Author: Daniel

Nepal 73: My Travel Crush

Daniel 20 Comments

I awoke around 4:30 a.m., shivering in my sleeping bag.

The cheap thing I had rented in Pokhara was performing about as well as I’d feared it would.

Anker had threatened us with a 4:45 a.m. start to catch the sunrise from Poon Hill, so I didn’t bother going back to sleep.

I stumbled to the bathroom. The dormitory was rising, loudly, but that wasn’t really an issue, since everyone in the lodge was going to do the sunrise hike to the nearby hilltop. Everyone had trekked here specifically to see the sun rise over the Annapurna and Dhalaguiri ranges— home to the eighth and tenth tallest mountains in the world. If anything’s worth getting up at 4:45 a.m. for, surely that sight must be near the top of the list.

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70+ Entries and 60,000 Words: Nepal One Year On

Daniel 11 Comments

Wow. Today is Feb. 25, 2017 (ed. note: this piece got pushed a week b/c I wanted to publish my Iceland essay, ‘Travel in the Age of Trump‘). Exactly one year since I was left alone and heartbroken in the Hong Kong airport. I won’t lie, it was a painful anniversary for me, personally. I’ve been writing the story of my subsequent travels in Nepal for more than six months now—much, much longer than I spent in the country, in real time.
In that time, I’ve seen the audience on thisisyouth explode— and I can’t thank you all enough for that. It’s a huge motivation for myself to keep writing when I know there are people reading it.

To be honest, if I hadn’t taken the step of publishing these entries, I would have given up on the story long ago.

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