Hippies Freaks & Wierdos Having travelled for several months now I'm starting to get the feel for travelling stereotypes. There is definitely a huge difference in the travellers that a certain place attracts, e.g. Italy (and most of Europe for that matter) - under 25s Aussies, Yanks & Canucks on their 3 week /14 city mega tour, never any actual Europeans China - Chinese and, bizarrely, French (at least a quarter of all the backpack...

<!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --> 3 Days in Chitwan National Park (Well more like 36 hours at Chitwan and a lot of intra-Nepal bus travel) One of the done things in Nepal, besides trekking, rafting and bungy jumping, is to spend a bit of time on safari at Chitwan National Park in the Terai (southern Nepal near the Indian border). As you may know I absolutely LOVED South Africa, especially the safaris there, so I was...

Shopping in Thamel Having honed my bargaining skills in China I was all set to hit the shops in Thamel and go on a pashmina buying binge. Much to my despair, however, Nepali shopkeepers - at least in Thamel - do not entertain much of a bargaining conversation. Or, at least, the style is very different to China and I haven't quite figured it out yet. In China, you're given a price which you know is inflated by at least a factor of 8, so you offer 10% of th...

GOAT WATCH 2009 The first day of the Dashain festival approaches and this is like Nepali Christmas over the course of more than a week. A main feature of this is that goats are sacrificed in squares across the country - Durbar Square in Kathmandu of course being the main centre of action. Goats across the country are living on borrowed time, nervously clearing their throats as they imagine the ritual slitting that approaches. The government promised 6500 go...

My week of doing nothing in Kathmandu And I mean...nothing. Nada. After our first night in Kathmandu, in which we walked around overstimulated by the freedom of information around us, I reckoned a good couple of days of doing nothing were in order. The gardens of the hostel were perfect for sitting around having a chat and drinking masala chai for hours on end. The Thamel region has a bookstore every other shop - as if they knew we were coming and that w...