Tag Archives: portrait Pashupatinath, three kilometres northwest of Kathmandu on the Bagmati River, is home to one of the most sacred of Nepal’s Hindu temples and cremation sites. One of the “seven groups of monuments and buildings” that make up the UNESCO-listed Kathmandu Valley, Pashupatinath Temple and the Bagmati Cremation Ghats are also on just about every tourist’s itinerary while in the city. So, the site hosts a mix […]  The remote, mountainous corners of northern and western Thailand – and neighbouring Laos and Myanmar – are home to countless small villages of “mountain folk” (ชาวเขา), or ethnic “Hill Tribes”. These Hilltribes/Hill Tribes are not a unitary group. In Thailand alone, there are six major distinct ethnic minority groups – the Akha, Karen, Meo or Hmong, Yao, Lahu, and Lisu, plus a few […]  One of the many joys of Byron Bay Bluesfest, that annual Easter long-weekend festival of blues, roots, and just about every other kind of music, is – for me – the very range of styles packed into five days, and the depth of talent offered up on the five+ stages. Although Americans tended to dominate the […]  With the radio cranked loud, I spent most of last week driving down New South Wales backroads, trying to not tap the beat too hard on the accelerator. The annual Easter-weekend Bluesfest music festival in Byron Bay had finished late Monday night, and I was on the way home with songs in my head and music in my heart. I love […]  Family. A word that entered into English in the early 1400s, meaning “servants of a household,” from the Latin familia “family servants, domestics collectively, the servants in a household.” The original definition includes the estate, the property; the staff, and any relatives. How things change! When I was growing up, “family” generally meant a nuclear family of two […] |
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