Greetings from sunny Nepal. After my last post from Senggigi, I left Lombok and spent a few days on Bali, in the town of Ubud. Ubud is a small, artsy town in central Bali, filled with temples, great architecture, small expensive (cheesy) boutique shops, and good restaurants. My favorite part of Ubud is the Monkey Forest - a haven for local monkeys, complete with a very busy little monkey swimming pool in the center. It was a nice place to spend my last few days in Indonesia.

After leaving Indonesia, I spent a few days in Bangkok, and then Por and I decided to head up to Nepal to do some trekking. This is the best time of year for trekking in Nepal because it's clear, and still relatively warm, though it can get bitterly cold at night in the high elevations. However, before trekking we did a white water kayaking course. This is the same course I took last year, but I figured I could use a refresher. After three days on the river, it was time to head to higher ground, so we were off to the mountains to do an eight day trek.

Since Por had never trekked before, I decided it would be best to do the Jomsom trek, which is mostly downhill. We flew to Jomsom, then took a jeep up to Muktinath to begin our trek. Basically this is the second half of the Annapurna Circuit Trek, starting at the town after the Thorong La pass. This is all downhill except for one very very long day of uphill climbing between Tatopani and Ghorepani - a 1700 meter climb. It was a nice trek with no problems except for a bit of food poisoning I got in Ghorepani. Now we're in Pokhara letting our legs recover from the trek.

That's all the news for now - I hope to post pictures soon.