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 a mysterious mountain town that inspired Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki to create the trippy masterpiece that is Spirited Away? Yes. Definitely.
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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‘Don’t step on the moss’ is Ahmed’s only advice as we slip and slide up a steep, muddy bank, away from the road that runs from the base to the summit of Gunung Brinchang Mountain and towards the 200,000 year old Mossy Forest. Avoiding stepping on the spongey, khaki-coloured floor of the mossy forest is…
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Ahmed only stops talking to take a breath and he seems to breathe considerably less than I thought was normal. Driving in the same erratic, I’m a cat, I’ve got nine lives style I had become accustomed to in South East Asia he drives us up winding mountain roads to the Boh Tea Plantation in…
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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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The imposing walls of Hue’s Imperial Citadel, a city within a city, loom over Hue. These walls have borne witness to the rise and fall of dynasties, the toppling of governments, the waging and winning of war. Now the crumbling, moss-covered remains of what was once a heavily guarded fortress look out at the modern city…
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