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4 weeks ago | 
smh.com.au | Nina Karnikowski
Travel Writer April 18, 2025 — 5.00am, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. It’s the day we’ve all been dreading. “Death day”, as we’ve facetiously called it; the second-last day of a Buddhism retreat at Kathmandu’s Kopan Monastery, when 130 fellow travellers and I will meditate on our own deaths. We’ve heard whispers about this meditation since the start of the 10-day retreat.
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4 weeks ago | 
watoday.com.au | Nina Karnikowski
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1 month ago | 
watoday.com.au | Nina Karnikowski
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1 month ago | 
smh.com.au | Nina Karnikowski
, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. I’m sipping coffee on the cobbled patio of our villa at Dolkhar Ladakh, watching bumblebees buzz around sunflowers beneath the towering Himalayas, when an apricot drops at my feet. I feel as though I’m in the garden of Eden. Perhaps I am.
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2 months ago | 
smh.com.au | Nina Karnikowski
Travel Writer March 6, 2025 — 11.50am, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. It all begins with a pair of socks. Walking down a back alley in Leh, the historic capital of the Ladakh region in the Indian Himalayas, I spot a pair of handmade sheep’s wool socks. I knead my fingers into the lumpy wool, inhale their barnyard smell, decide they must be mine.
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Feb 7, 2025 | 
smh.com.au | Nina Karnikowski
Travel Writer February 8, 2025 — 5.00am February 8, 2025 — 5.00am, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. During a recent trip to the Indian Himalayas, my husband and I found ourselves in McLeod Ganj, home to the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile. They say never meet your heroes, but when we were unexpectedly given the chance to meet His Holiness, we were willing to take the risk.
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Feb 6, 2025 | 
afr.com | Nina Karnikowski
Feb 7, 2025 – 5.00am or Subscribe to save articleEmailLinkedInTwitterFacebookSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? I’m standing in a field high in the little-visited Haa Valley in western Bhutan flicking milky water in the four cardinal directions with a sprig of juniper. The Bhutanese man next to me, dressed in a traditional black knee-length gho robe, tells me this ritual is known as lhab sang.
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Dec 31, 2024 | 
watoday.com.au | Nina Karnikowski
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Dec 31, 2024 | 
smh.com.au | Nina Karnikowski
, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. A painting of a naked woman sits next to a photo of a man flipping the bird, on a ledge above the outdoor composting toilet. Our room, which isn’t exactly a room, but a deck covered with all the things you’d ever find in a room – double bed, couch, dining table, bathtub – is littered with paintings and drawings, sculptures and art books, paints and brushes, antiques and curios.
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Dec 25, 2024 | 
smh.com.au | Nina Karnikowski
, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. A three-piece jazz band plays on the fringes of the buzzing farmers’ market, as shoppers peruse dozens of stalls offering handmade cheeses and organic vegetables, artisan teas and fresh pastries, craft beers and kombucha. It’s a scene that could easily have been plucked from the Northern Rivers of NSW.
