Travels in the Riel World

Paris, France

The Eiffel Tower at sunset.

Arizona, USA

Sunset in southern Arizona, just south of Tucson.

Machu Picchu, Peru

The classic view of Machu Picchu, taken from a hill above the Inca ruins. Still one of the most incredible places I’ve visited.

Masai Mara, Kenya

I took this photo while on safari in Kenya, in the Masai Mara game reserve. It was the afternoon of the last day of our journey and it was the first time we had gotten this close to a lion. Safari sightings are often as much about luck as anything else. This was one of several lions who had just killed a wildebeest (the carcass was laying a few yards away) and they were resting after the kill. It was an incredible scene.

Montevideo, Uruguay

Produce for sale at a streetside market in Montevideo, Uruguay.

I hope everyone in the U.S. had an enjoyable Labor Day weekend. Travels in the Riel World will return tomorrow.

I have to take time for a bit of book promotion here, as there was some nice press coverage in today’s Arizona Daily Star newspaper about my travel memoir, Two Laps Around the World.

It was the trip of a lifetime. Two trips, actually. In 2002, Bob Riel and Lisa Higgins, wed the year before, embarked on a three-month-long trip that took them from Greece to Turkey, then on to Kenya, Thailand, Beijing and Tokyo.

In 2005 they did it again, this time traveling to Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Singapore, Egypt and Europe.

But this was no four-star-hotel experience. The couple traveled at times by rickshaw and rickety bus, flatbed truck and camel.

More than mere sightseeing, the trip, says Riel, was a life sabbatical — one that more of us should undertake to renew and refresh our lives.

You can read more about the book, including some chapter excerpts, at my other website, www.bobriel.com.

Sydney, Australia

A view of the Harbour Bridge at sunset.

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Argentine tango dancers in a public square in Buenos Aires.

Nile River, Egypt

Sunset over the Nile River near Luxor, Egypt.

Prague, Czech Republic

The architecture and flowers of Old Town Square in Prague.

I enjoy reading the travel writings of Pico Iyer, so I was happy to find this recent article of his about a trip he took to Ladakh, a Tibetan culture in the Himalayan region of northern India.

I knew before I came to Ladakh — the high, dry region in northern India that borders Tibet and is often called ‘‘the world’s last Shangri-La’’ — that I would see one of the planet’s great centers of Himalayan Buddhism, which arrived in the region, in fact, centuries before it got to Tibet. Books like Andrew Harvey’s radiant ‘‘Journey in Ladakh’’ had told me that I would see people living as they might have several centuries ago, in whitewashed houses amid fields of barley and wheat irrigated by glacial snowmelt. And though I’d traveled to Bhutan, to Nepal, to the Indian Himalayas and to Tibet repeatedly over the past quarter-century, I’d heard that Ladakh, the ‘‘land of high passes,’’ as its name means, was the one place where this pastoral existence was still preserved…

Compact, otherworldly and highly magical, Ladakh is the latest secret treasure to dramatize all the paradoxes of civilization and its discontents. Its temples that mock gravity, its khaki-colored stretches of emptiness with small white Buddhist stupas above them, even the tree-lined walks out of Leh were more beautiful than almost anything I’d seen in Bhutan or Tibet itself.

As he often does, Iyer catches the paradoxes of the culture, caught between its past and its future…

For me, in any case, Ladakh seemed a beautifully unfallen place next to the blue-glass shopping malls of modern Lhasa, the global village of pizza joints and guesthouses that is urban Nepal, or long-isolated Bhutan with its chic new hotels. I couldn’t help smiling at the ‘‘He and She’’ shops scattered around Leh’s market, the prayer wheel in the main road that my driver drove around each morning to get blessings for our trip, the sign outside Pizza de Hut that said, ‘‘Thanks for the Visit. God Bless You. Take Care. Bye-Bye.’’ …

Often, as I made such walks, I found myself pushed off the road by honking cars. When I went on a Saturday evening to the Desert Rain coffeehouse for an ‘‘open mic’’ night, it was to find myself the only foreigner among Ladakh’s fashion-conscious teenagers, all fluent in every verse of ‘‘Hotel California.’’

Yet walk just 10 minutes out of town, and you come to shady rustic lanes where people with ancient faces are working in the fields or walking to the temple as if they’ve never heard of Paris (or Paris Hilton). One day I found musicians sitting on the ground among the poplars, playing at intervals while a team of elegant men in black robes took on a team of elegant men in white in a traditional archery competition.

His article reminded me of my own trip to Ladakh a few years ago, which I wrote about in my book, Two Laps Around the World.  You can read an excerpt about my time in Ladakh here. Meanwhile, here is a photo that I took there - a view of the Himalayas as seen from the upper level of a Buddhist monastery.

National Geographic has a wonderful feature online - an interactive photo map of China. By clicking on the names of cities or regions, one is transported to a collection of photos from that part of the country. There are 200 pictures in all and they show the amazing diversity, complexity and beauty of the Chinese nation.

Meanwhile, here is one of my own travel photos of China. The Great Wall:

Bali, Indonesia

The waves roll into Jimbaran Beach on the Indonesian island of Bali. At night, this beach is a beehive of activity, with dozens of open-air seafood restaurants lining the sands. When we were there during the day, however, the area was nearly deserted and we had an entire stretch of gorgeous beach all to ourselves.

Petra, Jordan

A view of the Treasury in the ancient city of Petra, Jordan. This stunning piece of work was carved directly into the rock of this mountainside about 2,000 years ago by the Nabataean people. The city of Petra is also one of the 28 life list travel destinations recommended recently by Smithsonian Magazine.

Paris, France

A crepe sizzles on the skillet at a French creperie near Montmartre.

Ladakh, India

Well, it isn’t Nepal, but it is the Himalayas. These are Buddhist prayer flags flapping in the breeze outside a gompa above the 12,000-foot-high city of Leh, in the Ladakh region of India.

Hoi An, Vietnam

Produce for sale at a local street market in the charming town of Hoi An, in central Vietnam.