Kathmandu & Beyond - Off the Beaten Path Travel Blog

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.

We’ve fallen even farther behind with our posts, but we’re still going! From Dresden, we headed to Cottbus, a city that ...
20/06/2026

We’ve fallen even farther behind with our posts, but we’re still going! From Dresden, we headed to Cottbus, a city that doesn't appear on many tourist itineraries unless you are off hiking in the Spreewald. But Cottbus was part of the GDR for over 40 years, and plenty of traces of that history are evident, and it was good mosaic-hunting ground…

Dresden was the first place where some of the places on our list eluded us. Either we couldn’t get into a building, or o...
05/06/2026

Dresden was the first place where some of the places on our list eluded us. Either we couldn’t get into a building, or our pin was too vague - how many buildings on one hospital or university campus can you pop into in the hope of finding something before giving up? On the flip side, the House of Culture is fantastic (both inside and out), and we did find a concrete elephant slide 😆and a few other gems...

Next stop… Chemnitz, a city that was officially named Karl-Marx-Stadt between 1953 and 1990 and is still home to the wor...
31/05/2026

Next stop… Chemnitz, a city that was officially named Karl-Marx-Stadt between 1953 and 1990 and is still home to the world's largest Karl Marx head.
Chemnitz has also been called the Saxon Manchester because during the Industrial Revolution, Chemnitz was the richest city in Germany.
In 2025, Chemnitz was a European Capital of Culture, chosen for its “hidden artistic treasures, bold Brutalist architecture, and vibrant post-industrial culture”. You can guess which bits we were looking for 😉 but if you scroll through the photos, you'll also reach some of the pretty stuff!

Moving on to Leipzig, we didn’t find as many mosaics as we did in our visit to Halle, but it’s a great city with an inte...
24/05/2026

Moving on to Leipzig, we didn’t find as many mosaics as we did in our visit to Halle, but it’s a great city with an interesting mix of architecture and many reminders of the decades when Leipzig sat behind the Iron Curtain as part of East Germany.

Close to the historic town of Halle (Saale) is Halle-Neustadt, a planned 1960s “New Town” built during the East German S...
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").

*Next stop: Dessau.*Most people come here for the Bauhaus, the hugely influential art and design school that helped shap...
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!

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

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

A selection of random shots of our recent trip to south-central India taken on the 'big camera'. We are off on our trave...
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).

Next stop… Gokarna — a unique blend of sacred pilgrimage town and laid-back beach escape. Alongside its string of beauti...
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.

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