Jaipur 5:35 a.m. Awoke suddenly a few moments ago from a stark and all too realistic feeling nightmare: I was traveling far from home (though not here in India) and I’d been temporarily abducted at gunpoint, along with several others, and forced inside a house to a back room where I was forced to kneel face […]
11:14 p.m. Today is my father Edward’s birthday—#79. Just spoke with him by phone a bit ago, wishing him well in Concord New Hampshire during his morning and my evening of the same day.
9 a.m. Slammed. This sore throat started creeping up on me last evening, just after getting an ayurvedic oil massage that left me diving for a shower to wash all the oil and powder off of my Delhi’d skin. I’d hoped that with extra doses of super-green powder, probiotics and Yin Chiao I’d be able […]
10:40 p.m. Finally got to bed at dawn, vainly trying to adjust my biorhythms to a suddenly polar cycle, so it was early afternoon before I really got myself down to banjara alley. I clambered up on the platform and sat amidst the piles of old textiles, diving on in. It’s increasingly clear that the […]
Back in Kabul Afghanistan 8:05 a.m. Well, so much for flying to Delhi last week. We just couldn’t drag ourselves away yet from this first engagement with Afghanistan—so we changed our tickets (at no cost, thank you Afghan air travel system) and went exploring furthur into the Afghan hill country. Nothing like 20+ hours of driving […]
Turquoise Mountain Foundation Compound Kabul Afghanistan 6:58 a.m. A quiet dawn here in the compound. The sun is back after a day or two of rain—somehow the cold here seeps quickly into one’s bones, even now that it’s already well into springtime. I hear the winters here are harsh, partly because with the little woodstoves often […]
Jaipur Rajasthan 5p.m. I have just today finished reading Rory Stewart’s fascinating book The Places in Between, about his highly dubious undertaking of following the Emperor Babur’s epic trek from Herat near the border of Iran across central Afghanistan’s high mountains into Kabul, alone and in mid-winter, just a few months after the USA’s invasion of […]
