Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic books and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
Check out the new website of German film director Marc Eberle, a long time collaborator who specializes in directing cutting-edge documentaries on Asian subjects.
Marc has covered human trafficking on the Indian subcontinent (Nepal’s Sold Out Daughters, 2001), the world’s greatest gathering of human beings, the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India (The Greatest Show on [...]
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 [...]
Kathmandu is booming, slowly.
On my walks around the Nepali capital, I encountered, hung out with and spoke to these wonderfully friendly and accommodating people, a few of the city’s two million inhabitants.
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 [...]
Chris Taylor, author of Harvest Season, a dystopian backpacker novel set in China that I recently reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, recaps and comments one of our meetings in Bangkok and our discussion on the future of backpacking, guidebooks and my novel The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu, which will be republished as an e-book [...]
Indian media have been reporting that Charles Sobhraj, convicted serial killer, currently doing 20 years in Kathmandu Jail, has been visited by an alleged British lawyer, a ‘blonde bombshell’, as the Indian broadsheets claim, who runs a website called Sobhraj Services and has claimed to be making moves that might free one of the world’s [...]
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 [...]
Austrian artist Willy Wysoudil and Tom Vater met on a roof top in Pokhara, Nepal a decade or so ago. At the time, Tom as recording indigenous music for the British Library and Wysoudil was photographing and filming tradtional life for his installation art projects back in Austria. Willy and Tom liked each other’s work [...]