Roaming & Reading Issue 3  November 3rd 2022

Bewitching Bhutan & the Black-Necked Cranes

This issue finds you on the day that I depart, at last, for a long-awaited trip to the Dragon Kingdom of Bhutan with a cadre of adventurous readers.

The idea, in 2019, was to launch Siren Sojourns, my adventure travel company for adventurous readers, with an expedition into the rural heart of Bhutan. We would explore the wilderness in the foothills of the Himalayas, stay in small villages and even Glamp (glamorous camping) on a mountainside for a night or two.

A global pandemic descended, Bhutan closed its borders (only reopening in late September of 2022) and I've rescheduled this trip four times!

But perhaps there is some truth to the proverb that says, "Patience attracts happiness; it brings near that which is far." Resetting this trip for early November means that we'll have a once in a lifetime experience: On November 11th, we'll be in the Phobjikha Valley when the black necked cranes arrive from Tibet. We'll join in the Black Necked Crane Festival and bear witness to a wondrous migration that has been happening for hundreds of years.

What's Not to Love About Lava?

In another life, I would've been rappelling into the bubbling, smoking craters of volcanoes. I find them endlessly enthralling and count a trip to the Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica as an all-time favorite. We arrived late one night in 2007 to the former lodge where Smithsonian scientists were based when they studied Arenal to find the earth vibrating with the force of the eruptions.

I remember drawing back the curtains in our room to see Arenal perfectly framed in the huge window, its summit spilling over with glowing lava.

So, I'm always on the lookout for intriguing books about women who have explored and studied these majestic forces of nature. Mary Somerville's book, "On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences," documents her own obsession with Vesuvius. A 19th century Scottish woman who studied math and astronomy, she climbed Vesuvius in the winter of 1817.

Dodging cracks that bubbled with molten lava, Somerville made her way up the wooded flank of the volcano, jotting observations as she went. She saw that the craters on the volcano were erupting in "bursts of red hot lapilli and red smoke" and she compared the cascade of lava to the autumn rains of London. Somerville would see two Vesuvius eruptions--the first in 1817 and the second 55 years later in 1872, just a few months before she died at 92.

Read to Roam Book for November

I recently talked a bookish friend into reading Ann Patchett's "State of Wonder." I know, everyone raves about "Bel Canto," but for my money "Wonder", published in 2011, is Patchett at her most imaginative and compassionate best. (Of course, Truth & Beauty, which is non-fiction, is absolutely sublime and if you haven't read it, don't delay!)

Dr. Marina Singh is sent from Minnesota to the Amazon to try to figure out how her colleague and lab partner died. The colleague, Anders Eckman, had gone to see a brilliant scientist who is working on a fertility drug in a remote place where women still give birth into their 70s.

Patchett's descriptions of the Amazon, a fecund, buggy, magical landscape, are rich and compelling. But I can still summon the sensation of reading--no, actually tumbling into--her depiction of a shimmering grove of luminous trees that hold the key to the development of the new drug.

Sometimes when I can't sleep in the middle of the night, I calm my breathing and imagine myself in Patchett's wondrous forest.

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