Machete Lessons for Beginners
It would be fair to say that watching one’s nine-year-old son improve his machete skills while 8-12 hours from *any* form of medical care, however...
Tagged: trekking
When Travel Becomes Time Travel
Tomorrow we embark for Pulau Halmahera, one of Indonesia’s Spice Islands, where we will travel back in time. Our aim? To experience the nomadic hunter-gatherer...
Climbing Mount Kinabalu
Dali would have loved the summit of Mount Kinabalu, the highest peak between the Himalayas and New Guinea. Granite towers, horns and cowslicks protrude improbably...
Ulp. It's an Alp.
When a mountain makes it onto the state flag, you know it’s a big old mountain. And Mount Kinabalu, which stands over 4000m above Sabah...
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....
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...
Here Comes the Rain…
Maybe it’s El Nino. Maybe it’s climate change. Maybe we’ve brought the English summer with us. But it feels like the rains have come early...
Virachey National Park
Virachey National Park sprawls across northeastern Cambodia, right up to the borders with Vietnam and Laos. Within it is a fraction of the Ho Chi...
Poachers and Gamekeepers
“You want beer party now?” As we wandered the haunted hotel by torchlight, Saa’s invitation kind of broke the mood. The Bokor Hill Station, a...
Tree, Not Try
Tree knows the Bokor National Park better than most. After all, he lived in the forest for two years. “My life was not a good...