Some statistics about my blog...

Hello friends I've met and friends I've yet to meet!

Howdy!  And thank you for reading my blog!

For those of you out there who have blogs of your own - you know that it can be a real joy, and at other times it can be a nightmare!  At the moment, for me, it's a joy.  The words are flowing... the wifi speed is adequate... and there is plenty to write about.  At other times it's like, well I just don't feel like writing - and I'd rather say nothing than write something that I didn't feel like writing.  Sometimes, I just write it anyway....

Anyway, here are some stats about howiestraveladventures.blogspot.com:

• Since I launched this blog in April last year it has been viewed more than 2300 times!  That's at least 5 views a day!
• The blog has been read by people in more than 15 different countries including Australia (highest readership of howiestraveladventures), Nepal, the United Kingdom, the United States, India, Thailand, China, Malaysia, South Africa, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Singapore.
• 17 blog posts have been published in total
• More than a thousand photos in facebook have been linked to the blog
• I have filmed, edited and uploaded 13 videos (linked to the blog)

Thanks for your readership and I hope you enjoy the posts.

If you've any comments or suggestions drop me a line at howie_monster@yahoo.com.au or through facebook.

You can 'like' Howie's Travel Adventures on Facebook also:

Blissful times in Pokhara

After the Annapurna trek I was, to put it lightly, completely buggered.  I wanted to do nothing more than eat and sleep and drink.  It truly was an assault on my body after months travelling through the undeveloped world.  I was well out of balance, and, after a nice evening of cheeses, cocktails, steaks and wine I fell VERY ill.

It was the type of ill where I was at a restaurant and I thought I’d passed wind, but I hadn’t – the fluids began.  A bit later I was vomiting – so I went to the trusty local Nepali pharmacist who diagnosed me with food poisoning.  He gave me anti-biotics, which I needed to take with food.  Unfortunately, I could not even keep the tablets down that were meant to stop me from vomiting!

After a few more days, things finally started to settle down, and I relaxed into the lazy pace of not doing much and really looking after myself.  I took strolls along the lake and up to the view points while I researched yoga schools in Pokhara – my next goal for Nepal – to study yoga.

I tried a few different centres – all of different costs, styles and arrangements.  All very good and quite reasonably priced.

Eventually I came across a dude named Rishi, whose yoga centre was a very unpretentious room next to his house.  His classes were 350 Nepali Rupees per  1-2 hour class.  That’s about $5 dollars or about 3 pounds.  He was unconventional in some ways, but unlike any teacher that I’ve had before – he really helped me to find the keys to yoga that I’d been looking  for.

Yoga is breath.  Yoga is life.  These are some of the things that Rishi would say.  But it is true!

After a few years of practising yoga I still had a lot of stiffness in my hips, shoulders and back.  These are some of the worst places to be stiff.  In addition, my ankles and wrists were stiff.  This basically means that energy was trapped in my body, and also, that I wasn’t letting energy into my body!  Crazy eh?  With Rishi’s help, I began to loosen these stiff joints – using  the Iyengar technique mostly – which is a series of repetitive movements that you co-ordinate with the breath.

This was the other thing – after many years of meditation and breathing practice – I was still not breathing properly!  Many people would be surprised to know that many of their ills are tied to the breath.  This is why techniques such as deep breathwork are useful in breaking patterns in the body and mind, because the breath is the key to all of this.

Rishi’s classes began with a good 30 minutes of intensive Pranayama.  What is pranayama?  Well my first answer to that was “breathing exercises”, but Rishi was quick to correct me.... Pranayama  is about “The life”.  It’s about moving dead energy in the lungs, increasing the air circulation in the body and activating the chakras along the spine.   Asana alone (ie. yogic postures) only exercises the muscles and joints, but without the breath moving properly, there can be no extension, change or benefit from the practice!  Now, I knew this before, but what I didn’t understand that pranayama, as a prelude to asana practice helps to extend the lungs and get the primary chakras activated so the body can engage the asanas at a deeper level, and so the mind is focussed and quiet...

So I studied with Rishi for a good few weeks and my body and my mind was opening up to a completely new way of being.  I was reading a lot, journaling a lot, and blogging all of my India posts.  This process of focussing almost entirely within for this extended period was blissful. I was deprogramming all of the issues that were tying up my mind and body in knots for years.  The asthma as a child, the traumas of school and being a teenager, and the cycles and patterns of years of work all made way for my pure essential being to come to the centre.  I was clear, worry-free, relaxed, full of energy, alive, healthy and happy!

And Pokhara was the most amazing place to do this.  My lodging at New Parent Guesthouse, was basic.  I survived on less than $100 a week; including accommodation, yoga classes, food, internet.  Yes, life was basic, but the sun was shining, and the pace of my existence was exactly of my own definition.

I would do this again... in a minute...  and I will.

In the meantime, here is a video montage from my time in Nepal to take me back to the bliss of Pokhara...

Quotes from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An enquiry into Values”, by Robert M. Pirsig. Published 1974

What follows in this post is a series of quotes from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An enquiry into Values”, by Robert M. Pirsig.  I started to read this book when I was in Kathmandu, after 6+ blissful weeks in Pokhara experiencing life to the full.  Soon, I will post my blog on the rest of my experience in Nepal.  But for now - here are some quotes for you to digest... if you're looking for a great book to read, I highly recommend reading it.  It remains a great reflection of our modern industrialised existences...

"...How can I love all this so much and be insane? ...

... I don’t believe it!

The mythos.  The mythos is insane.  That’s what he believed.  The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!"

"Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices – TV, jets, freeways and so on – but I hope it’s ben made plain that the real evil isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity.  It’s the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil."

"My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done:  by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all.  God, I don’t want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out.  These can be left alone for a while.  There’s a place for them but they’ve got to be built on foundation of Quality within the individuals involved.  We’ve had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it’s just about depleted.  Everyone’s just about out of gumption.  And I think it’s about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource—individual worth.  There are political reactionaries who’ve been saying something close to this for years.  I’m not one of them, but to the extent they’re talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, they’re right.  We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption.  We really do.  I hope that in this Chatauqua some directions have been pointed to."

"The city closes in on him now, and in his strange perspective it becomes the antithesis of what he believes.  The citadel not of Quality, the citadel of form and substance.  Substance in the form of steel sheets and girders, substance in the form of concrete piers and roads, in the form of brick, of asphalt, of auto parts, old radios and rails, dead carcasses of animals that once grazed the prairies.  Form and substance without Quality.  That is the soul of this place.  Blind, huge, sinister and inhuman:  seen by the light of fire flaring upward in the night from the blast furnaces in the south, through heavy coal smoke deeper and denser into the neon of BEER and PIZZA and LAUNDRAMAT signs and unknown and meaningless signs along meaningless straight streets going off into other straight streets forever.

If it was all bricks and concrete, pure forms of substance, clearly and openly, he might survive.  It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill.  The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting to contain a flame that can never exist.  Or the hedge in front of the apartment building with a few square feet of grass behind it.  A few square feet of grass, after Montana.  If they just left out the hedge and grass it would be all right.  Now it serves only to draw attention to what has been lost.

Along the streets that lead away from the apartment he can never see anything through the concrete and brick and neon but he knows that buried within it are grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the manners that will convince themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style and glamour vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid for by the vendors of substance.  He thinks of them at night alone with their advertised glamorous shoes and stockings and underclothes off, staring through the sooty windows at the grotesque shells revealed beyond them, when the poses weaken and the truth creeps in, the only truth that exists here, crying to heaven, God, there is nothing here but dead neon and cement and brick."

"The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it “freedom”, but in the final analysis “freedom” is a purely negative goal.  It just says something is bad.  Hippies weren’t really offering any alternatives other than colourful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy.  Degeneracy can be fun but it’s hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.

This book offers another, more serious alternative to material success.  It’s not so much an alternative as an expansion of the meaning of “success” to something larger than just getting a good job and staying out of trouble.  And also something larger than mere freedom.  It gives a positive goal to work toward that does not confine.  That is the main reason for the book’s success, I think.  The whole culture happened to be looking for exactly what this book has to offer.  That is the sense in which it is a culture bearer."