Well I guess it would be good to get the introductions over and done with so I can get on to sharing the next few exciting adventures I have coming up in my life... for quite some time now I have been sharing my stories with family and friends when I travel via email and have always been a "wanna-be" travel writer... so with some encouragement I am here to try the "blog approach" to make my writings more accessible and to not arrive home to find I had forgotten to add someone to my email list...and they believe I have become a victim of the Ashram "Reprogram" Program in Rishikesh , India!!
I actually did come back from a month travelling in Northern India with my great travelling buddy Kristin and we did spend some time in an Ashram learning the Guyatri mantra, meditation, and some hatha yoga..as well as my own indoctrination through that rite of passage of "Delhi Belly"
...We spent some terrific days hiking the hills, camping beside the Ganges and whitewater rafting with Snow Leopard Adventures. Please note the Ganges we paddled, swam and were dunked into was not the always sacred but polluted waters that we experienced in Varanasi - where the pilgrims come to be blessed by the Great Mother, The Ganga...we were thankfully near the source of her, near the Himilayas where the water runs brisk in Class 3,4 rapidity and mountain spring cold....
Though never the less our Canadian guide Joe told us in the few months he had been rafting there he had witnessed 8 floating dead bodies on their own spiritual run down the river...
Kristin and I had climbed Mt Kilimanjaro together in Tanzania and lived through lions in the campground in the Serengeti and she had survived being my roommate/flatmate for a few years...so we knew we could survive a little sacred water of questionable quality gulps from the Ganga...as we had gleefully "hooped and hollered"our way down the "roller coaster", driving "the ship" as the only westerners in our raft full of nonswimming and Sawar Kammeez and sari wearing Indian women and their families!
Anyway I digress a little...
I love to write, love to kayak, work parttime as a kayak guide for an adventure travel company in Wilmette, Illinois and have my own practice as a physical therapist. I am from New Zealand and the love of the outdoors runs deep from my childhood, I consider the Pacific ocean to be " my ocean"... when I stand on a shore near her I feel I am almost home...that the waters reach all the way to Aotearoa. (NZ). I feel truly blessed to have grown up in such an amazing country and it will always be home to me.
For now, I live 2 blocks from Chicago's biggest jewel - Lake Michigan- in the not so small college town/city of Evanston...
I used to say the 2 best things about Chicago were " O'Hare and Midway"...and it is true I still take every gift and chance to travel when I can...
So what's next for me?
I leave this Friday to guide a trip circumnavigating the island of Milos, Greece by kayak,..followed by a dessert of Turkish delight sailing a Gullet and kayaking along the Turquoise coast...
I know, I know...someone has got to do it!
-Breezegirl
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