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The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Rude

I left the Dracula Hotel (dark, scary, blood on the walls) in the sleepy village of Yuksom for the slightly less sleepy village of Tashiding. I was in a shared jeep with three young girls from Sheffield. They'd spent the last year mllking cows in New Zealand and were...

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The Day of the Jeep

On the way down to the jeep stand in Darjeeling from where I was going to depart for Sikkim, a man with no teeth asked me: 'do you want to ride a horse?'. 'Do I look like I want to ride a horse?' I replied, gesturing to the huge pack on my back. When one is carrying...

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A view of Everest with sausage fingers

For anyone who likes a bit of a ramble, sausage fingers are a perennial problem. For those unfamiliar with the condition, it's a swelling of the digits when on a big old walk. Now chipolatas in the Quantocks I'm pretty familiar with but when faced with Mount Everest,...

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If it's Thursday, it must be Darjeeling

Twice yesterday I was accosted by men. At the New Market (which smelt of human excrement - not what you want when you're looking for a juicy pear), I met a man who had once been to Birmingham and was now involved in condom distribution to the poor; that was when he...

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Oh Calcutta – make way for the alien

I thought the British loved a queue but in India queues are king. The immigration queue at the airport snaked all the way back to the plane practicall. We were greeted after a fashion by a diminutive floorwalker. He was supposed to sort us into groups. Who was a...

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Small beds and scatting

I've been in the land of cheese and novelty dildos, a land where a man in a Paisley cotton frock and cardigan can get on a tram, put a plastic colander on his head and attract no attention whatsoever . This is Amsterdam - where anything goes and frequently does. On my...

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You're nicked

It was a dirty night on the east side of Brighton. I'd been hanging in a bar with some Swedish chick and her pooch - a scraggy canine with a shot jaw. I'd not eaten so my gut was growling and something about the bar that night was fraying my nerves. Maybe it was the...

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Dancing with lesbians

Step, step, cha cha cha, step, step, cha, cha, cha. Bear with; just practising my ballroom - for I have been dancing with lesbians. I didn't mean to - it was an accident. H, who has a Gold Medal in Rumba (from the Gay Olympics in Vancouver) invited me along to see his...

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How not to behave in an art gallery

Another curious idiosyncrasy about the Germans - they don't like you going the 'wrong' way in an art gallery. Take my visit to the Brucke Museum in Berlin; on entering I'd assumed the gait of your typical museum flaneur, ie take a few tentative steps towards a...

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