on YouTube said: "This was the most effective commercial ever, and I am now seriously considering buying a Clydesdale."(!)

[Mutti: click on the picture above: it'll take you to YouTube automatically.  Then click on the little triangle to get it to play.  It'll take a little while to load.  When it's running, then you can click on the double arrow on the bottom right of the screen to get it to Full Screen, which is the best way to view it.  Also: the link below, marked "here", does work on iPad.  It takes you to a Daily Beast site, which has a number of other videos of the ads. Some are really funny...]
Other ads chosen by the Daily Beast, some of them hilarious, mini-movies in fact, here.
If above doesn't work try
http://youtu.be/WuAAXCOUH6Q

Music and the Universe.... the Bolshoi simulation

John sent along some links to music: Santana "Into the Night" and the Glitch Mob's "Animus Vox, Fortune Days" and "We can make the world stop".  And mention of Daft Punk.

Last week he sent link to the above, which you can read more about here.  A simulated model of the universe's 14 billion year history. As John says "very amazing"....

Later: from John, suggestion to check out Ludovico Einaudi.  Here he is at the Royal Albert Hall on YouTube.

"My Travel wish list": Paul Theroux

Montana, one of the places the author still wants to see.

WE travel for pleasure, for a door-slamming sense of “I’m outta here,” for a change of air, for edification, for the big vulgar boast of being distant, for the possibility of being transformed, for the voyeuristic romance of gawping at the exotic; and sometimes we travel because we have been banished. I was banished once, and it fortified me.

The rest...

"A legacy in progress"

NIcole Schoeni at the Bailey Street Gallery, Mid levels, Hong Kong

We knew Manfred Schoeni well.  Most of the art on our walls is from his gallery.  We were about to go into business with him -- an Art school -- just before he was murdered in the Philippines in 2004.   This is a story in the South China Morning Post, a few days back, about how his daughter, the lovely Nicole (above), took over the business after his death, and has run it now for eight of its 20 years in Hong Kong:...

 Fionnuala McHugh
Sunday, 13 January, 2013

Nicole Schoeni is building on her father's love for Chinese contemporary art

Twenty years ago, hard though it may be to believe in these crowded days, you could easily count the serious galleries in Hong Kong on the fingers of one hand: Alisan Fine Arts, Plum Blossoms, Hanart TZ. Into this sparse landscape there arrived a German called Manfred Schoeni who loved food, wine and cigars, and came here to work in the hotel industry. He married a Hong Kong woman, through her became interested in antiques, and started travelling to China. In 1992, he met a group of young artists who were camped in the ruins of Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace outside Beijing. Their names were unknown and their stomachs were empty. They were hungry for what Schoeni could offer.

"The Great Wall of Watson"

"Anne Forsythe at the 'Great Wall of Watson'"
Photo: Tim the Yowie Man

From Tim the Yowie Man's article in the Canberra Times, 16th November:

A kookaburra sits in an old she oak chuckling at us. And it's little wonder. He's no doubt laughing at the three of us scrambling aimlessly up the northern slopes of Mount Majura. It's like the blind leading the blind for we don't even know if what we are looking for is still here.

We're in search of a ''large dry stone wall like something you'd find in the Cotswolds'' which Anne Forsythe, of Ainslie [and formerly The Canberra Times], stumbled upon several years ago but despite several earnest attempts to relocate it has never been able to. ''It's almost as if it has disappeared into thin air,'' penned Forsythe in a letter to me which prompted this little excursion up the slippery slopes of Mount Majura.

Read more... 

Hat Tip to Steve Padgham for the link

LATER: Nice little story.  Sounds a fun search.  I wonder if any of the three folk who found the "Great Wall of Watson" took GPS readings of where it is, for next time?  P.

Jane and Anna on Derby Day

In defence of the Diplomatic Service

My letter in today's South China Morning Post

LATER (20 Feb '13): This letter led to several of my ex colleagues in DFAT and Austrade contacting me to say they'd seen the letter and appreciated it: included the Consul General in Hong Kong and the Senior Trade Commissioner in Taipei.