Serendipity intervened. The very same day, an email arrived in my Inbox from “GetYourGuide,” a company that aggregates local tours from all over the world and makes them available on their website. The firm inquired if I would care to try their service and offered me a free tour, anywhere in the world they operated. I browsed through their Nepal tours and was amazed by the variety on offer. In addition to popular activities such as Annapurna Circuit Treks and visits to Chitwan National Park, they also offered a selection of cultural activities, such as “Throw Your Own Souvenir Day Tour,” where clients visit craftsmen in the small township of Thimi, just east of Kathmandu, who are renowned for their pottery. Artisans demonstrate their skill and then invite participants to try their hand at throwing a pot; the creations are glazed and fired and given back as souvenirs. Since I love writing about culture, I debated long and hard, but in the end my desire to see the highest mountain in the world won out and I booked their one-hour Flight Over Everest.

Blessed with crystal blue skies, the entire Himalaya Range spread out before us

Everything happened like clockwork. My ticket was delivered to my hotel the evening prior to the flight, a car picked me up promptly at 5:45 a.m. and drove me to the airport despite the fact that there was a bandh (general strike) underway across Nepal, and the driver waiting for me at the end of the flight. My only disappointment was with Agni Airlines; upon boarding the 29-seater craft I was crestfallen by the fogged-up and scratched condition of the windows, which would make it difficult to get good photos. Soon we were up and away, leaving behind the relentless dun-colored pollution that drapes the Kathmandu Valley. We pierced the low cloud ceiling and broke through to azure skies; moments later the Himalayan panorama spread before us. Jagged, snow-crowned peaks jutted through the cottony clouds and stretched across the horizon. Veering to the north, we flew so close it seemed our wingtips might graze the crags, while our flight attendant roamed the cabin, naming the various mountains.

Flew so close it felt like we could reach out and touch the mountains

Mt. Everest in the distance, at right, from the cockpit window

A murmur of excitement rippled through the plane when Mount Everest finally came into view. Fierce winds tore snow off the twin peaks: the south face of Mount Everest on the left and it’s companion, Nuptse on the right. I was underwhelmed. “It’s just another mountain,” I thought. There was nothing to differentiate it from thousands of others I’d seen around the globe. And then I thought about the forces required to thrust this massif to its 29,029-foot height. Mount Everest is the world’s most dramatic example of colliding continental tectonic plates. In the Early Cretaceous geological period, the Indian plate broke off from what is today Australia and Antarctic and began rapidly moving 3,700 miles northward, where it slammed into the Asian plate. As the northern edge of the Indian plate was gradually subducted below the Tibetan block the Himalayas rose. I looked at this enormous slab of rock with new-found respect; it seemed inconceivable that something so seemingly immutable could have begun life as a ripple of hills on the margin of a continent.

Hard to imagine anyone climbing these jagged and forbidding mountains

My thoughts turned to the allure of this most high of peaks. For mountaineers it is the holy grail, and many have died trying to summit. By the end of the 2010 climbing season, Everest had claimed 219 of the 3,142 individuals who had tried to reach the top. At the summit, conditions are so difficult that the corpses of those who perished have been left where they fell. I gazed out my window, wondering where on the brilliant white field of snow these bodies lay.

Mt. Everest (left peak) on a brilliantly clear day in the air over Nepal

My reverie was interrupted by the flight attendant, who grabbed my arm and indicated I should follow her. She led me into the front cabin, where Everest rose before me through the crystal clear glass of the cockpit. I took turns with other passengers, returning to the cockpit three times for different views of the famous peak. On my final trip to the front I remembered something my Nepali niece told me on my last visit: “We call her Sagarmatha,” she explained. I had to look it up. Sagarmatha, the modern Nepali name for Mount Everest, is a Sanskrit word, from sagar = “sky” and matha = “forehead” or “head.” Perfect.

About GetYourGuide:

GetYourGuide is an aggregator service, which compiles tours offered by local operators around the world and displays them in one convenient web site. They provide you with all the pricing and availability information you need to place your booking whenever it’s convenient for you, using their secure online payment system. The distinct benefit of their service, in my opinion, is the ability to book tours for all locations around the world from one central website, rather than searching for each separate city or country you are visiting. Additionally, I like the idea of being able to make date changes or early cancellations at no cost. Their website states: “Because we work directly with local operators, you never pay more than locally. Otherwise we’ll refund the difference.” I did a bit of research and found that I could have purchased the trip for $176 locally rather than the $196 quoted by GetYourGuide, however I was unable to determine if that price included the transport to the airport and back, but their money back guarantee seems to cover this potentiality. I found their service to be efficient, organized and dependable and, judging from my perusal of available Nepal tours, they offer an impressive selection of tours and activities, many of which I had previously not known about, despite having spent a great deal of time in Nepal.

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Unfortunately, I so often hear objections to hostels, especially from travelers in my age group. There is a pervasive belief that hostels are frequented by 20-somethings who party half the night and then return to the dorm room and have noisy sex. Many also believe that hostels are dirty, are located in dangerous neighborhoods, and that things go missing in the dorms. On all counts, they couldn’t be more wrong. I have stayed in hostels all over the world and most are clean and located in safe areas of the city, plus they all have firm rules about no sex in the dorms (I’ve never experienced a situation where this occurred). And in all my years of traveling, I have never had anything stolen in a hostel.

Lobby at Lub-d Silom Hostel in Bangkok, Thailand

What will be a surprise to anyone who hasn’t considered staying in a hostel is that almost all of them now offer private rooms in addition to dorms, and the private rooms almost always have private rather than shared bathrooms. Add to this the very affordable prices offered by dorms and you have an unbeatable combination. Like hotels and resorts, however, amenities and facilities vary from one hostel to another and I’ve gotten adept at reading between the lines of customer reviews when choosing a property. My criteria, in order of importance, are: in-room wifi, location near the city center, price, safety, and cleanliness. Most of the time I can’t meet all my criteria but once in a while I get lucky, as I did several years ago when I discovered Lub-d Hostels in Bangkok, Thailand, which offers the following amenities, among others:

• Free high-speed wifi access in the rooms and common areas
• Lub-d has two hostels in central Bangkok, one in Siam Square (the heart of the shopping district) and another in the Silom (the commercial and nightlife area), both of which are an easy walk to the Sky Train and MRT subway
• Lub-d Hostels are exceptionally safe and secure, with closed-circuit TV, electronic keycard access, fire protected emergency exits and fire & smoke alarms throughout the facility
• Without a doubt, Lub-d are the cleanest hostels I have ever stayed in; their website says: “At Lub-d, cleanliness is not an option. It is the foundation of everything we do.” I believe it; their shared bathrooms virtually sparkle!
• Extremely affordable prices that range from $13.56 per night for a dorm bed to $47.46 per per night for a double room

My spotless double room at Lub-d Silom in Bangkok

Since I often use Bangkok as a base for my Asia travels, I’ve had the opportunity to stay at Lub-d numerous times. Initially I chose Lub-d Siam Square, where I stayed in the female dorms; by my second visit the staff was greeting me by name when I walked in the door. This time around I opted for Lub-d Silom because it was better located for some business I had to conduct while in Bangkok, hoping that it would be as wonderful as its sister property. In a word, it was unbeatable. I arrived at 1 a.m., dead tired after 36-hours of flights from the U.S., and was quickly checked in and my luggage whisked up three flights to a private double room with flat screen TV, in-room safe, hair dryer, free bottled water, and of course, the standard of cleanliness that I had come to expect. Over the next two days, I chatted up other travelers in the lobby common area, washed my laundry in their coin-op machines, and watched a recently released movie on the large screen TV in their on-site theater.

Though I love both Lub-d Hostels, in the end, Silom was my favorite. My preference may be be partially due to the crowds being less intense in this area of the city. Or it could be because Silom is located within walking distance of the famous Dusit Thain Hotel, where I enjoyed a buffet breakfast one morning with three fellow travel bloggers who happened to be in Bangkok as well: Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads, and Iain Manley and Claire Claire van den Heever of Old World Wandering. Most likely though, it has to do with their endearing staff who, having discovered it was my 60th birthday, sang happy birthday to me on the morning I checked out and sent me away with effusive waves as I blubbered out the front door.

Musician plays soothing string music in lobby of Dusit Thani Hotel. Go see this luxurious hotel for its gardens, eat at the buffet, but stay at Lub-d Silom!

Lub d Bangkok was rated “one of the 17 coolest hangout hostels in the world” by Britain’s influential daily, The Observer, and it’s easy to see why. If you’ve never considered staying in a hostel, you might just want to take another look. And if you’re Bangkok-bound, you can’t do better than Lub-d, my favorite hostel in the world.

Disclosure: Lub-d Silom kindly provided two nights of complimentary accommodations during my recent visit to Bangkok, Thailand. However, the receipt and acceptance of complimentary items or services will never influence the content, topics, or posts in this blog. I write the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

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