The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu reviewed by Ron McMillan at Amazon

Nepal

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Great review of The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu by Ron McMillan at Amazon.

“My first experience of Kathmandu dates back to the days when the flawed heroes of The Devil’s Road rolled into town in their beaten up van – and the author has captured the period beautifully. The cheap hostels and lakeside hangouts (in Pokhara) were awash with characters just like those in this, very atmospheric piece of fiction. Back then, there were two major attractions to budget travellers coming to Nepal. Mountains and drugs. And for many of the European travellers I saw, the mountains might as well not have existed, so obsessed were they with the cheaply (or even freely) available ganja. I recall one Italian traveller wandering into a tourist restaurant, the sleeves of his vest filled with marijuana plants that surrounded his head like an American Indian headdress. He was the happiest man in Nepal – and the least concerned about the laws of that, or any other, land.

Tom Vater captures this illusory sense of invincibility, of freedom from the law, that characterised young travellers in that region in those days. And his is a tale of how that sense of invincibility goes horribly wrong. Well worth reading – whether or not you were there in those heady, smoke-filled days.”

 

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