Mainland Southeast Asia

In Mae Salong, a Chinese minister and his wife invited us to a Sunday service, attended mostly by the Akha, one of Thailand’s hill tribes.

An interview with a veteran of China’s Forgotten Army in Mae Salong. Abandoned by Taiwan and adopted by Thailand, he fought for over 40 years.

At the foot of Lasagongma Mountain, 5224 metres above sea level, the Mekong takes its first icy breaths. Under Tibet’s cobalt skies, it tumbles toward flatter earth, into tropical Southeast Asia, where it meets the ocean at Vietnam. It’s a journey of 4,350 kilometres through six countries, making the Mekong the world’s tenth longest river. [...]

A travel story about a trek in rural Laos, near Luang Prabang, and the fine line that divides tourism from voyeurism.

When Henri Mouhot travelled to Luang Prabang, he was the first white man to enter Laos in 25 years. He died beside the Nam Khan, where a tomb stands as a testament to his journey and his journals, “scribbled generally by the light of a torch, and on my knees at the foot of a tree.”

Luang Prabang is a riddle that photographs can solve. It is a town popular with tourists and a World Heritage site, but it rarely feels overrun. It is like a sprawling resort in places, with a commerce given over to foreign comforts, but it is not a colony on the Banana Pancake Trail. Instead, Luang [...]

Claire and I went to Vang Vieng to laze in a grove of Edenic green. It was a picture-perfect fantasy, conjured up by a postcard in Vientiane labelled Blue Lagoon, but we were curious too. Vang Vieng was where drug-addled backpackers bobbed downriver in tyre tubes, and its ugly reality did not come as a [...]

A jaded view of tubing along the Nam Song River in Vang Vieng, Laos, and other bad backpacker behaviour on the Banana Pancake Trail.

A man I met in Vientiane, who spoke eloquently about the city and how it had changed, initially gave short, guarded answers to my questions. When I promised not to quote him, he opened up, but I couldn’t fit what he said into my portrait of the Chinese people changing Laos without either revealing his [...]

A portrait of the Chinese immigrants transforming Laos’ sleepy capital.

A night train from Bangkok to Nong Khai, on the border of Laos, is an opportunity to indulge in fantasies of the East.

Koh Mak is Thailand’s quiet island. In the Gulf of Thailand, near Koh Chang, it isn’t visited by the hordes of tourists that fly into Phuket and Phi Phi; you can relax, and listen to the sound of the water curling its way up the sand.

Songkran in Bangkok feels more like a monumental three day water fight than anything sacred…Futilely swinging my pistol in defence, we made our way to the road leading directly to Khaosan. Throngs of chalk-smeared people ran through the whitened streets; where it was too crowded to run, they edged forward, with nowhere to hide from the ceaseless ambushes.

The censor didn’t deliver the letter, and through every promotion and every move, he made sure that he received the 95 that followed – and that the businessman’s mother, who must have thought herself abandoned by an ungrateful son, received none of these letters from Thailand.

I don’t have a single journal entry about my three months in India. I didn’t write anything about my time there, except for a post about the dancer that didn’t dance, in a Bombay beer bar. The scene – a slice out of a furtive, alternative reality, swallowed up in Mumbai’s underworld – spoke to me, forming sentences in my head. But those brief moments of inspiration stood alone.