I don’t know which piece of good news to share with your first. I guess I’ll postpone some of my self-promotion and give you an update on our good friend Pema. He keeps himself busy from fall to spring hiking the steep Khumbu trails of his home neighborhood in Nepal and tends to maintaining his prosperous lodges. You can be sure that he gets quite enthused when summer comes along and the heavy monsoon rain make his trekking business impractical. He absolutely loves getting out and traveling the world in the summers, as he has been doing for many years. He has made so many friends across the far corners of the globe that it takes him all summer to dash around and drop in for quick visits. For now he’s in the eastern United States, and by the end of the summer he’ll whip through here on his way to California. I suggested that either he has too many friends to visit or he should find more excuses to get away from Nepal.

I’ve been reading a number of other blogs on the topic of Trekking Nepal lately. The recent posts are from adventurers who have recently returned from a soggy jaunt through the lowlands of Nepal. They say everything is fine, and oh yeah, there a millions of leeches lining the hiking trails. An image that comes to mind is the giant, oozing creature from “Princess Mononoke” tumbling across the land, leaving a trail of quivering slug slime. Pema tells me that if you’re in the lowlands during the monsoons, the little creatures leap out of the leaves on the ground and say “Hi!” Amy goes further to tell how they were creeping off of the plants and slithering up her boots. You couldn’t pack enough salt to fend them all off and the idea creeps me out bad. Oh, and by the way it’s a condition of rain clouds that you can’t see tall mountains through them, so the net effect is that the monsoon season is not as popular (as what, getting a root canal?).