Author: Francesca DelGuidice

The 4th of September we chose to head to Dakshinkali Temple, a sacrificial temple dedicated to the Hindu, bloodthirsty goddess Kali. Kali is one of my favorite Hindu goddesses, so let me give you a little background about her (summarized from the Wiki): Kali is the representation of eternal energy and eternal time, but also…

The next day, September 3rd, after Henk and I enjoyed our large, sumptuous breakfast of toast, eggs, juice, and porridge, we left just past 12:00 PM to go back to the museums we missed previously due to the holiday. They were indeed open this time so we first headed to the National Museum of Nepal,…

On September 1st, Henk and I decided to hire a taxi from the hotel and head out to three places – Swayambhunath, (also known as ‘Monkey Temple’ because of the (duh) abundance of monkeys on its grounds) the Natural History Museum, and the National Museum before heading back to Kathmandu’s Durbar Square to witness a…

On the last day of the month of August Francesca and I had a bit of a slow start, but got out of our room after a late breakfast to explore our local Durbar Square. A rickshaw took us to the ticket booth, where we purchased our tickets for the day and started exploring. Again,…

The first place we headed to on August 20th was Samding Monastery, part of the Gelukpa Sect. Samding was the seat of Dorje Pakmo (The Diamond Sow) aka Sera Kandro, the wrathful deity Demchok’s consort. She is considered the highest female incarnation in Tibet, and furthermore, is the third-highest ranking person in the ‘lamaist hierarchy’…

The morning of the 16th we woke up to head for Potala Palace, arriving there a little before 1:00 PM. We had to wait a little while, since our tickets were timed, to gain entrance – so we just walked through the nearby parks and the area outside Potala. It is quite stunning when you…

I’ll take over writing again! It is the 14th of August and we’ve just had something to eat for a late (around 3:30 PM) lunch. Henk and I were worried that we wouldn’t be hungry enough for our ‘dinner-and-a-show’ we asked Ray to book for us, since it was supposed to start just a few…

Sadly we had to leave Chengdu on the morning of August the 9th (we could have stayed there way longer, turns out there is a LOT to do there!) for our flight into Lhasa. While the first activity we’d be doing, the Tibetan Shoton (aka the Yogurt Banquet) Festival wasn’t until the 10th, we knew…

We woke up late the morning of the 30th … we were approaching the end of July and finally had Tibet scheduled and ready for the 9th through the 25th of August! This left us with 10 days to see Pingyao and the next few cities we wanted to explore before flying from Chengdu to…

The morning of July 28th we had to get up super early for our flight to the border town of Erlian in Northern China in order to make our extremely annoying border crossing into Mongolia. We discovered from a local Mongolian who was on his way home that if we wanted to try and see…