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Welcome to Asian Nomads ... a journal of my travels in Asia with fellow wanderers

I've been 'knocking around' in Asia more than twenty years now.  I first came here in the early 1970's as the Vietnam War ended, spending a year each in the Philippines and South Korea.  Asia bit me 'on the butt' and I wasn't happy until I returned to it in 1985, that time in India, Thailand, and Nepal where I stayed for the next thirteen years.  I arrived as a student and returned to the U.S.A. as a teacher.  After the events of September 11, 2001,  I once again sought out Asia as a safe respite from the insanity of my birth nation.  Since then, I've returned to South Korea and Nepal as well as exploring Taiwan, Mongolia, China, more of Thailand, and now (March 2008), I plan on looking at deeper roots in what used to be Manchuria.  Please join me as I examine the past, present and possible future of the countries I write about here.  If you like being an 'armchair' traveler or 'backseat' driver, maybe you'll learn something through my personal (Inter)National Geographic meanderings.  To wander the world is to experience a temporary freedom from one's duty to self-survival.  It is an act of re-creation of one's inner self through contact with the more expanded environment -- one we need to grow out of ourselves.

Dhane Blue, March, 2008, Please be patient as this web-site expands slowly over time.
  The 'Eye' of the Tiger  

What inspires the world's wanderers?

I wrote my Master's Thesis in 1991 on a subject related to this web-site -- Appropriate Development (Tourism) for the Central Himalaya.  I have since lived more than 10 years in this part of Asia.  What makes a tourist want to travel?  What do we learn from travel?  Why ever leave home if you can visit places all around the world?  There is nowadays a software program one can purchase and install on a home computer to receive more than 2000 television channels, from virtually every country in the world.  My thesis focused on identifying the kinds of tourism that were in place in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and in the kingdom of Nepal.  In India, tourism in U.P. is primarily domestic and focused on the religious pilgrimage.  In Nepal, tourism is primarily international and focused on trekking in the Himalaya.  What are the differences between these two styles of tourism -- the religious pilgrimage and trekking in the mountains?  Surprisingly, not much.  Both invoke a state of mind in awe of nature and its beauty in the traveler but do it in slightly different styles.  Whether the traveler is a devout Hindu pilgrim or an international trekker, their experiences remain the same.  It is the journey into and search for both an inner and outer experience of 'Sacred Nature".  
  
 
  Heart of Gold  

A 15-year labor of love ...
 
This 'Buddha' is located in a beautiful temple on a hillside just east of Mae Sot in Tak Province, Thailand.  Nestled among a lush and green forest, it is surrounded by teaching halls and other buildings used for meditation retreat weekends by local and visiting Buddhists.  As part of my teacher's orientation to Thai culture, I visited this remarkable spot and met the Buddhist nun who teaches there.  The temple is worth a visit just to admire the handiwork of a young Buddhist artist from Myanmar.  He has spent more than 15 years of his life creating the wood carvings and engravings that decorate this temple.  Painstakingly applying gold leaf by hand, carving elegant filigrees in wood, and polishing solid teak floors, he has helped construct a local masterpiece of art.  Although I have reservations about a Buddhist community's use of funds for this purpose -- instead of for community development -- I understand how inspiring this kind of work of art can be.  Both Thailand and Myanmar have many beautiful temples as does China and Korea.  I have visited many of them -- on mountains, above lakes, beside the sea, in mountain hamlets.  They all represent a community's efforts to build a retreat and place of spiritual replenishment within 'Sacred Nature'.  We as a human race should be building more and more such gardens of the heart as opposed to the blight of urban sprawl we often choose.  Is it any wonder that people who choose to live in the 'Satanic' temples of modern city-states suffer compared to the rest of us?
 
  My Asian Homes  

Where I'ved lived in Asia ...
 

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