Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2008

It’s been a truly rewarding and exciting year for us in 2008 at Divine.

For a start, more of you avid travellers and trekkers seeked us out to plan your trips to Nepal and around the Himalaya. It was our pleasure to have you travel with us and thank you for trusting us with your travel and trekking plans. It has been very enjoyable discussing your trips with you and even more so when you returned to share your travel tales with us. Thank you very much for all your feedback, photos, gifts and most of all, friendship. To those of you who recommended your friends and families to us, we thank you deeply for your support and hope we have served you all well.

To all teachers, despite the hefty planning, admin and operation work for each of our projects together, we salute you for your professionalism and tireless enthusiasm! Thank you for your constant feedback, sharing and trust. It is always a great learning experience as we work together to shape programs, learning objectives and travel needs for our students. Your insights are invaluable and we hope to incorporate more of them in next year’s programs. Besides, sports and CIP in the village schools, we are exploring cultural exchange programs and arrangement with the local Nepali schools in the city. We will continue to refine and explore new programs so they are customised to meet your objectives and remain relevant to your students’ learning needs.

This year we incorporated Divine as a private limited company and moved our office from Paya Ubi to Serangoon Avenue 4. We obtained our travel license and are working from a fully equipped home office. We always try our best to keep our office in pristine condition until the arrival of new travel brochures! Well, right now, the Kashmir collaterals are sitting in one corner right behind Deepak’s space. Interestingly, most of you are keen to check out our new office and we most certainly welcome you! I am trying to learn how to brew a good cup of masala tea so we can welcome you with a touch of Nepal when you next visit us.

At the end of year 2007, Deepak was appointed the Honourary PR Representative of the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB) in Singapore. We got real busy managing “Naturally Nepal Evening”, a roadshow and networking session for tour agents and operators at Traders Hotel. We had the pleasure of the Singapore Women Everest Team joining us at the event and introduced the iron ladies to the NTB officials. We helped organised a Nepalese song and dance item for Fairfield Methodist Secondary School when the school celebrated International Friendship Day. In August, NTB participated at the inaugural ITB Asia 2008, the largest travel trade show held in Suntec Convention Hall. Again, we helped put together the exhibition booth and had a successful presence at the event. In between events, Deepak played host to the Tourism Minister, NTB CEO and other NTB officials who came by Singapore.

On the media front, it has been an exciting time for us too. In 2007, NTUC Lifestyle magazine featured Nepal as the travel destination in its November issue on both its Chinese and English magazines. We met up again with the Chinese editorial team this time. We shall not reveal the content of the feature article but you can watch out for it in the February 09 issue of NTUC Lifestyle. We also appeared in ST Life! Travel to advice on last minute getaway to Nepal. You can view these articles in http://www.nepalexplore.com/media.asp. We were also approached to assist as a fixer for an episode on the ‘Culture X’ series in September (shown on Arts Central, now known as ‘OKTO’). It was great fun for our team in Singapore and Nepal as we made travel arrangements, co-ordinated the project, arranged for acting cast and even our staff doubled up as the main cast! Some of you may have recognised Subas and Tshering and wondered how come they were on TV…you were not seeing things, they were indeed filming for the documentary series! You can view the process here at http://divinesingapore.blogspot.com/2008/08/filming-in-nepal.html

Since the inauguration of our blog, many of you have shared that you enjoyed reading our blog. Thank you for visiting our blog. Despite running crazy schedules at work, we will continue to keep the stories coming in. Guess what, the best part of maintaining the Divine Blog is that we never run out of stories! As much as we enjoyed writing it, the constant challenge is to ensure consistency in uploading them. Usually we are not able to do so in Nepal due to extremely slow uploading speed. Hence, the lapse of inputs while we are away. 😛 That said, although our inputs may not be real time, the contents are certainly REAL and heartwarming. So, keep reading!

Moving on to 2009, while we work on other tourism-related projects and look to extend our marketing efforts to more parts of Europe and Asia, we also hope to open up more destinations. We also discovered many of you first timers favoured doing the easy trek route in Nepal. We will explore more easy treks so you can enjoy the great outdoors and nature in a stress-free manner. Obviously the toilets and showers will not be as comfortable as home but hey, ain’t this what adventure is all about? 🙂

That said, we do hope you would graduate from the easy trek routes and take the step to explore the other popular treks around Annapurna, Langtang and even Everest regions. If you talk to those who have been, the gleam in their eyes and the excitement in their speech will definitely spur you with a “Why not?” With a good sense of humour, some curiosity and belief in your ability, you can certainly achieve what many of us have. If you have been dreaming about doing THE trek and are unsure or have no time for guide books, talk to us. Let us help you turn your dream into reality and look back with a smile.

As for corporate clients, we are happy to continue customising your travel itinerary for that very important corporate retreat! Well, the price of air tickets are not exactly in our favour now. However, we are optimistic for next year as we begin planning new corporate trips in Spring (March to May) and look forward to falling ticket prices to the Himalayan countries!

As the end of the season and the year draws near, we are also looking forward to a much needed rest over the yuletide holidays. It is always good to be home – of course we meant Singapore – we look forward to meet up all of you either for good food or kopi and most of all, we would love to spend some time with our family and usher in the new year. Of course, for those of you who have been waiting for our return to discuss your trips, it is business as usual at our Serangoon office. We are closed on public holidays but will be contactable anytime. We will be away before the Chinese New Year but no worries, we will update our travel schedule when it is near.

Till then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you. Enjoy your holidays to the fullest and see you soon!

Yours truly,
Deepak and Alice