Stokes in Peru

  Hola Chicos & Chicas, One of the major reasons that Marianella and I chose to move to Bangladesh was for the promising travel opportunities that seemed to abound when we perused the maps of southeast Asia.  One of the first flights we checked after accepting the job was to Kathmandu, given the close proximity to Dhaka and it did not take us long to settle upon Nepal for our first extended vacation in Asia.  As you may have noticed, news from us has been pretty quiet-acclimating to the new job, home, and culture kept us very occupied through our first three months, so we were quite excited for our trip to Nepal. Gloriously, we were not disappointed.  Just an hour and a half flight northwest from Dhaka, we arrived in a drastically different terrain-gone was the humid flat land of Bangladesh, replaced by crisp air and the snow-capped mountains of the Himalayas.  Our timing was also ideal-late October/early November is supposedly the best time to visit Nepal, and it certainly wa

Greetings folks, From the other side of the world :-).  Marianella and I have just completed week #2 of our residence in Dhaka and our new venture has been a whirlwind of getting accustomed to our new jobs, new home and new country/culture.  We stumbled off the plane two Sunday mornings ago, relatively spry for two people who had just flown 29 hours (not counting the eleven hours we gained flying eastward during our travel).  Gathering together our thirteen bags at the airport, we were whisked through the streets of Dhaka by a couple of our new employers as we drank in the sights of our new city (more on that later).  Arriving to our new home, we were greeted at the door by our new bearer/cook (bearer's similar to a maid in our terms) who had prepared our home for arrival and a quick lunch of fried rice to satisfy our hunger pangs.  Shortly thereafter, we crashed-and crashed hard.  Sleep over the next few days came at odd hours while we would awake at 3 a.m. and discuss the

  Greetings folks, Time is ticking quickly on our residence in the Western Hemisphere; by the end of this month, we will be calling Dhaka, Bangladesh home for at least two years and this blog is certain to take a very interesting turn. Before embarking on that grand adventure, we were able to slip in an extraordinary visit  when we recently jetted into the South Pacific to Easter Island.  I'll be honest-when Marianella and I first moved to Peru and were playing the game of "where do we want to travel?", neither of us had Easter Island very high on the list.  It seemed remote, we figured it would be expensive and outside of some giant stone statues, we wondered what the allure would be.  After this trip, we have both recanted our foolish initial thoughts about the island. It is certainly remote-in fact, it stakes the claim as the most remote inhabited place on Earth, with its nearest neighbors being Chile to the east (roughly 2300 miles) and Tahiti to the west (250