We arrived in Mongolia during the Naadam Festival, a yearly contest of the ‘Three Manly Sports’ of wrestling, horse racing and archery. Richard, Margaret and Ruby had seen some of the wrestling the day before, at the stadium in UB, but by the time we arrived and had lunch it was more or less too … Continue reading »
While I’m busy waxing lyrical about trains and tents and Siberia and what have you, the other main subject of this blog – books – is suffering from a degree of neglect. I hardly read anything, not even the One Other Book, while I was away. However, since my return I have been making up … Continue reading »
If you should happen to glance back at my previous posts from the Big Trip you’ll notice that I’ve updated them with some pictures. You can now see the Forbidden City and Rahul’s family and the street dogs of Kathmandu and stuff like that. Email subscribers: you lot will need to visit the blog site … Continue reading »
This blog is now running two countries behind my actual location. I’m in Russia now, writing this in a yurt on Olkhon Island in the middle of Lake Baikal; who knows when and where I’ll post it. Before Olkhon we spent twenty-four hours in Irkutsk, and before that was Mongolia. Beijing already seems like it … Continue reading »
I’ve left hot and rain-soaked Kathmandu for a cooler yet equally humid Beijing. Considering the fuss I had over how to get to China, it should have been no surprise that my actual entry into the country was far from plain sailing. I had two flights – one from Kathmandu to Kunming in China, then … Continue reading »
I realise I haven’t really written very much about the things you can see here – temples covered in elaborate carvings, ancient palaces, gold-topped Buddhist stupas and hills covered in forest, flowers and swarms of butterflies. But whenever I sit down to write, the encounters I have had with different people and animals are the … Continue reading »
I’m enjoying the food here in Nepal. The national meal, which everyone eats at least twice a day, is dal bhaat – rice with sloppy dal (lentils), vegetable curry and sometimes a bit of ‘pickle’ – potatoes or vegetables in a sharp or mustardy sauce. Very tasty. My favourite dal bhaat so far is happily … Continue reading »
