2018Travel Entry
Faces of Nepal
Open journal notes
A purple backpack ablaze with a big white Venture Up logo made its rounds on the luggage carousel at Katmandu's international airport. What a great advertisement I thought, wondering if anyone would know us in Katmandu. "Do you work for Venture Up?" An American had approached me, seeing the same logo on my T-shirt. "Yes". Here I was on the other side of the world and already feeling right at home in this Himalayan mountain kingdom. Funny how you can travel to just about any mountain land and catch up with someone you know, or somehow connected to you. Over the years it's become less a coincidence and more a welcome expectation. There's something about the mountain regions everywhere that draws in people of all backgrounds and connects them to one another on some level, if only for a moment. ?Thirty minutes from Katmandu, I sat on a hilltop with R.P. Pant in Patan. Rolling green farmlands broke way to a white sunlit stretch at the horizon. The snow-capped Himalaya have remained the same for eons, save for the changing light of day and the mood of the season. He pointed to a faraway niche in the emerald hills where…