Solo travel or Organised Tour

All of the travels, including the Everest Base Camp (EBC) trek were doing on our own – “we” is my wife Carrie and I by the way. There are 2 main reasons for it. First one is money. The trekking company from the UK is charging more than £2000 per person for 18-day journey to the EBC and that is pretty much our budget for 8 months in India/Nepal. Just a quick browse through few main travel forums will reveal that finding your way up to the EBC on your own is quite easy. Getting professional and experienced mountaineers to guide you up to the summit – I’m all for it – but paying somebody to stroll beside you up the mountain is just silly.

Even if you are looking for company if you are traveling solo you can post a thread on Thorntree or any other travel forum and find a buddy who is ready to join you.

That brings me to a second reason I don’t like organized tours – you never know who else is gonna be there. Imagine spending 2 weeks walking next to some annoying tourist who complains and nags about everything. Trust me they are out there and there are many of them and they can afford £2500 for a babysitter on the trek.

At this point I have to admit that I am little biased. My tourist allergy comes from me being surrounded by them for the past 14 years – 4 years living in Niagara Falls and 9 years living on the cruise ships so I’ve seen it all – I’ve met people who traveled from New York to Bora Bora and got off the ship to buy a T shirt and went back onboard to attend the next session of bingo. Not all organized tours are full of people like that but you just never know.

I do like making new friends and hanging out with other people but I’d like to have a choice in who is it that I share my adventures with.
Tonight is the last night in the Lake District – tomorrow we’re off to London and Thursday – incredible India.

Semi adventure on the almost top of the world

From this point on, DarkoRoom will take a slight turn from Travel Photography blog to Travel & Photography blog which depicts a journey of discovery, both inner one and that of a place wherever we might end up. The journey, this time around, leads to India and Nepal and the inner part of the voyage began weeks ago with me calming myself down in the office of the Indian Bureaucratic Irritation Machine but more on that later.

So here is the brief breakdown of the “travel plan”: we’re heading out of London on September 10 and flying into Srinagar via Delhi on September 11. For those of you not familiar with the region: Srinagar is Kashmir, which is northern part of India, which is on the border with Pakistan. There is a bit of a political situation in the region but I won’t go into that. If you have a favorite news website you can look it up and if I figure out what is really happening there I’ll make sure I announce it here on the blog.

From Srinagar we’re heading into Himalayas and some cool (feel free to use either fashionable or temperature meaning of the word) places to visit on Indian side of the mountains; Ladakh and Darjeeling being some of them. In Nepal we’re headed up the famous and apparently very busy trek towards the Everest Base Camp. When winter arrives (I was surprised to hear that winter ever leaves these places) we’ll be heading south to relax on the beach. More detailed plot will appear eventually on these pages.

Today’s photo was taken on the warm-up hike in the Lake District. This was taken about a week or so ago since it’s been raining every single day this week and we didn’t go out much. I know what you’re thinking – we should have been hiking in the rain to prepare ourselves for months of trekking which await and what if it rains on the Everest trek. Well then I won’t have the option of staying in a warm home so I’ll have to deal with it. Anyways, the view is of Crinkle Crags from our hike to the Pike of Blisco.

The adventure begins in one week and in the next few post I’ll go through the details of preparations for the trip so if you are planning to go to Kashmir, Himalayas, Nepal or India or wherever – come into the DarkoRoom