Stepping off the flight in Calcutta, I felt a twinge of trepidation. The only other occasion on which I’d been to this inadvertent icon of India’s romantic past and chaotic present I’d been hiding behind the tails of Prateek’s kurta. I had found the juxtaposition of even moderate wealth and poverty oppressive – street people asleep on the gorgeous staircase of his grandmother’s colonial apartment building – and the humid, dirty, grey heat overpowering. In an attempt to dress conservatively yet remain cool, I had bought a salwaar kameez in the market, but it was made of a nasty nylon-type material, the salwaar hopelessly short for European legs, and I had felt scruffy and over-cooked. This time was going to be different. After all, I was different. No longer the anxious junior lawyer on her hard-earned ... read more

If an eighth century saint answers a village’s prayer to cure a leprosy epidemic, it is only fitting that the miracle be commemorated for ever after in dance and colour and panache. And when that village is in Bhutan, the dance and colour and panache are truly fabulous. On my first trip to Bhutan, I’d been lucky enough to go to one of the biggest festivals in the country, the Tsechu held in the imperious Punakha Dzong, which marks the anniversary of the Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyel’s seventeenth century victory over the Tibetans. The Tsechu had been an incredible occasion, presided over by Bhutanese Buddhism’s highest-ranking official, the Je Khenpo, with elaborate dances and re-enactments, fabulously-dressed crowds and colour, bemused tourists and rituals, and the closest I’ve seen to a traffic jam in this sparsely-populated country. This ... read more

Taking a newbie to India is a little like introducing a friend to an adored aged aunt. You know that she’s great value, but how will she perform on the day? After all, there are times when she forgets to wash or “has an accident”, her sense of humour isn’t always to everyone’s taste, and she can be pretty cantankerous on occasion; but when she’s on form, sharing her stories and showing off her jewels, you love her to bits. It’s not like Lorraine was new to travelling. We’d met while she was working, and I was volunteering, at the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia; now she’d recently returned from 18 months’ teaching English in South Korea; and she had travelled relatively extensively before that. When she found out that I was planning another India trip ... read more

I couldn’t do what I wanted to do in Panama, so I sulked and came home early. To be fair, this is only the second time in the last five years’ travelling that I haven’t managed to get to where I wanted to go because of logistical and security (rather than simple lack of time) reasons. The first was in Rwanda when, despite getting to the towns at the northern and southern ends of Lake Kivu, I failed to reach the town in the middle of the Lake’s eastern shore, despite trying from three different directions. The buses and the road conditions simply wouldn’t play ball. In Panama, my main aim had been to visit the site of Scotland’s short-lived and tragic attempt at an empire in the 1690s. While much of my school-taught Scottish history ... read more

I’m back in El Castillo, sitting in a hammock on the balcony of the charming Casa de Huésped Chinandegano, with the rapids that almost defeated a young Nelson in 1780 off to my right. I feel a little guilty for not going back to the pretty Nena Lodge that did me so well last weekend, but this place is right on the river, the French-Argentinean couple I’ve run into from time to time this week went out of their way to recommend it to me, and I was already going to come back here for dinner tonight, with the mouth-watering memory of its “camarones en salsa”… Did I really think this morning that the San Juan del Norte-San Carlos “rápido” could stop here and I would be able to resist the temptation of Yamil’s “bom-bom” coffee ... read more