I traveled to Asia for seven weeks (June 29 to August 13, 2025), with a self-designed itinerary:
- I passed through Delhi (India) for a night
- I met up with my youngest, Nissa, in Kathmandu (Nepal).
- We traveled to Pokhara (Nepal) and back by bus.
- From Nepal, we flew overnight to Ubon Ratchathani (Thailand) for a couple of days.
- To add to our border-crossing experiences -- and to get to one of Nissa's bucket-list destinations! -- we took the bus over the border into Laos. In Laos, we went to Pakse, took the bus-plus-boat to the island of Don Khon, and finally flew up North to Vientiane.
- An airplane ride brought us into China for the second half of our trip.
- We started in Kunming, going to the Stone Forest
- Our "medievalist-plans-the-itinerary" segment of our trip involved a section of the silk road headed East across Gansu province, from Dunhuang, through Gulang, Wuwei, to Tianshui, and then to Xi'an (Shaanxi province), the start of the Silk Road.
- We ended in Nissa's home province, Shanxi, visiting Pingyao Ancient City, and ending in Tiagu, where Nissa teaches English at the Shanxi Agricultural University.
A quick caveat: I took a ratty disposable phone with a glitchy camera and what turned out to be a terrible point-and-shoot camera, but we saw some really stunning sites. Happily, Nissa's phone camera was of a better quality and shared access sometimes let me have a go at photo documentation. Don't expect National Geographic quality photography, but I hope you can get a sense of the wonders we saw.
I'll be blogging about the trip as I sort through our photos over the next several weeks, telling some funny stories, describing some of our adventures, and occasionally opining about soundscapes. If you'd prefer to stay in the scholarly lane, I have a separate page that provides an index to my posts on monastic studies.
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