We started at Lees Ferry and stopped at Whitmer Wash. 188 miles on the water. Its a helicopter ride out to the the Bar H ranch from there. This was a motor raft trip with 20 HP Honda 4 stroke so pretty quiet on a large raft (14 passengers?) Still, it was nice when he stopped the motor to educate us on the canyon. The paddle trip must be great, too. Certainly, more exciting in the rapids.
In 2017, I took my first ever international trip at age 45- to South India for a month long yoga trip. I didn’t know what to expect when I got there. This was after two 8- hour flights(stopover in Paris, so now I can say I’ve “been there”, for a couple of hours) and a 3 hour taxi ride from Bangalore to Gokulam, Mysore. Gokulam is not really big-city, not really rural India. It’s a nice “suburban” in between. I stayed with a host family and that year there was some money devaluing going on so getting good cash wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. I also only brought an elderly iphone for wifi and staying connected, which was great for breaking social media dependence, not so great for more practical things like being able to call people/taxis or wire myself some funds. And did I mention bucket baths, and old-school squat toilets, with no tp? Well, those things aren’t so bad if you’ve got your own private bath.
Pleasant surprises were: most people speak english so not as hard to communicate as I’d worried about . I actually enjoyed practicing yoga around a multitude of people- we’d be packed in like sardines in cohorts of 30-50. Everything I was doing and going to was in the neighborhood so I didn’t have to walk far for class time, meals and shopping. Authentic chai. Monkeys! Also, cows, goats, chickens in the streets sometimes. My host family had 2 adorable pugs as well. And the mangoes and fresh coconut milk, OMG, if you like that sort of thing…: ). I decided to try and go back later for a “do-over”, sort of, now that I knew what it was like. I got to take more pictures and see more sights when I did so, in 2019.
Adventures involving passports can be stressful. I’d planned on a 3-day stopover in Comoros, which had only two flights a week to Dar es Salaam. At the time, the policy was for immigration to hold visitors’ passports, handing them back on departure. What could go wrong? A smack of the forehead – “You’re leaving today? I’ll go get your passports” and he speeds off in his Peugeot. As the plane takes off, he returns with the news that he is locked out of his office, his assistant has the key. Turns out later that the assistant is locked in the office, sleeping off a bender. We get an extra four days in the lovely (they really are) Comoro Islands.