With a friend I just finished my first long-distance bike trip down the west coast of Taiwan. I’d planned to make a full loop of the island, but I’m headed to Sri Lanka in a few weeks and wanted to spend some more time in Taipei before I leave, so I hopped a train when I got to the end of the tracks in the south and came back to Taipei. When I come back to Taiwan I’ll rent a bike again and go down the east coast, which’ll probably be sometime this summer.

After a year traveling Southeast Asia, followed by another year traveling Northeast Asia, I had seen more of the Asian continent than I’d seen my own country in Canada. But with two years abroad I had skipped one Christmas at home with my family, my mother wasn’t going to let me get away with skipping another, so after two years abroad I was coming home for the first time – I decided to take the opportunity to make up for lost ground, and experience as much of Canada as I could.

I just came back from 22 days trekking the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, with a few side treks including one to Tilicho lake.

I spent about a week and a half in Nagarkot, which is on the outskirts of the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal. You can see Kathmandu and it’s neighbouring city Bhaktapur from the mountaintops in Nagarkot, but it’s a world away. Before going to Nagarkot I was in Kathmandu trying to use Google to find the best next stop, but when it came to Nagarkot I couldn’t find much info that wasn’t related to trekking (actually it’s hard to find any information related to Nepal that isn’t related to trekking). So, now that I’ve been there, I wanted to share what you can do in Nagarkot that’s not trekking-related.