Trendy travellers don’t walk
Kathmandu seemed seedier than ever as I waited for my Chinese visa. I had to keep busy, I couldn’t sit around all day or I would get depressed. It was August and the weather was hot, too hot, and by …
Hustling for a Tibetan visa in Kathmandu
Kathmandu was the first Asian city I had seen that wasn’t built of concrete.
This small city seemed genuinely ancient and the centre was full of Hindu temples, each one a hive of activity. Some were covered with elaborate stone …
Squeezed into an Indian train
Bombay’s main railway station is vast, Victorian and teeming with people. I stood there feeling at a loss as to how to navigate through the crowd. Bombay is the biggest city in India and I didn’t have the energy to …
Africans in Bulgaria
I only stayed four days in Romania but it felt like months. I was glad to be sitting on the train to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, to be gradually moving on. Laurentiu and Cristina had brought me to the …
Why you go Romania?
Next on the agenda was Romania, the biggest country in that part of Europe. I had been interested in Romania since university because it never appeared in the media. All the other Communist Bloc countries got mentioned now and again, …
Pretending to be an artist
Professor Fastl seemed like a kind man. He was tall, handsome and pre-occupied. He had renovation projects going on all over Austria and wasn’t going to look too carefully at this scruffy applicant. He had no reason to not believe …
