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 photographs. 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.

Often it's the smaller industrial satellite cities that yield better finds than the bigger ones. Aksu, just south of Pav...
18/10/2026

Often it's the smaller industrial satellite cities that yield better finds than the bigger ones. Aksu, just south of Pavlodar, is one such example. While many cities are taking down or hiding their Lenin statues away, Aksu still have a park full of busts of the man through his ages. So many that we had to make a little collage so as not to spam the post!

From Semey, we took a shared taxi to Pavlodar. The city is a major industrial hub, heavily developed under Soviet planni...
15/10/2026

From Semey, we took a shared taxi to Pavlodar. The city is a major industrial hub, heavily developed under Soviet planning. Although it has undergone de-Sovietisation, a few pockets of Soviet mosaics, WWII memorials, and industrial-era public art remain. Plus a little more modern architecture and a particularly good post-Soviet mosaic.

Going from humid, rainy Chiang Mai to cold, windy eastern Kazakhstan was a bit of a shock to the system! 😬🥶After a quick...
10/10/2026

Going from humid, rainy Chiang Mai to cold, windy eastern Kazakhstan was a bit of a shock to the system! 😬🥶

After a quick two-night pitstop in Almaty, we headed east to Semey. It’s famous as the home of national poet Abay and the home-in-exile of famous Russian writer Dostoevsky. Both have dedicated museums, but we skipped them in favour of our own hunt for Soviet-era mosaics, monumental artwork, and other architecture from the era that caught our eye.

07/10/2026

🚇🇰🇿Conceived during the Soviet era with construction beginning in 1988, the Almaty Metro finally opened to the public in December 2011 after decades of delays, mostly due to financial constraints. The most recent stations opened in 2022 and it was Kazakhstan's first and only underground rapid transit system.

Bright colours and public art in Frankfurt Oder 🇩🇪A short hop from Berlin, Frankfurt Oder (not Frankfurt, Frankfurt) fea...
28/09/2026

Bright colours and public art in Frankfurt Oder 🇩🇪
A short hop from Berlin, Frankfurt Oder (not Frankfurt, Frankfurt) features a surprisingly vast collection of public art that was primarily commissioned between 1960 and 1990 as part of East German reconstruction projects which mandated artwork to feature in new urban developments.
And yes, our tardiness is reaching new levels! We're off on another trip at the weekend so are trying to get the last couple of stops from our Germany trip posted before we switch countries...

What's the saying? Better late than never?...Back in the 1950s, Eisenhüttenstadt was designed as East Germany’s ideal so...
15/08/2026

What's the saying? Better late than never?...

Back in the 1950s, Eisenhüttenstadt was designed as East Germany’s ideal socialist city and has some seriously stunning (and massive!) mosaics. We explored Eisenhüttenstadt a few months back during our trip to Germany and are finally sharing the photos 🙈

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.

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