Don't try this at home

[Manfred M]

The one major difference between a developed and developing country is the cost of labour. Where those living in the developed world would use relatively expensive machinery and several people to do a job, throwing a person at it. We came around a corner walking back to our hotel after having lunch down the street where we ran into this man transporting a couch. Not perhaps the best image, but it does say a lot about how things are done differently in Nepal than they would be in the Western world....

[Shadowman]

Possibly a portable bed, nice image.

[yooray]

Picture is just good, it tells a lots of story about Nepal regarding work. You are absolutely right the way we work here in Nepal is totally different as compared to western countries. Hope one day the country which is rich in natural beauties will also become good in technology, employment and lots of other matters.
Thanks!

[Manfred M]

Picture is just good, it tells a lots of story about Nepal regarding work. You are absolutely right the way we work here in Nepal is totally different as compared to western countries. Hope one day the country which is rich in natural beauties will also become good in technology, employment and lots of other matters.
Thanks!

Yuvraj -thank you. We enjoyed Nepal very much. Stunning scenery (and not just in the Himalayas) and wonderful, helpful and friendly people. We spent a fair bit of time in both Bhutan and Northern India. The contrasts between the three countries was quite interesting; while all three areas have much in common, the differences are just as great.

[yooray]

yes! almost all three countries have some similarity. Its just the people and behavior matters from region to region.
Anyways its great that you really liked Nepal and other countries. I've also visited Mumbai, Goa and Delhi. They all are great. I hope you will come again in Nepal. You are most welcome!
Thanks!

[Donald]

An excellent documentary picture. And I am so glad that Yuvraj has joined our group and has been able to see and comment on the image.

[pnodrog]

Manfred I have enjoyed the whole series of photographs. Just curious as to how you organised your trip. Was it a rough itinerary with a day to day hunt for accommodation etc or had you planed it precisely with everything booked in advance?

[IzzieK]

Manfred I have enjoyed the whole series of photographs. Just curious as to how you organised your trip. Was it a rough itinerary with a day to day hunt for accommodation etc or had you planed it precisely with everything booked in advance?

I'd like to know the answer to this one, too.

[Manfred M]

Manfred I have enjoyed the whole series of photographs. Just curious as to how you organised your trip. Was it a rough itinerary with a day to day hunt for accommodation etc or had you planed it precisely with everything booked in advance?

Actually everything was well planned and organized. We started planning the trip back in February, doing a lot of reading and trying to figure out what we wanted to see. Once we identified what we wanted to see we contacted four different travel operators in the various places (three were local and one was an international one). The portion with the international operator (gAdventures) was a set group tour that just happend to go to many of the places we wanted to visit and covered about 1/4 of the total travel time.

Once we contacted the local operators (who are totally flexible in terms of an agenda). We gave them the places and things we wanted to do and see and they came back with alternatives (generally based on what was and was not doable due to travel time issues). We probably went back and forth a good 6 or 7 times trying to work out an agenda. We did this one at a time until about a month prior to our departure, where everything was nailed down.

Our agenda had two "anchors"; there were two festivals that we wanted to see in Bhutan, so these drove some of the dates. The group tour had a fixed start and end date, but ran every couple of weeks, so we had some flexibility there. We also wanted to make sure that we had some slack in the schedule in case of weather based flight delays; mostly an issue with the Bhutan part of the trip. The Paro airport is a visual flight rules only airport and one of the most challanging ones in the world to fly in and out of, so if the weather is bad, one can't go. This actually almost happened as there was a weather problem in the area and the flight had a 90 minute window before darkness and fuel limits meant turning back to Delhi.

Once we nailed down Bhutan, we followed a similar process for visiting Arunachel Pradesh and Asam. That gave us four days before our tour of India started, which was enough time for a day of downtime and time to visit Varanasi. The final leg was the Nepal part of the trip and we wanted to trek for up to a week plus explore Kathmandu and get to Chitwan National Park. We had a down day at the end of this period and planned to spend a day in Delhi before flying home (that's what we are doing now). We will be heading off to the airport just before our flight (03:30 AM) via Frankfurt and Montreal tonight.

In other words, we had 100% of our travel and accomodation booked before we left. That mean no searching for places to stay and as we were on a tight schedule, no slip ups either. We had issues with the accomodation on one night and one minor transportation hiccup that delayed us for less than an hour.

I hope that this helps..

[Mike Buckley]

If someone had described the rig thinking that it might work, I would have insisted that it wouldn't work.

An excellent documentary picture. And I am so glad that Yuvraj has joined our group and has been able to see and comment on the image.

Yes to that!

[Mike Buckley]

In other words, we had 100% of our travel and accomodation booked before we left. That mean no searching for places to stay and as we were on a tight schedule, no slip ups either.

I still haven't decided whether that method works best for my wife and me or whether we prefer allowing more flexibility in the schedule that gives time to allow unplanned surprises of the good kind to occur. We've done it both ways. The method we choose depends on the area being visited, the modes of transportation being used, the activities being planned, the language barriers that need to be overcome and the types of overnight accommodation being considered.

[Manfred M]

I still haven't decided whether that method works best for my wife and me or whether we prefer allowing more flexibility in the schedule that gives time to allow unplanned surprises of the good kind to occur. We've done it both ways. The method we choose depends on the area being visited, the modes of transportation being used, the activities being planned, the language barriers that need to be overcome and the types of overnight accommodation being considered.

We are very much the same here, Mike. We tend to try to cover off all the bases on our first visit to an area and have more flexibility on return visits.

[rpcrowe]

Manfred,

I don't know if I mentioned this in reply to a previously posted image of yours but, if I did, it bears repeating! I really like how you are photographing people on your wonderful adventure. So many travelers bring back only images of brick and mortar, mountains, vegetation and those incredibly boring sunsets.

Please keep posting your people shots!

[Manfred M]

Manfred,

I don't know if I mentioned this in reply to a previously posted image of yours but, if I did, it bears repeating! I really like how you are photographing people on your wonderful adventure. So many travelers bring back only images of brick and mortar, mountains, vegetation and those incredibly boring sunsets.

Please keep posting your people shots!

Thanks Richard - I came to the same conclusion regarding having people in my imagses.

At one point I would wait long periods to get people out of my shots (and still do this for compositional purposes). I finally tweaked onto the thought that sometimes it is important to include people in a shot to provide a reference for scale; for example a huge rock looks a lot like a small rock until you put a person in the scene to show how large it really is.

From there I finally started to figure out that people make up a great deal of what we interact with, so they became a more important subject for my travel shots. I also think taking a portraiture course at the local community college influenced me on this aspect of photography. There is a relatively blurred transition between a portrait to an environmental portrait to street photography. I tend to mix up all three genres when I do my travel shots of people.