Kathmandu & Beyond - Off the Beaten Path Travel Blog

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Kathmandu & Beyond - Off the Beaten Path Travel Blog

Travel blog about Off the Beaten Path Travel and alternative things to do in better-known places. Welcome to Kathmandu & Beyond.

Quirky travel, street art, abandoned places, architecture, focussing on Asia, Far East and New East (Eastern Europe, Balkans, Baltic States, Central Asia). We are full-time travellers, Mark and Kirsty Bennetts. We’re from the UK, but, for the past 12 years, home is wherever we lay our backpacks! We’ve each travelled to over 100 countries and our travel blog documents our travels in words and photo

graphs. These days, we enjoy following the road less travelled and exploring lesser-visited places with an emphasis on quirky sights, architecture and monuments, abandoned places, and street art. Through our travel blog, we aim to share our experiences and inspire you to travel to off the beaten path destinations, and seek out unconventional things to see and do in better-known places. Join us on the road less travelled as we discover quirky and unusual things to do and see, and explore off-beat destinations.

17/05/2026

Close to the historic town of Halle (Saale) is Halle-Neustadt, a planned 1960s “New Town” built during the East German Socialist era to house workers from the nearby chemical industry and their families. Once promoted as a model socialist city of the future, it was designed around wide boulevards, Plattenbau apartment blocks and the idea of collective living - very different to the centuries-old streets of nearby Halle (although there is a great mosaic there too - shown in the first photo).
There was plenty to keep us busy in Halle-Neustadt, with the most impressive mosaic being the monumental "Unity of the Working Class and Foundation of the GDR" ("Einheit der Arbeiterklasse und Gründung der DDR").

11/05/2026

*Next stop: Dessau.*
Most people come here for the Bauhaus, the hugely influential art and design school that helped shape modern architecture and design worldwide. Us too! We fully embraced the clean lines, flat roofs, steel frames and endless glass.
The Bauhaus building itself was the highlight, especially for Kirsty, who became slightly obsessed with the huge glass walls and staircases. It’s amazing how modern the whole place still feels nearly 100 years later. We also tracked down a few lingering relics from the GDR years, because apparently we can’t visit eastern Germany without hunting for Socialist-era artwork and architecture.
Oh, and we found concrete elephants!

07/05/2026

We landed in Berlin and headed straight to Potsdam for a couple of nights (our Berlin time comes at the end of the trip).

Most visitors go to Potsdam for its Baroque architecture, grand gardens and Sanssouci Palace — the summer home of Frederick the Great. Us? Nah… we were there for the Socialist mosaics and public artworks created during the years when Germany was divided into East and West Germany, and Potsdam was part of the Eastern Bloc.

The highlight was probably the Der Mensch bezwingt den Kosmos (“Man Conquers the Cosmos”) mosaic, considered one of Potsdam’s most important examples of Socialist Realist public art. Although the stone hippos come a very close second for Kirsty!

05/05/2026

So who guessed Germany correctly? 🇩🇪
We’ve just arrived in Potsdam and we’ve found our first mosaic en route to finding a beer!

01/05/2026

A selection of random shots of our recent trip to south-central India taken on the 'big camera'. We are off on our travels again next Tuesday. We are heading to a country in Europe we both have been to before, but also one neither of us knows, having only ever been for work (Mark - several times) and on a whirlwind coach trip (Kirsty - just the once). Would anyone like to guess where?

Clue: mosaics, monuments and wandering around housing estates will be high on the agenda 😬.

All photos: Kathmandu and Beyond (see individual photos for locations).

04/04/2026

Next stop… Gokarna — a unique blend of sacred pilgrimage town and laid-back beach escape. Alongside its string of beautiful beaches and relaxed, yoga-loving vibe, Gokarna is also an important spiritual destination for Hindus.
It’s a place that’s been on our wishlist for years, and although we may have built it up in our minds as more of a paradise than we found, we still ended up having an enjoyable few days there.

29/03/2026

Beach time 🏖️ 🌅 😎 🐄
From Panjim, we made the hop, skip, and jump to Agonda Beach in South Goa. Many people think of Goa as a single beach, but although it is India’s smallest state, it’s still roughly 1,429 square miles and a three-hour drive from north to south (more like six by public transport).
Again, it’s over 26 years since we were last in Goa, when we spent a few days at Calangute Beach as part of our honeymoon. Three decades of overdevelopment have contributed significantly, and several people warned us not to return to the northern beaches, so we opted for Agonda, two hours to the south. It was a good decision, and considering we hadn’t even planned to visit Goa at all on this trip, we had a relaxing few days.
And I just realised we didn’t take hardly any photos, and the few we did were mostly at sunset!

23/03/2026

As per usual, we’ve slipped into catch up mode with pics from our India trip! Moving from Karnataka to the west coast, we spent a night in Panaji, the capital of Goa.

Unfortunately I (Kirsty) fell sick on the bus journey so didn’t get to see as much of Panaji as I would have liked to have but it did mean Mark got to go out and annoy the instagrammers on his own.

Social media influencers - in fact anyone who wants to strike a pose to in front of the colourful UNESCO-listed buildings - are banned from taking photos as the locals have got fed-up with the disturbance.

08/03/2026

Badami was also our base for visiting the nearby temple towns of Pattadakal and Aihole (Mark was upset that he forgot to get a photo of himself standing by the town entrance sign! 🤣🤔)
Pattadakal is a World Heritage Site that, according to UNESCO, represents the high point of an eclectic art that, in the 7th and 8th centuries under the Chalukya dynasty, achieved a harmonious blend of Dravidian (South Indian) and Nagara (North Indian) architectural styles. No less impressive, nearby Aihole hovers on UNESCO’s tentative list in recognition of the evolution of temple architecture.

05/03/2026

Our next stop was the town of Badami, famous for its 6th-century rock-cut cave temples and hilltop fort.
This was our third attempt to visit Badami and the surrounding area - previous tries were many years ago and thwarted by road closures due to flooding. This time it was plain sailing without a drop of water in sight!

27/02/2026

🛕🇮🇳 We last visited the magnificent ruins of Hampi in central Karnataka as part of our honeymoon just over 26 years ago. Apart from the road in and out improving, the nearby gateway town of Hospet being renamed Hosapete, and the difference in the entrance fee between foreigner price versus local price being even greater than it used to be (INR600 versus INR45), not much has changed in all that time. You still have to stay in small, family run guesthouses if you want to have the temples on your doorstep, only vegetarian food is served in the restaurants, and booze is a big no, no.
However the enforced teetotal vegan lifestyle is completely worth it! Some temples are still active while others are no longer in use, and exploring them is fascinating, especially with the river setting and dramatic landscape of giant boulders all around.

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