Jo Herrings Adventures

Everyone loves a good awards ceremony at the end of an epic journey. So in preparation for all these questions I have come up with the following to sate your appetite. Photos are on FB as usual. Favourites of The Big Adventure Sight -  seeing trees growing out of temples was cool at Angkor Wat but what was jaw dropping was seeing the curl of cloud of the back of Mount Everest. The top of the world really is awesome. Cuteness – seeing a little boy in nappies playing in a huge bowl of rice in a Laos market City – Sarajevo. It’s a beautiful city with a heart breaking recent past. The food, the people, the sunshine, the environment, the religion and the peacefulness Trek – Everest Base Camp – could it really be any other. Pinnacle of a Lifetime in more ways than one. Moment –   being at Eden Park when my All Blacks won the Rugby World Cup and reaching Base Camp of Mt Everest share the tops of my list Funniest Moment - having my bum pinched by a tribal Bur...

The state of Himachal Pradesh is one of mountains and rivers, winding roads and toy trains. Here are a few of the famous tourist highlights I enjoyed between 10 hour bus journeys! Shimla Famed as one of the great Raj Era Hill Stations where ladies of the Raj spent monsoon summers sheltering from the heat, I had to see this. In my experience this is anything but a shelter from the heat! On arrival you are deposited in a new bus station 8 km from the town forcing you to use either the public bus (R10) or a  taxi (R250) neither takes you to the top of town or even close to a hotel. So I opted for the R10 bus. They deposited me at the bottom of the hill. Porters were waiting at the bottom but how hard could it be? Hard. I walked for 3 hours in the hot sun with my 20+kg trying to find a nice clean hotel room, eventually ending up on the ground floor of Spars Lodge. You can’t open the windows due to monkeys so the task of finding a room in Indian summer season is hard. Really th...

I have always wanted to go to Everest Base Camp to see what the closest to the top of the world must be like. My big sister Fiona made it there some 14 years ago on her way to London. She had run into Ants (her old school friend and now my brother-in-law) in the streets of Kathmandu and later met Simon (her husband) after her trek in Chitwan National Park. She had also bought a painting of the beautiful Ama Dablam  (mother mountain for Mum) with Tengboche Monastery in the foreground and it sits pride of place in our family lounge. As a result Nepal and the Everest region screams family adventure to me.     After a couple of days in Kathmandu during a strike (the country is in massive flux as it does not have a constitution or a governing majority) I met Dustin and Elan near my hostel telling them I was keen to do the Everest Base Camp trek. I had been recommended the Anapurna circuit time and time again but with recent deaths due to slips and the coming m...

It seems like an age ago since I was in Sikkim and a month on the road really is. I arrived in Gangtok the central town of the province of Sikkim in Indias far north east. It is a bustling tourist town for Indians and home to an affluent mix of Nepali, Tibetan and Anglo-Indians which showed all of us backpackers up with their fine jeans and rip off labelled outdoor wear. To get into Sikkim you need a permit. Free in price but not in hassle. It had meant I held up a jeep load of locals for 30minutes at the check point. As I walked down the street in Gangtok, dodging the evening rain two guys I met at the checkpoint shouted “New Zealand Girl”. They beckoned me into shelter where I met a German guy and two Hungarians. We needed a group of at least 5 Foreigners at least to hire a jeep and get more permtits to be able to go to the holy lake of Changu bordering Tibet. It meant we would be going high into the hills, near snow! And after months in the heat I was excited to use the mer...