belated

i've been home and back again.

the smell off the plane onto the tarmac was sweet as burnt cherry wood, kathmandu i never knew i'd miss your delicious musk. two weeks had gone by since i'd left for the States, good ole USA, red, white, and blue had never made me so proud until I was so far away but now I was back, NYC LA Santa Barbara Phoenix Grand Canyon Death Valley Las Vegas Yosemite Stonington CT NYC, my packed destination vacation. good times with good people. family and friends, birthdays and a wedding, and final dinners...Goodbye!

adventures abound

today i rode the Asia World Championship Mountain Bike Course 2008, a mix of cliffs (avoided) muddy slopes, and rocky single track. Nepal is slowly making a mountain biker out of me haha. From the tallest mountains in the world to the jungles of the Terai, adventure sport opportunities such as bungee jumping, paragliding, rock climbing, kayaking, mountaineering, rafting, and mountain biking are huge here.

Im not sure if people consider riding an elephant through the jungle in search of lions, rhinos and bears a sport but it sure is an adventure! I was hosted by the National Trust of Nature Conservation while I conducted my due diligence and project assessment for reforestation projects around the Chitwan National Park corridor forest and buffer zones and they were kind enough to lend me one of their elephants for a day.

early morning

today the pollution hangs round you like a smokey blanket. no deep breathes. my lungs already feel tighter like im smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. lucky me with a driver. to see the constant physical suffering of the people and live above it here......

It is hard to resonate my life with the life around me.

what is possible

Originally I was planning on developing a set of forestry projects with the National Trust for Nature Conservation in Nepal around Chitwan National Park to be a combination of avoided deforestation and afforestation/reforestation projects which would enhance community forest user groups income base through carbon credit sales and agroforestry practices but after watching Willie Smits story at the TED talks I am inspired to expand the breadth of the program and develop a project along the lines of his work in Borneo.

Willie Smits and the BOS Foundation show what is possible from conservation and how to create a sustainable human community

raw experience

Day 39
into Kathmandu and I still can't form the right set of words to describe this experience. Echoes of New York City have been chased out of my head by barking dogs. The nightly chorus of Kathmandu.

It is Raw, a city of smells dust, and unstructured human motion. Street signs and traffic signs didn't arrive with the transition to the new millennium; cars, motorcycles, bicycles and people flow into each other around temples, shrines, and dogs using hieroglyphic methods of municipal organization.

The smell of the Bagmati River makes me gag at the intersection of Lalitpur and Kathmandu. Man made islands of plastic bottles, plastic wrappers, plastic bags, and the occasional animal carcass dictate the water's flow. This represents the trash that is not collected and burned on the street. I've only seen one garbage truck, it was doing 50 mph on a residential road, trash pouring out the back over SEE YOU emblazoned in bright neon letters.

Welcome to Kathmandu.

Day 1
I'm 12,136 kilometers far away and 23 years old.