From Bangkok we went on to Hong Kong for 3 days and did much the same things we did last year on our China trip, the Aberdeen fishing village from where this first picture was taken, Victoria Peak, and the Stanley Market.

We did take a day trip to Mainland China however.  Here's a photo of the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Museum. Sun Yat-sen, it seems, was instrumental in freeing the Chinese from the Monarchy back at the beginning of the 20th century.  He has the status of a god.

We went to one of the schools there in China and were allowed to roam freely throughout the campus.  This is one of the classrooms.  Skyline of Macao.  We leave China and are off to Kathmandu, Nepal, another really great place full of birds and charm.

One of their many wooden temples.  Here's one where the street vendors have taken over.  The street vendors were a little more pushy here in Nepal.

We got up early to take a flight overlooking the Himalayas.  The tallest peak in the photo is Mt. Everest.  It was a remarkably clear day, a wonderful sight. Then later the same day Shirley and I left the others and took a two day side trip to the Royal Chitwan National Park with many wild animals and lots of birds.  That's our small plane that landed on a grass field.  This little side trip was, without a doubt, the highlight of the whole 3 week trip.

First we had a jeep ride, where we crossed many streams, then this river we had to boat across, then back into different jeeps, and finally elephants, it took about 2 hours to get to the camp.  This is the main lodge and sitting area where we sat around and drank wine in the evening and chatted with other visitors, oil lamps were the only light.

This was the room for the first night at the main lodge, very nice. We went bird watching in the afternoon and had a naturalist with us the whole time.  He was able to point out the different birds and other wild life.  I was in seventh heaven.  Then the next day we took elephants for our trip to the tent lodge for our second night.  That's our luggage on the second elephant with the driver holding onto my bottle of wine.  It was about a 2 hour trip on the elephants.

Here we are at our second night's lodging, a very comfortable tent.  We had a small bathroom with a shower in the back.

We chose  to go bird watching again as our day trip.  So here we are in the middle of the jungle looking for anything that moved.  We had a guide with us the whole time.  They wouldn't let us go by ourselves.  There were monkeys, boars, deer, jackals and many smaller animals.

This was the vantage spot in front of the lodge overlooking the grasslands.  We were sitting in front of our tent, resting, when a runner came to tell us that a tiger had been spotted in the grasslands.  We rushed up to the viewing area and sure enough there was a tiger coming out of the grass.  We were able to watch it for about 5 minutes before it disappeared again into the grass.  They told us that it was a very, very rare occurrence for a tiger to appear in front of the lodge like that, almost unheard of.

Lots of rhinos in the grass, that's a mother and her baby.  The next picture shows the back of the tent lodge.  The little hut behind Shirley is where they did the cooking.  It was a wood burning open fire and they did a fine job.

They had bird blinds at each of the camps.  The one on the left was at the main lodge with our naturalist.  The other one is at the tent lodge with our other naturalist who stayed with us the whole day and even on our 2 hour elephant ride back to the airport the next day. There were only 4 other guests at the tent lodge the days we were there.  They went on an elephant safari instead of bird watching. The lodge is limited to 24 guests, but because of September 11th, there were only 6 of us.   For more info  http://www.tigertops.com

For more of the trip go on to...Page 3