On a hot day, we climb the Great Wall of China. Not, unfortunately, at Simatai or Mutianyu, the less touristy sections of the Wall near Beijing, but at Badaling. Badaling is 70km from Beijing, the nearest the Wall comes to the capital, and the most commercial and crowded section.
Hanging on to the iron railing that [...]
In the early years of the 17th century, a powerful but eccentric nobleman built a pleasure resort against a backdrop of the wooded hills outside Salzburg. Archbishop Markus Sitticus named his pretty yellow palace Schloss Hellbrunn. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Sitticus had little love for gilded chandeliers and brocade drapes. So he set about filling [...]
Pondicherry has a strangely surreal feel to it.
It’s not as if India is short of places with a colonial past. Just about every hill station in the country, from Nainital to Ooty, has its clutch of old stone churches, its Mall Road and its little shops selling jams and marmalades. Many also have old cottages [...]
When the Farakka Express pulled out of Delhi at 9.45, I was already comfortably seated. A bespectacled young man in faded jeans and checked shirt was the only other occupant of the compartment. He looked quiet, respectable—a decent youngster, I thought.
“Are you going all the way to Malda, sir?” He asked me.
“No,” I replied. “Only [...]