When you're heading to the place, it's a good idea to pack many pairs of long black socks. They make excellent gifts for the local men, Lisa Napoli was advised before her journey to Bhutan, while lip gloss and tea are the perfect offerings for women.
Not that presents were foremost on Napoli's mind.
Gripped by a fierce midlife crisis and questioning everything from her single status to her career choice, she was about to leave her home in Los Angeles to find some perspective in the remote Himalayan kingdom -- a trip that filled her both with excitement and fear.
"Shouldn't a woman in her early forties be doing something normal, like taking her kids to Disneyland?" Napoli wonders at the beginning of her new book "Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth."
In 2007, the journalist took an unpaid leave of absence from her job and signed up for a six-week stint volunteering at Kuzoo FM, a start-up radio station in Thimphu, Bhutan's capital.
Just getting there was a long exercise in patience and jet lag: Napoli took an 18-hour flight from Los Angeles to Bangkok, Thailand, where she spent the night and hopped on a four-hour flight to Paro, Bhutan's only international airport.
It was the beginning of her adventure in the tiny kingdom, which only opened its doors to tourists in the 1970s and is famous for promoting Gross National Happiness -- public policy that emphasizes culture and environmental preservation alongside economic development.
Props: CNN
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