Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic books and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
Yes, there is now a facebook page on The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu, my 2005 novel. This new amazing facebook feature will feature news, reviews and updates on this ripping story of three hippies who drove a bus full of drugs from London to Kathamndu in 1976.
There are plans to republish The Devil’s Road to [...]
I have just published a feature in the Friday supplement of The Rising Nepal, one of the country’s Eng;ish language newspapers. Why? Well, The Rising Nepal helped me start my career in 1997. The paper graciously offered me the use of a typewriter and I hammered out a series of feature stories on Nepali culture [...]
Kathmandu offers much more than ancient shrines and palaces though the city does have a surplus of those and there’s a temple on almost every street corner, Buddhist, Hindu, often something in between. But beyond religion and age old tradition, the city in in flux, straining towards its own definition of modernity, with only the [...]
After a seven year break, far too long, I am back in the heavenly city for a few days.
Kathmandu has grown into a little urban monster but once the shock at the congestion has worn off, the Nepali capital unfolds as a multi-layered, booming mountain town, quite happily bouncing between tradition and modernity, in almost [...]
I just found a seven year old feature of mine called Seven Years out of Tibet, the story of Tibetan refugees stranded in Nepal, published by Asiatimes Online in January 2004. For this story, we visited the Tibetan Buddhist shrine at Bodhnath and interviewed monks who had walked from Tibet to Nepal to find themselves [...]
Charles Sobhraj, one of the world’s most notorious serial killer celebrities, also known as The Serpent and The Bikini Killer, is said to have murdered a string of back packers and tourists in South and Southeast Asia in the 1970s.
In 2003, Charles Sobhraj was arrested in Kathmandu, Nepal, for a 1975 murder.
In 2004, Mr. Sobhraj [...]
When Dan, Tim and Fred, three naive hippies, set off from London to Kathmandu with few funds and a dodgy bus, a drug deal in Pakistan seems like the most common sense way to make the journey pay. But the mountains of the Hindu Kush, a mysterious Frenchman, a set of Iranian Siamese Twins cum nightclub singers, [...]
In 2004, writer Tom Vater and photographer Steve Sandford visited the war stricken kingdom of Nepal and met a Maoist cell high up in the Annapurna’s for four days of talks. Two years on and Nepal’s belligerent king has shut down democracy alltogether and driven communist rebels and pro-democracy advocates into the same corner, while [...]
Charles Sobhraj, one of the world’s most notorious serial killer celebrities, also known as the “Bikini Killer’ and the ‘Serpent’ was convicted for murder in 2004 in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Prior to his conviction I spoke with one of the allegedly scariest men alive, as well as his captor, police officer Ganesh K.C. who had no doubt [...]
There are many Kali temples in the Kathmandu Valley but only one, demands daily sacrifices - Dakhshin Kali. And on Saturdays, the blood runs faster, deeper and longer than on any other day.
The first rays of the sun break through the pine trees that cover the steep slope that seems to drop right down to [...]