Western-Thai Dating: A Driver’s Guide
One of the most consistently entertaining aspects of the courting ritual indulged in by ageing Western men and much younger South-East Asian women is the...
Tagged: around the world
Ecotourism? My *rse
Monday morning sees us in Chiang Mai, for centuries capital of an independent state, sometimes Siamese, other times Burmese, now the hub of northern Thailand....
Does the Tooth Fairy Take Lao Kip?
So junior’s molar, which has been threatening to drop for the last few weeks, finally did the deed today. He hasn’t, historically, had the best...
Spirits of the Forest
The sheer complexity of the ecosystem in protected, mature forest, from lichens spinning their symbiotic webs across old bark to the chaos wild pigs wreak...
On Books
Back in Udomxay, the construction town in northern Laos where our two-day odyssey from Vietnam reached a natural close, we met a crazy Canadian chap...
Babysitting, Hmong Style
It’s not easy being a woman in the Hmong tribal minority of northern Vietnam. Or a girl, for that matter. This little girl is six,...
Global Time = Quality Time
My son and I set out to travel the world together in January. I’d imagined many wonderful things about the journey. What I hadn’t imagined is the sheer quality and quantity of time together.
Putting the Graphic into Ethnographic
As you can probably tell from the picture the Vietnamese Museum of Ethnography in Hanoi offers infinitely more fun than the rather cumbersome title would...
Making Incense, Vietnam
Incense is part of daily life in Vietnam. Joss sticks are offered at the altars which grace every business and almost every home, sold by...
Round Halong Bay by Junk
Halong Bay, North Vietnam, is one of the most dramatic seascapes the planet has to offer. Five hundred million years in the making, twenty million...