Tag Archives: china

Bikinis out for the lads – it’s summertime in China!

19 Jul

chinaflagIt’s summertime folks, which can mean only one thing in the People’s Republic of China: the indiscriminate objectification of women. Whoop!

Kicking off this season’s top picks of state-run misogynism is government-run news agency Xinhua with a glorious photo feature from this week entitled Top 10 sexy nudist bathing spots around the world. Quick, someone call the Pulitzer judges…

A snap of “Brighton Nudist Beach” (does this place actually exist??) from what looks like the 80s is among the 10 with the completely superfluous caption: “This beach is officially recognised and belongs to the clothing optional beach”. Err, ok chaps.

Communist Party mouthpiece the Global Times, meanwhile, ran an unfathomably long exposé on China’s beauty pageant industry, revealing how corruption and apathy are tragically threatening its very existence.

Yup, keep at it GT, it’s not like there’s any real news to report. And it’s not as if Chinese media reports anything like real news.

With this kind of media coverage deemed completely acceptable it’s perhaps not surprising that much of the Middle Kingdom has rather, um, traditional views when it comes to the fairer sex.

All eyes in recent weeks have been on the case of Li Tianyi, the infamous son of a high-ranking PLA general who is accused of gang raping a woman with four other men after a hard night on the booze.

Whether he gets a fair trial remains to be seen, although the case has gone so high profile now that to be acquitted would make the Party look rather silly, especially given president Xi’s campaign to crack down on official corruption.

One unlikely gent who indirectly jumped to Li’s aid was Tsinghua University law professor Yi Yanyou, who opined on Sina Weibo: “Raping a chaste woman is more harmful than raping a bar girl, a dancing girl, a sanpeinu or a prostitute.”

Ah-huh…

In a later interview with the Wall Street Journal, Yi, who hails from one of China’s most prestigious universities, dug himself into an even deeper ditch with this little gem:

“I’m not saying that Li Tianyi didn’t commit rape, nor that prostitutes could be raped. The same curse words have different impacts on different people. Chaste women and prostitutes have different views on chasteness, so [rape has] a different impact on them.”

It’s not just women who are getting a rough time in China at the moment either. So are male prisoners’ bottoms, according to a new poster put up by the authorities in Inner Mongolia.

It depicts a picture of a sunflower next to a chrysanthemum, with the caption: “Manzhouli court warns township residents to abide by laws, or…”

mongolian prison poster

Now, the authorities are claiming the aim of the poster was to show how prison “takes away one’s best years of his life, like a fading flower”, except the flowers don’t look much different from each other.

They do, however, differ in one telling regard, namely the chrysanthemum has a wider central circular area, especially in comparison to the sunflower, leading naughty netizens to speculate the real, more anal-related reason for the before-and-after prison metaphor.

It hasn’t helped that in Chinese web slang “chrysanthemum”  is apparently often used to mean “anus”.

So there we go. 21st century China? You’re welcome to it…

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Hong fun in the summer Kong-shine!

12 Jul

lionsAs someone who has a love-hate relationship with sport, love it when we win, inconsolable when we don’t, last weekend could have gone down as one of the worst since Newcastle “blew” the Premier League lead in ’96. As it happened, it was one of the best. A scintillating 10 minute period from the Lions which routed the Oz-tralians was followed by even greater heroics as Andy Murray reclaimed his British credentials from the claws of Alex Salmond and gave a nation even more to cheer about.

Watching it all soaked in cider and sweat from my Hong Kong home has made the whole thing seem slightly unreal, although at least we’re spared blanket coverage and Sue friggin’ Barker here. In fact, witnessing the demolition of the Wallabies was all the sweeter from the grand colonial setting of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Central. Sipping Tsingtao with my fellow gin-soaked members – whose faces were about the shade of a Lion’s jersey – was particularly satisfying come the final whistle. I can say in all honesty that the “whingeing” moniker is ironically enough 100% more appropriate when applied to our Antipodean cousins – as a nation possibly the world’s worst sporting losers.

So that’s the start of summer then. All here are hugely looking forward to morphing into an unwrung sponge after just a few steps out of the door. As indeed are we to spotting the hordes of teenaged Hong Kong girls – and indeed middle aged women with teenaged girls’ bodies – dressed in hot pants so short  it really does make Wan Chai a confusing place after a couple of sherbets.

There’s honestly not much to do here until September. In a week or so China’s government will pretty much shut down for the summer and Party cadres and their families across the Middle Kingdom will pack up their Louis Vuitton luggage and primary colour clothes and head to Europe or the US on luxury holidays most Chinese can only dream of. They will behave appallingly but spend an obscene amount of (probably) illegally acquired money, thus making them at once both indispensable to the tourist industry of these foreign lands and utterly hated throughout the world.

In the meantime, I for one intend fully to spend my summer afternoons at the beach, my weekends gorging on dim sum and the rest of the time jumping off boats into sea the temperature of warm milk. Oh yeah, and my evenings agonising over the Ashes, having one too many and being bundled onto some concrete by some twat. Probably Australian.

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Beijing: So near but actually too far

28 Jun

chinaflagSo right about now I was supposed to be on a flight to Beijing – a stylish long weekend with friends in the northern capital, doing the hell out of the wall, the City, the square…you know the sort of thing. I pushed to the back of my mind the thought that the air will be thick with carcinogens, the streets littered with children’s tears and shit, and the locals, well, Chinese.

However it was all a moot point. Points don’t get any mooter than this particular point, because you see, I didn’t have the requisite visa. The newly announced 72 hours visa-free permit for visitors to stay in Beijing and Shanghai apparently doesn’t apply if you have a return ticket. Rules, damn rules…

It makes about as much sense as any piece of Chinese bureaucracy – a system, no, an entire country, that takes immense pride from fucking up the hapless laowai. Whether it’s the idiosyncratic approach to queuing, cab drivers that have no idea where they’re going, vomitingly dreadful food, or Benson&Hedges air quality, everything about Beijing is fiercely offensive to a cosseted little Brit like me. I’m sorry about the Opium War guys but seriously, it was a long time ago…time to move on people.

hadrians wall

Hadrian’s….by far the better wall

Anyway, sod it. The mercury’s set to hit 33 degrees this weekend in Hong Kong. It’s a bank holiday, there are beach parties galore, people to get nicely tipsy with and cab drivers who know where I live. There’s the best Chinese food anywhere on the planet, tap water you can drink without literally shitting yourself, and internet porn. Oh, and I can Tweet. Screw you Beijing, I’d rather invent a time machine and go back to London in the ’50s….

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Warning: make contain whistles

14 Jun

whistleThis week I have to write a little bit about this guy who blew someone’s whistle. I’m not sure if it was technically his whistle or the US government’s whistle but it was bloody loud enough to get everyone’s attention and now you can’t move for news of him. I’m talking of course about Edward Snowden, the former IT bod at defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton who became China’s new favourite person after fleeing to Hong Kong to avoid capture by the US and possible charges of treason.

My observations are as follows:

IT technicians at defence contractors get paid too much. The Mira is a friggin’ swish hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui where Snowden was holed up, the inside of which I only ever get to see for IDC analyst conferences on virtualisation. Before that he was rumoured to be staying in the W. Seriously, this former information security engineer should be used as a poster boy to get more kids into IT: excitement, intrigue, a $200,000 a year salary, Hawaii home, a hot girlfriend who’s a professional pole dancer. And he still wasn’t happy? Some people. Let’s see how he likes the inside of Guantanamo.

Second; I can’t work out whether he’s incredibly naïve or very smart. Out of pure schadenfreude I’d quite like to see Snowden bundled into the back of a black van and never heard from again due to his decision to flee to Hong Kong because the people here “have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent”. Part of that is true – people love complaining, usually with whistles, about the government and their rapidly eroding rights – but how often do they get their way? Only when it suits Beijing. Case in point, three pro-democracy activists have just been convicted of burning the HK flag in a protest. Seriously, in 2013 people are still getting done for that…

It doesn’t stop there. A Hong Kong Uni poll last month revealed the majority of people here (48 per cent) think the press in HK actively self censors, while Reporters Without Borders ranks it 58th on its World Press Freedom Index, four places down from 2012. Freedom House doesn’t rate Hong Kong too highly either – ranking it 71st in the world in terms of protection of civil liberties and listing it as only “partly free”.

This place exists in a “one country two systems” regime which protects civil liberties, press and internet freedoms and preserves the rule of law, unlike mainland China. But it’s never really been tested yet. The regime only continues to exist in this form because it allows HK to flourish as one of the world’s great financial capitals. In reality, the former British colony is ruled by property moguls and bankers and the politicians they elect and become; and who as a property mogul or financier wouldn’t want to appease Beijing with its huge coffers and vast potential market?

Having said this, I think on balance Snowden’s smarter than this.

He is appealing to HK-ers’ natural proclivity to fight for free speech, which they will do – again with whistles – at a rally on Saturday afternoon. It doesn’t matter that the free speech on this occasion is being threatened by the US rather than Chinese government. In fact, this unusual twist will also appeal to Beijing. Whether it’s part of the plan or not, he’s been making himself an attractive asset for the Party to keep hold of by disclosing some hugely embarrassing secrets about US state surveillance of its own citizens, as well as revelations of NSA hacking attacks on China and other countries. It’s all given the Communist Party huge leverage in the on-going cyber blame war with the US and will surely mean Beijing will not want to step in and over-rule Hong Kong’s decision on extradition – which could itself take forever.

save snowden

I should really be happy that the warrantless surveillance of citizens by US security agencies is being uncovered by an IT droid, but there are a few things that made me take an instant dislike to this guy.

First: “Edward”. The only people I know who actually use the full length version of this name are politicians, former kings of England and people trying to give themselves more gravitas than they innately possess. Unless it’s The Guardian that is trying to give Ed more gravitas than he innately possesses, in which case ignore me…

Second: The Guardian interview. Have you noticed how Snowden is at pains to say “I don’t want public attention because I don’t want the story to be about me”, and that “my sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them”. Err, why didn’t you just try and stay anonymous then? Not easy, granted, but there is a touch of the Assange about his carefully rehearsed, media-friendly declamations.

Third: failure to grasp basic employment law. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he told The Grauniad. Again, I think you’ll find that disclosing top secret state-run surveillance programs is against the rules according to your former employer and possibly treasonous.

Fourth: I hate IT nerds in glasses and I can’t abide whistles.

That last one was a joke.

As for the future. Well, Hong Kong’s media unfriendly CEO CY Leung was giving nothing away in this cringe-worthy interview by what looked like a Bloomberg TV intern.

Despite the above rant, though, Death Noodle hopes Edward Snowden is able to stay exiled in Hong Kong for as long as possible. With any luck, until after 2047 when the “one country, two systems” rule runs out and he’ll finally be able to experience what it’s like to live in a proper tyrannical state. Although by then, no doubt, we’ll all be speaking bad Mandarin and defecating in lifts.

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Taiwan: Land of t-shirt wrestling and stinky tofu

7 Jun

taiwan beerAhhh Taipei. Another weekend, another new favourite Asian city. I realise I do this gratuitous love-in on an irritatingly frequent basis but I’ve got to say this place is worth fawning over.

Taiwan has a long and chequered history ending in a lengthy period of Japanese colonialism in the late 1800s to 1945, and then the forced immigration of the Kuomintang Chinese nationalists after they were routed by Mao’s lot in the Chinese civil war. This has made it a smaller, friendlier, cleaner, tastier and altogether sexier version of China proper. Some American douchebags I met called it China Light, but that’s doing Taiwan a massive disservice.

The Japanese empire may have departed this island long ago but its cultural remnants cast a long shadow. From the tap-to-open automatic doors to the ubiquitous vending machines and even the hot springs, Japanism is everywhere. And people queue! And, especially refreshing coming from Hong Kong where the locals are tucked up in bed playing Candy Crush on their phablets by 10pm, Taipeiers go out and booze like it’s the end of the world.

taipei cityscape

Case in point: I was awoken in my hotel room on Sunday afternoon by the gentle shaking of a 6.3 magnitude earthquake, with no memory of how I got home. Only the blurred pictures of tequila shots on my smartphone and a vague memory of being wrestled out of my t-shirt by a girl called Melody remained. Ahh, Taipei.dancing girls

The Republic of China has been unfairly ignored for much of the past 50 years by the international community but in a lot of ways it’s the kind of place you wish mainland China could have been. Ignore the stinky tofu for a second and you’ve got a free press, good education, a fully functioning healthcare system and lovely people. The PRC still regards it as a territory to be eventually subsumed into the motherland à la Hong Kong, but one visit to the imposing Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei will prove that this is about as likely to happen as Xi Jinping opening a Twitter account.

chiang kai shek

Generalissimo Chiang cuts a forlorn, almost tragic figure in the museum dedicated to his life, beneath the monument. After all, this is the guy – the Kuomintang leader for several decades – who let China slip through his fingers and effectively exiled himself on a small mountainous island. It’s now a place where the rivers flow bereft of even a solitary rotting pig carcass; where the internet takes you to any site you wish, where the police do not arrest elderly women protesting the sexual abuse of their infant daughters; where the air is clean and the rice doesn’t even contain dangerously high levels of cadmium.

He must be kicking himself.

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Camb-Okinawa: darkness and light in Asia

22 May

s21 museum“Does the genocide museum have a dress code?”

It’s not a phrase I’ve ever typed into Google, certainly not on holiday, but it was necessary research a couple of weekends ago in Phnom Penh. Cambodia isn’t really like any other SE Asian country I’ve ever visited but it doesn’t take long to realise that a sombre trip to the Killing Fields and the notorious S21 prison are essential, if harrowing, stops.

I’m not going to prattle on like a sententious twump about why they’re important, you can figure that out for yourself. But reading a forced confession of some poor sod from my old school in NE England whose life was abruptly terminated at the hands of the Khymer Rouge does rather focus the mind. Reading all about the horrors of the ’70s and the turbulence that followed for decades afterwards, it seems churlish to complain about the food (pretty terrible) or the horrific sex tourism (the Heart of Darkness club is aptly named) in Cambodia. That didn’t stop me, of course.

I didn’t make it out to the Angkor Wat wonderland but the highlights for me were the smiley, smiley locals – you’ll never meet more polite hustlers in your life* – the dirt cheap beer, and the other worldliness of a city which was almost entirely depopulated during the late ’70s.

As lovely as Cambodia was, however, it was eventually time to pack away the Gary Glitter costume and head somewhere slightly closerkaraoke to home, culturally at least: Okinawa. Now there are two types of people in this world: those who see a five day forecast of torrential storms and brave it to the beach anyway, like IDIOTS, and those who decide to cut their losses and spend their entire weekend eating and drinking. So it was we discovered that the delights of Okinawan nightlife are even more delightful perhaps than Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto.

Naha is more chilled, more friendly and more accessible for the gaijin tourist than virtually any place in Japan proper I’ve been. That’s probably down to the fact it isn’t really Japan at all but part of the ancient kingdom of Ryukyu – the locals don’t much look like Japanese and they’ve a different dialect and even separate languages, although the two distinct cultures seem to have found a pretty sweet balance on these sub-tropical islands.

awamori

Cue lots of counter-stool-beer-izakaya action; plenty of chopstick competence-related comments; complementary shots of local firewater awamori; and the odd lock-in listening to the owner’s Led Zeppelin collection. Food = as good as you’d expect from Japan; beer = ditto; random events = cracking; brothels = surprisingly un-hidden; amusing Engrish signage = in abundance.

All in all an excellent quick-stop weekend destination from HK, especially thanks to Abenomics and the weak, weak yen.  The only dud was Black Harlem, a bar chocked full of over 10,000 vinyl records playing the most beautiful soul music but with the most miserable customer/bar staff combo known to man. In an irony which did not escape us as we exited post haste after one drink, it simply had no soul.

(*99% of the time anyway. My mate did have her flip flops nicked outside the Killing Fields museum. Who does that??)

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RIP Ngau Kee: So long and thanks for all the frogs

26 Apr

HK night viewWhen we come to the end of days, when Hong Kong is nothing more than a giant shopping mall, devoid of culture, originality, character – an antiseptic playground for billionaire mainlanders. When we finally all decide we’re probably better off elsewhere, then 2013 may well be the year we look back on as the time everything started to go wrong.

Why am I reaching for the Prozac? My beloved Ngau Kee (pr. ‘now gay’) is no more. After 62 years serving the citizens of Sheung Wan, owner Mak Ping-keung has been forced to shut his family run Canto-food shop by a money-grabbing bastard masquerading as a landlord. Apparently the avaricious arse wants more than the HK$49,000 (£4,000) currently being paid and he’ll probably get it, such is the appetite for property in and around trendy Gough Street.

It wasn’t always this way. Well before the over-priced ponceholes moved in and family-run businesses were pushed out, Gough St and its environs was a pretty ropey part of town – home to printing presses and not much else. Not now. Now it’s filled with furniture shops selling shit no-one wants, posh cafes crammed with buggies and mummies and poncho-wearing bell-ends, and art galleries that look like clubs.

Ngau Kee was great. It was dirty, noisy, cramped and probably hadn’t seen a health & safety certificate in its entire life, but it had a long and delicious English menu, cheap Tsingtao, and a garrulous bunch of (mostly) friendly staff. Basically, everything you want from a local restaurant. And fresh frogs! Local celebs crowded round its tables, ordering braised beef hotpots and mountainous platters of salt and pepper squid, film crews shot regular pieces with Mak and his missus – and her amazing mulleted barnet – and the punters always went away full and happy.

There’s no word of them relocating. To be honest they already moved from an original site in Bridges St so I wouldn’t blame them calling it a day. Wherever they go they’ll have only a year or two respite before the rents price them out of the area again. In the meantime, what is Hong Kong left with? Already club favourite XXX has been forced to close, artsy bar-hole Sense 99 looks like it has become a block of flats, and now this.

So as you walk past what was Ngau Kee, soon no doubt to become a boutique fashion outlet selling clothes no-one wants, spare a thought for the old place, and the city that used to be Hong Kong.

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Chinese diaspora hurtles UK towards Milkageddon

17 Apr

glass of milkIt’s rainy season again.

Not rainy like those insipid drizzly squalls we used to get back in Blighty – this stuff comes in full tilt, balls out, end-of-the world downpours. And it’s usually accompanied by the kind of thunderstorms you’ll rarely see outside of 70s horror films. The urge to sit staring out of the window with a cigarette in my mouth writing some terrible poetry is almost crippling.

Anyway, one potentially positive side-effect of these daily drenchings for young Hong Kong mothers is that it may put off the local milk powder smugglers from their despicable cross-border trade.

Yeah, public confidence in the safety of baby formula sold on the mainland is so low these days that a huge parallel trading industry has grown up whereby powder is bought up en masse in HK and sold for a profit across the border. It has become so bad that the LegCo last month slapped a restricted export license on the stuff, making it equitable to rough diamonds and high grade pharmaceuticals.

Get caught carrying more than the personal allowance of two cans without a license these days and you’re in for a potential fine of HK$500k (£40,000) or two years in the slammer.

I read with much mirth last week, that the UK is now suffering the same fate, with major retailers restricting restricting the sale of milk powder as Chinese tourists and students rush to send the stuff back home. Perhaps more to blame though are the wily entrepreneurs who are snapping the stuff up at source before it can be distributed to the retailers and shipping it out to China for a profit of up to double what they paid for it.

Reuters says that, apart from the public health concerns of milk powder made in the PRC, demand is also being fuelled by an increase in middle-class working mothers – wherever they are in China.

All of which encouraged me to ponder what the future holds.

In a country where dead pigs float, rather than fly, in their tens of thousands down rivers, and air pollution levels regularly oscillate between “extreme danger: stay indoors” and “it’s eaten through the doors! Fuuuuuuck!”  there’s unlikely to be an improvement in public confidence about food safety in the near term.

So unless China’s young Mums decide to go “back to basics” (cue Benny Hill music) with their baby feeding habits, are we headed for the Milk Wars?

I envisage a dystopic future post-Milk War III (MW3) in which the planet has effectively becomes a servile colony producing milk powder, high-powered sports cars, Burberry handbags and terrible hip hop for its economic masters in China. Maybe Ridley Scott to do a film to raise public awareness.

At least we can thank our stars China’s leaders have for the past 30-odd years in their infinite wisdom enforced a very fair and humanitarian one-child policy in the country. Can you imagine the rush on Cow & Gate if they hadn’t? It turns the blood cold.

Oh, it’s stopped raining…

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Can you hear the little piggies? Oh no, they’re all dead…

14 Mar

xi jinpingSome breaking news just in from China. Xi Jinping, already anointed general secretary of the Communist Party last November and PLA chief, has won a nail-biting contest which went right down to the wire after he saw off no-comers to claim the presidency of his country.

Cocky Xi, 59, said “I thought I had a chance when the only political party in the country elected me unanimously as its leader that I might just be able to squeeze over the line and I’m glad to say that all my hard work campaigning door-to-door has paid off. I’m dedicating this one to the PEOPLE!”

Now, of course that’s not what Xi said. It was a simple lampoon. But I hope it’s at least partially successful in expressing a tiny bit of cynicism at today’s ‘election’, during which national broadcaster CCTV actually reported that the National People’s Congress (aka China’s annual ‘parliament’) took a break to count the votes. A break to count the votes. Yeah, and make sure you do it carefully people because every…vote…counts. If that isn’t democracy in action, I don’t know what is.

In the end Xi secured 2,952 votes, with one brave soul voting against and three abstensions. Seriously, did someone lose their fucking marbles? They voted against? Before you have a pop at the Chinese presidential elections, though, check out the voter turnout. President Xi now has a 99.86 per cent mandate to do whatever he and his seven-man Politburo team, and of course all the shadowy factional power string-pullers, put their mind to. In your face Obama.

So while that one poor soul who didn’t vote for Xi can expect a swift exit from front-line politics, what can the rest of us look forward to from Xi’s China?  Well, less ostentatious displays of wealth from cadres for sure – in fact, the austerity/corruption crackdown has already begun, primarily because it makes central government look good. Hopefully that will also mean fewer instances of spoilt princelings wrapping their Ferraris around motorway bridges whilst getting sucked off by high class hookers. Actually, no, I’d quite like that to continue, if it keeps the general population of these arrogant little runts down.

We can certainly expect to see more effort to turn the whole smog thing round. The pollution levels in Beijing and other cities regularly go off the scale. I mean literally, they don’t even have measurements for how fucked people’s lungs are getting. Fujian province has even marketed itself to tourists on the back of its supposedly superior air quality with Partridge-esque slogans such as: “Welcome to a breath of fresh air”, and, “Take a deep breath. You’re in Fujian”. This interesting campaign was only curtailed recently when hundreds of dead piglets were found in a ditch in the province, contaminating the water and turning the air rather sour. Nice one Fujian.

Yes. Dead pigs. We can certainly expect a whole heap more public health scandals of this kind. In fact, over 6,000 of the oinky critters have been fished out of Shanghai’s  Huangpu river in recent days. In response to concerns that the water, which is processed into drinking H2O, was contaminated, President Xi remarked that a good “citizen test” to see if a river’s water is safe is to get the local mayor to go for a swim in it. Fancy a punt on the Huangpu Xi? Thought not.

If that wasn’t bad enough, it seems that the reason for the mass porcine disaster-cide is that diseased pigs were being killed and dumped in the river upstream after a local government crackdown meant they could no longer be slaughtered for eventual sale as processed pork-style products. Yes, diseased and dying pigs slaughtered for meat on an as-yet-unknowable scale. Forget randy monkeys, this is probably how AIDS started.

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No sex tourists please, it’s Kathman-DO!

22 Feb


budah stupahIf you’d told me when I was in my  20s that one day I’d be sat in an organic café in Kathmandu wearing a woolly sweater and eating a bowl of lentil soup I probably would have spat at you. Yet hilariously enough that was exactly the situation I found myself in just a week ago.

Unless you’re a fan of tiny ceremonial orange trees and fireworks, getting out of Hong Kong for Chinese New Year is a smart move. Many ex-pats either plump for the wintry ski-resorts of northern Japan or the sub-tropical sex tourist hot spots of Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, but few try Nepal. It’s a shame.

Despite my dhal-a-geddon in the organic café, Nepal was a bit of a bloody revelation actually. I’m no hardcore trecker and harbour something between sneery contempt and point blank hatred for the those who elect to spend two weeks of their hard-earned annual leave getting up at 5am every day, turning their pants inside out for the fifth time and making small talk with complete strangers whilst battling frost bite and intense boredom. In case you were wondering.

himalayas

No, the plan for me was hatched over a particularly fine Nepalese curry on Staunton Street and involved staying at a decent hotel in the Thamel district of Kathmandu – one with Wi-Fi and no blackouts – and making the odd day trip out and about. It worked a treat.  Nepal is sandwiched in between China and India and its links to the UK go back to Raj days and the service of its legendary Gurkha soldiers in the British military. Given Britain’s first mover advantage in the colonial stakes, English speakers won’t feel as out of place here as mainland Chinese tourists obviously were when spotted out and about.

Kathmandu now has Wi-Fi, Angry Bird hats for sale and Sky Sports in bars and bloody motor bikes EVERYWHERE but for all that it doesn’t seem to have changed much in the past 50 years. Cows wander aimlessly down potholed, dirt track roads; sinister looking men sit in shop doorways by huge butchered slabs of dead buffalo; even more sinister looking men sidle up offering hashish; horns honk ENDLESSLY; and just when it’s getting a bit too much a glorious waft of sweet perfumed incense from a nearby shop makes it all better.

There are a LOT of temples. There are views only an hour’s drive away of the Himalayas that took the breath away even of a cynical old bastard like me. There are enterprising dealers who offer marijuana, then up it to opium and on one occasion trump the lot by touting “something”. Something? Seriously, you have “something” to sell? Alright then, I’ll take three bags…kathmandu durbar

Kathmandu is dirty, noisy and crowded, but for a few days away in February you could do a lot worse. There are great curries on tap, especially good if you’re a vegetable-arian, cheap beer, brilliantly friendly locals and, obviously, great hikes. The country’s still recovering from civil war and coping with a political system which is doing its best to run it into the ground, so do your bit and spend your Honky dollar there next CNY.

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