Its that time of year again - holiday time and my next adventure involves travelling round Brazil with a couple of side trips to Paraguay and Argentina thrown in. The main areas I will be visiting are the Amazon rainforest near Manaus, then Iguassu Falls, Rio then chilling out on the tropical Island of Ihla Grande. Not sure how often I will be able to update the blog, if not possible during the trip itself will have to complete retrospectively when I get back. My first destination is Manaus in the heart of the Amazon, to get there I flew with Lufthansa via Frankfurt and taking into account the 5 hour stopover this took approx 24 hours to get from Manchester (UK) to Sao Paulo. I then immediately took another flight to Manaus, in total this ... read more

Today I visited Bhaktapur which lies around 40 mins away to the East of Kathmandu. Bhaktapur is an ancient Newar town in the east corner of the Kathmandu Valley. It is the third largest city in Kathmandu valley and was once the capital of Nepal during the great Malla Kingdom until the second half of the 15th century. Bhaktapur is known for its fabulous culture and indigeneous lifestyle. It is listed as a World Heritage by UNESCO for its abundant rich culture, temples, artworks in wood, metal and stone. Again I got the bus from near the park, it was difficult to find the bus though I had to ask about 4 people before someone eventually pointed me in the right direction. Bhaktapur was really nice to walk around as there was limited traffic allowed around ... read more

It took 7 hours to travel the 140 kms from Chitwan to Kathmandu,which gives you an idea of how steep and windy the journey was, the views were pretty amazing though - there's some big mountains here!! On arriving at the bus station there was the usual swarm of taxi drivers and I ended up sharing a taxi with a nice young French girl who I ended up going with a drink with later that night. She was called Amelie and lived in Montmartre in Paris - just like the film. By the way I haven't mentioned so far that Nepal and Varanasi have no electricity for most of the day and night which is fun. Kathmandu is very much like some of the Indian cities I have visited very congested, dirty, noisy and polluted - ... read more

My journey to Nepal lasted 25 hours and as usual was not without incident. I took the overnight train from Varanasi to Gorakhpur which was 1.5 hours later and set off at 02:00, I got about 4 hours sleep before waking up at Gorakhpur to be told that there were no buses to the border town of Sunnauli. As usual I took what I was told with a pinch of salt and set off for the bus station anyway. Gorakhpur is an awful place and I did not not want to stay there overnight which was was the only option left if I couldn't get onward transport. As I was walking along a guy started shouting Sunnauli at me and pointed into a jeep - result! - so my backpack was flung on he roof and ... read more

Early in the morning at the Sawai Madhopur train station I bumped into a nice German couple who were with me on the train and what a train it was. All the AC seats were booked so I had to travel second class. By the time we approached the back of the train were our carriages were it was already starting to pull away and there were guys at the open door saying there was no room after passing a couple of carriages I realised that if I didn't get on the next one I would miss it so I resorted to brute force and charged at the next doorway and jumped into the throng of people gathered there (it was just like catching a tube in London:-) closely followed by my new chums. There was ... read more