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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Can Tho is a stop on most Mekong Delta itineraries. If you go to Can Tho expecting a rural Vietnamese town, a sort-of Hoi An Old Quarter retreat with picturesque cycle routes and souvenir-selling street vendors you’re going to be disappointed. But if you go to Can Tho expecting a thriving, modern city full of…
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I was going to type ‘is Dalat Vietnam’s biggest exporter of flowers?’, a quick, lazy search to find out whether I had any grounds to say that it was, but I didn’t get round to actually doing the research. As soon as I typed in ‘is Dalat’ Google’s auto-fill search function finished off my question,…
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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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It’s normal, I think, to put the most difficult and disturbing realities of life on earth to the back of your mind. None of us could function if we constantly acknowledged the truth of just how messed up this planet really is. If it wasn’t for that safe little smokescreen of wilful ignorance that envelops…
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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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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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I loved Hanoi in all its noisy, congested glory and spent many hours wandering, deftly avoiding death by motorbike, on the streets of the Old Quarter, but after a while I felt like I could do with a bit of tranquility and a history lesson somewhere green. This led me to the Imperial Citadel of Thang…
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