Nine arch bridge near Ella The British love affair with tea can probably best be seen in Sri Lanka, one time island of Ceylon. Committed advocate of decolonisation as I am, I must nevertheless confess that I do find the name Ceylon more attractive and the name is far from reclusive on the island […]
Maldive Islands from the air Last year when I went to Nepal, my journey strangely took me from Manchester to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Istanbul, then Istanbul to Kathmandu, taking some forty hours in total. This owing to the limitations and convolutions attendant on international travel during the protracted Coronavirus pandemic at that time. The […]
When I first arrived into Kathmandu mid June, I had no idea how long I would be in Nepal, what I would do, or where I would travel to. I knew I wanted to go up into the mountains again, having fallen in love with them the previous year when I was living in Uttarakhand […]
You certainly see interesting sights in Kathmandu; extraordinary even. Observing the dogs with their red tikka mark and garlanded with flowers was striking, but there were many other things that attracted my interest too, like a vendor of flutes, all tied together on top of a pole, like a tree. Then there were the goats […]
I returned to Kathmandu two days ago and am now back in the hotel with the large yeti in the back garden. It seems strange being back here after a full and very eventful five months further up country in Pokhara and the Annapurna district. My return has coincided with the Diwali Festival of Lights […]
My last full day in Pokhara, I went up to the Kedareshwor Shiva Temple to conduct a brief farewell and thanksgiving puja. I had been there ahead going to Muktinath and upon returning too. The temple location is really beautiful, being set upon the banks of Lake Phewa, opposite lush tropical forested hills. It is […]
My time in Nepal is approaching its end. On Tuesday I am due to fly back to Kathmandu, ahead of leaving the country. As usual when you are confronting the end of a period of time spent anywhere, you get many flashbacks to different times and experiences. So, the first two months were spent in […]
It was way back in June when I first arrived into Kathmandu, before making my way to Pokhara, which has been the base for my several travels since. Well do I remember in my earliest posts, describing the scene from my balcony at Greenhills, of the fields being plowed ready for the rice sowing. The […]
As koalas and kangaroos are emblematic of Australia, tigers of India, pandas China, so yaks and yetis have a similar totemic function here in Nepal. For me, however, the beauty and mystique of the high Himalayas is ever symbolised by the reclusive snow leopard, which, alas, I was never able to see. They roam the […]
It was a short drive down to Kagbeni, a small village cum town that, given its strategic location between Jomsom and Muktinath, has likely served as a staging post for pilgrimage traffic across the centuries, given the town itself is some eight hundred years old. I had been aware of Yac Donalds for some time, […]