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  Greetings from Kathmandu, Nepal… Hope you guys are well and trading great!   It has been GCSE results week back in the UK, so congratulations to all those young people discovering what their next adventure might be. Good results or disappointing ones, life has a funny way of taking us somewhere completely unexpected… and sometimes those unexpected paths turn out to be the best ones. Last week I was telling you about the Independence Day games in Bali, and how much our staff enjoy making complete fools of themselves. I was writing from Kuala Lumpur excited because I had found Tokyo street with an inspiring Lucky Cat shop.  If you missed it, you can catch up here.   From there I took a Malaysia Airlines flight directly to Kathmandu. Lovely staff who actually remembered me and made a fuss. That's unexpected; you don't get that on Ryanair.. Likewise Kathmandu is certainly the kind of place where things happen unexpectedly—and rather serendipitously. It's still the rain...

Greetings from... well can you guess? I hope you guys are doing well - enjoying the summer and trading well!  Last week I was telling you about the Tea Blenders of Bandung and making friends with a taxi driver / out of work actor. If you missed it, you can catch up here. Now, looking at those two pictures, you might reasonably think I have finally made it to some place new - can you guess? Before leaving I had a very interesting week in Bali. Every year around Indonesian Independence Day, we have a Team Bonding Day at AW Advantage , our IT back office. This year the theme was Heroes of Indonesia. You see our team comes from all over Indonesia, and each of them chose a different local hero from the history of their own area or island. Bondhan and myself were installed as X Factor-style judges, which I think we took rather too seriously. Here are some of the contestants. And wow... I was so impressed. Vika, for example, came as Sayuti Melik — the man remembered for typing up the fina...

Greetings from Bali… Hope you guys are doing well! Last week I was telling you about Bandung in West Java—a very surprising place. If you missed it, you can catch up here . The journey back was almost as interesting as the journey there. Bondhan and I took the feeder train from central Bandung to the Whoosh station before catching the fast train back towards Jakarta and the airport. The feeder train was pretty special. In fact, it took us to the most beautiful, cutest and most comfortable little train station I think I have ever seen. It was clean, modern, surrounded by green hills and somehow felt more like a boutique hotel than a railway station.  Then, of course, we got back on the Whoosh... and a Batik Airways flight back to Bali. But I have more to tell you about Bandung.. Tea in Punclut  While in Bandung, we headed up into the surrounding mountains to an area called Ciumbuleuit—which I really don’t think I can pronounce properly. The locals call this leafy, elevated and ...