Destination: Nepal

Everest Base Camp: Now With 3G

Outside’s Grayson Schaffer is spending two months blogging from base camp—and, as he notes in one of his early posts, he’s doing so without the use of a spendy satellite connection:

Until the 1970s and ‘80s, most Everest expeditions included two porters who did nothing but run mail dispatches from Base Camp to the nearest village. No longer. This year, multiple climbers at Base Camp are snapping photos on their iPhones and sharing them through Instagram and Facebook in real time.

That’s possible because of Nepal’s dominant cell phone service, Ncell. In 2010, the provider announced plans to bring 3G coverage all the way to Mount Everest. Now it’s here.

Just one more sign of our inexorably shrinking planet.


A Very Different Take on Nepal

Writes Andrew Hyde:

A deep depression hit me about an hour into my visit to Nepal and lasted for the first two weeks. Nepal, as a travel destination, is nothing short of raved about. “The Himalayan Mountains are majestic and the people are the nicest in the world!” was a common travel tidbit I heard. What I found was a developing nation with deep problems becoming worse by the month with tourism hastening the poisoning of the well. The pollution is the worst I have ever seen. Air, land, sound and water, nothing is spared the careless trash.

(Via Kottke)


The Family Jewels

A Himalayan trek took an unlikely turn, leaving Abbie Kozolchyk in the hands of a Nepali goldsmith, his wife and their son

See the full audio slideshow: »


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Coming Soon: Same-Sex Weddings on Everest?

Nepal’s new government has some ambitious plans to rebuild and expand the country’s tourism industry, the Times of London reports. One way to make that happen? By becoming Asia’s biggest gay tourism destination—and, with a same-sex marriage bill also in the works, same-sex weddings on Everest could soon be a major part of that effort.

Said Nepalese MP Sunil Babu Pant: “There are plenty of gays and lesbians who want adventurous, sporty, outdoors kind of tourism. In other Asian countries which offer this, they are either not welcome or considered criminals.”


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The Best Travel Videos of 2009

The Best Travel Videos of 2009 iStockPhoto

We watched a lot of travel videos this year to come up with these: the 12 most hilarious, moving and memorable

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Video You Must See: Summiting Mount Everest


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Escape From Thamel

On hawkers, banana pancakes and tourist ghettos from Kathmandu to Bangkok

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A Flight From Kathmandu to Tumlingtar

Photo by Rob Verger

It’s been gray and drizzly for a few days now in New York City, and this dreary weather gives me a kind of itchy wanderlust. The airport beckons. It makes me nostalgic for what was perhaps the most adventurous flight and trip I’ve ever taken, now almost a decade ago.

I suspect that many travelers out there have such a trip in mind—the kind that, while it may have been grand and seminal for you at the time, might live on even larger in your mind in the years afterwards.

I was studying abroad in Nepal at the time, and we had reached the point in the semester when we all were required to pursue independent study projects. I had decided to venture out and try to collect legends about something called the Khembalung Beyul in northeastern Nepal, which is a Shangri-la-type “hidden valley” that exists more in story than in actuality.

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