Even after being back for five months we're still experiencing elements of Einstein's relativism - spacepeople who have travelled very fast and returned to find time has moved faster at the place they left than with themselves - and it's not just all the weddings. When people talk about last year we both immediately think of events in 2004 - for us 2005 and early 2006 just didn't seem to exist. Nonetheless whilst things changed most people have remained reassuringly the same. The Arctic Monkeys happened whilst we were aw [View Full Entry]

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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& [View Full Entry]

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The one-legged teenager pondered the huge piles of rusty anti-personnel mines with the feigned disinterest common to those his age - I almost expected a drawled "whaaatever". Then he handed me one of the mines and said, with something approaching glee "Press here". It should have been obvious what would happen but when we heard the loud 'CLICK' of the internal detonator we all jumped nonetheless. He laughed, with something of a developing swagger. He would be a man soon, an Asian man, from a poor, underdeveloped country. A one-legged man. The biggest thing that struck me about all these dea [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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Standing at 5000m near the head of the Gokyo valley, I turned to our guide, Man Magar, and said "Man, I've visited fifty two countries in my life and I've never seen anything like this." We were braced against the wind perched on the moraine at the aptly named "Scoundrel's viewpoint", so called because it affords an excellent view of Everest and Nuptse without the need to climb any of the steep surrounding hills. To our left was the massive wall of snow and ice that comprises the slopes of Cho Oyu, at 8201m (26906ft) the sixth highest and one of [View Full Entry]

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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 &ldquo [View Full Entry]

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There, that dates me. We were always encouraged to avoid Tiswas as, being aired on a commercial channel, it was considered low-brow. "Will you play Holi?" "Happeeee Holeeee" "I wish you a happy, successful and colourful year." (Nearly) all pictures taken with a Canon Powershot S1 IS with WP-DC50 waterproof casing, for obvious reasons. No more blogs for a month I'm afraid, we're off trekking in Nepal. Holi,Swap Shop, Tiswas [View Full Entry]

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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 ul [View Full Entry]

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"What do you do if you are on a train and the Tsunami comes?" We were stood in the open doorway of the slow-moving express train from Matara to Colombo, the hot breeze wafting our faces and the baking sun lowering beneath the palms. Out, beyond the blasted skeletons of once solid brick houses, beyond the temporary camps of tents and the gleaming white of the newly erected stupas and gravestones, was the sea, no more than 200m away. The questioner was one of three young Sri-Lankans from Kandy, sited in the cool of the central highlands, returning after spending time [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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