Finally, after sixteen months of toil and hardship, acts of bravery and endurance, cowardice and betrayal, itching and scratching, life and death; finally we had reached our goal - the heart of an impenetrable darkness, the source of all Backpackers. Khao San Road. Bangkok. "It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of ... read more

What's wrong with "First Aid?" It's got only twenty percent of the syllables and thirty four percent of the letters. Sat in the hot tropical air of a humid Malaysian wet season watching yet another tedious and overly-simplistic training video concentration was hard to come by. The only saving interest were the extremely bad actors, who approached their victims with the same wild staring intensity that Wayne Rooney would an errant linesman - "May I help you?" being bawled out at the same time as slipping on a pair of rubber gloves to avoid 'contact with fluids'. The only sane response to such an 'Emergency Firster' would be to yell 'Keep your hands off me you raving lunatic.' We were in the Perhentian Islands off the North East coast of peninsular Malaysia and we'd come for ... read more

The miserable blogs continue - I can't find anything amusing to write about. Apologies if I'm starting to sound like a cross between Alf Garnett and V.S. Naipaul, but I'm only really apologising to Indian people; those many kind folk that have made us happy, welcome or more simply just interested, who perhaps don't deserve yet another diatribe on how awful they all are. But Western reaction to India seems to make me more and more angry. Sitting in a Nepali tea house somewhere near Everest, I was reading Rohinton Mistry's “A Fine Balance”, which portrays the narrow line between hope and despair, living and dying, of the Mumbai poor in the mid-1970s. A young European woman offered ... “Oh, don’t show me that book, it’s awful. It’s so depressing”. “Have you been in India?” “Oh ... read more

To the casual observer the engine behind the world's 3rd largest economy might well appear to be India's numerous hawkers, con-men and beggars, the persistance of whom would please any hard-nosed western capitalist. Of course, in the Britain of Norman Tebbit and John Major, beggars were either indolent miscreants too lazy to get on their bikes to look for the jobs that, unskilled and with no employment record, would magically materialise as a result of their plucky Britishness; or unscrupulous fraudsters who live it up in the lap of luxury thanks to the generous donations of the kindly, but ultimately gullible, British public. In their last days this bunch of smug odious lizards chose to raise political capital by openly attacking the poorest and weakest in society - those who could least defend themselves. Ten years ... read more

A short blog this time. If you want something good to read, try 's harrowing description of a recent visit to hurricane-damaged New Orleans - "". Reading this hit us doubly as we are currently sitting drinking lassis amidst the devastation of the Tsunami in Sri Lanka. After a whistlestop visit to the UK, taking in friends, relatives and the Indian Embassy, we decided to take advantage of free accomodation in Hong Kong to take a rest. By chance it happened to be Chinese New Year, so we extended our stay to take it all in. To be honest the parade was a little disappointing - we had expected lots of Chinese dragons and Kung Fu, and instead there were lots of rather dull corporate floats. The fireworks however, as one would expect from the Chinese, ... read more