Fresh from 10 days on the river...preparing for 5 weeks in India!

Welcome to Lisa's Travelling Lore! I've never done a blog before but the adventures I have ahead of me call for a means to document and communicate them. I hope it proves to be both useful for recording my thoughts and entertaining for others to read!

My summer of adventure has already begun! Adam and I returned last night from ten days on the river! We were at ARTA's river rafting guide school. With ten other students and four guides, we rafted down the South Fork American, Middle Fork American, and the Tuolumne Rivers in Northern Calif. In a few short days I learned a wide range of useful skills: from where to sit in a paddle boat (I had never been river rafting before), to tying GE, bowl-line, trucker's, and fisherman's knots, to setting up my ferry angle going into river rapids and looking at ("reading") water in a very new way. The most challenging rapids I had the opportunity to guide were Kanaka on the Middle Fork and Sterns on the Tuolumne - both class IV rapids.

Point positive. Set up your ferry angle. Call a turn or paddle forward when you need help. Eddy out and set up safety for others. Look to where you want to go - not where you don't want to go - and you'll get there.

Today and tomorrow, I'll be rushing around, excitedly, preparing for my next adventure: India. I leave on the 14th at night and arrive in Bangkok, Thailand on the 16th at 6 am. My Uncle Odd, (long-time family friend who is Thai but worked with my dad in Hawaii for the first ten or eleven years of my life) will pick me up in the morning and drop me off 12 hours later for my flight to Delhi. I arrive at Delhi airport at night on the 16th where I'll meet the group of 12 that I'll be living and working with for the next four weeks. My volunteer placement is at a day care where I'll be wearing the traditional salwaar kameez and the kids will speak Hindi...I'm trying to learn as many words as I can before I go! (Bahut accha, shukriya...) After four weeks volunteering in Palampur, I'll travel around India for a week and then spend two more days in Bangkok, before returning to Southern Calif.

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." - Mohandas Gandhi