Mainland Southeast Asia

Short-changed, shoo-ed out of shops and fleeced by taxi drivers: Vietnam can be hard to like, but why should that matter?

The history of the Khmer Empire is written in the ruins at Angkor, from ancient Roluos to Hindu Angkor Wat & the Buddhist Bayon

The ethical consequences of dark tourism are ambiguous, especially in Phnom Penh, because the Killing Fields and S-21′s extermination camp are monuments to violence as well as its victims.

Hirudo orientalis has two heads, two sets of reproductive organs and nine pairs of testes. Hiding deep in Cambodia’s jungles, it waits for unsuspecting animals [...]

Southeast Asian history is mostly the story of competing city-states like Bangkok and Ayutthaya, which are reincarnations, in their way, of one another, with the same karma.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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.