In Holguin you must do as the Holguin’s do. The people of Holguin go about their business at an easy pace. Sauntering around the city they stop for a rest in the city’s many parks, where the benches sit invitingly in the dappled shade of tall trees. Or they take a seat in one of…
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A trip to Taroko National Park is the reason most people visit Hualien on the East coast of Taiwan. Famous for the marble gorge at its heart, Taroko National Park is over 92 hectares in size and is sliced open at the centre by the surprisingly diminutive LeeWoo Ho River. It’s a place that begs…
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Hit enter on the google search ‘embalmed and displayed’ and I guarantee you will instantly regret it. I visited the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi in March 2015 at the very start of a three-month trip around Vietnam and have been trying to write about the experience ever since. There was something so unnerving…
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For my first attempt at a ‘Day in the Life of’ blog post I chose a day spent travelling between one place and another, Pangkor Island and Taiping City in Malaysia. If I had written this the day before there would have been very little to report as I spent so many hours reading a…
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Sometimes you can go to a new place without any expectations. Nothing but a name, the place is an empty vacuum until the moment you step into it, breathe its air and look around. Hoi An was not this. Hoi An was a place I had already vividly imagined, a collage of postcards and adverts…
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I learned many things during my time working in a small museum in the UK, many strange, extraordinary, worrying things, but one of the real eye-openers for me was that all museums, no matter how great or humble, have objects in their collection for which they have no provenance. What that means is that they…
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I was told that nobody goes to Ninh Binh, which isn’t in itself a reason not to go but went some way in explaining why we found it so difficult to find somewhere to eat that first night. After walking the dark, rainy streets for half an hour or so we settled for a pho…
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Following the disaster of our first trip we tried again to visit the Yogyakartan Sultan’s Palace, this time on a Sunday, in the hope of seeing some traditional Javanese dance. It’s now more than two months since I first experienced traditional Javanese music and dance and I still can’t seem to get the sense of…
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