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Spent much of the day on a ferry from Alleppey to Kollam, another town down the coast. The ferry uses only inland canals and lakes. On arrival, we got into a procession with brightly lit animatronic Gods on floats, drummers, dressed-up people with oil lamps, torches, and several elephants. All with incredibly loud Indian music…

The big attraction on Kerala’s coast is backwater touring,  and Alleppey is ground zero for it. When you arrive by bus, touts will descend on you brandishing beautiful but faded pictures of houseboats. The iconic Kerala houseboat looks like a huge wicker basket mounted on a barge,  but these aren’t actually the best way to…

Alleppey is a town on the coast,  south of Cochin. It has nothing to do with Aleppo. Alleppey is mostly known as the best place to explore Kerala’s backwaters,  an extensive network of waterways spanning thousands of kilometers. While the hills are dry and cool, the coast is hot and humid. Getting there involved another…

Up in the hills of Kerala they are growing tea since British colonial times. Nothing is ever flat here, and tea plantations cover the rolling hills like bright green pillows. Women hand-pick the tips of the plants for white tea and the top leaves for green tea, then someone clips the rest with shears for…

The Coast of southern India is hot and humid, even in February. This was perceived as unsatisfactory by the British when India was part of their empire, because British weather is not like that. So they moved inland to the “hill stations”. So did we today. That meant a long tuk-tuk ride to Ernakulum, the…

The long tuk-tuk drive from the airport to Fort Cochin early in the morning brings back memories of South India. The long lines of gaudily decorated trucks and tuk-tuks (three-wheelers) with their “sound horn” signs, the stained concrete and rusty metal, and the Indian spices in the air… The ferry that took us across the…

The photo shows what happens when the village youth gets their collective hands on a tablet. First they win three consecutive Solitaire games, and then they guide a knight to victory against fire-breathing zombies. A normal day in the village. I took the night train to Hanoi and spent the day there. At dawn I…

A friend invited me to his family’s home in a small village in the mountains of northern Vietnam, close to the Chinese border. I was welcomed at a small homestead by three generations for three days. The house is built from bamboo cement and wood. They have six dogs, three cats, two buffalo, two pens…

Why is it that every next leg on my journey requires taking a bus at six o’clock in the morning… And one of those local things, built for people a head smaller than me. And the local buses always operate in “never full” mode… Anyway, to my surprise they run a direct bus from Muang…

The Nam Ou is a tributary of the Mekong, coming from the mountains in the north and joining the Mekong near Luang Prabang. I am hoping to cross the border to Vietnam there, and travelling on the river is the most scenic way there. I had to stop at Muang Ngoi, a small village stretched…

Luang Prabang is the jewel of Laos, the land of the one million elephants. (Except they killed off most of those.) This town is home to buddhist monastery at nearly every major corner, with beautiful wooden pagodas painted with gold. The tree-lined streets are quiet, narrow, and lined with wonderful French colonial architecture, with no…

It takes time two days to travel on a slow boat from Houay Xay to Luang Prabang. I went with a first-class cruise that stopped at a number of villages, all very simple affairs made from woven bamboo and wood on stilts, with children and animals running around on the dusty paths. The river is…

Two hours in a very authentic local bus brought me to Chiang Khong this morning. Not much to do there: one street, no traffic lights, two monasteries. Small wooden longboats ferry passengers across the Mekong river to Houay Xay in Laos, for one euro, where it takes a few minutes to “check in” to Laos.…

Last stop in Thailand: Chiang Rai is a smaller version of Chiang Mai without the traffic. It’s at the south end of the Golden Triangle in the border area between Thailand (check), Myanmar (check), and Laos, where I’ll be tomorrow. The attraction here is nature, with waterfalls, forests, mountains, and rivers, but this time it’s…

It’s a long train ride from Bangkok to Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand, over 14 hours – in part because the tracks were damaged during the monsoon season this year. The first-class sleeper ticket was a good investment. Chiang Mai is Thailand’s second-largest city, after Bangkok, which is fifty times larger by population.…

<p dir=ltr>Back in Thailand. After a brief visit to Bangkok I went on down the coast to Pattaya. This town has a reputation for tourism gone wild, like Palma de Mallorca, Cancun, Vang Vieng, or Las Vegas, so I have always avoided it in the past. Time to change that. It’s true, the town has…

Yangon is a large busy city at the Yangon River. Big rusty ferries full of shouting street vendors selling everything from jackfruit to toothpaste cross the river. The other side is called Dala, and it’s a different world. It feels like a river delta village, with small bamboo and wood houses spaced widely, with forests,…

The country is full of Buddha statues, many golden, or covered in plaster, or plain brick. But on closer inspection, many of those are monks, not Buddha. Buddha is actually the title of someone who has achieved enlightenment, not a specific person. But with a capital B it usually refers to the first buddha, the…

Inle lake is up in the eastern mountains, so it’s pleasant and cool after the humid heat of Mandalay. The lake is very shallow and is now, at the end of the rainy season, at its largest. There are many villages in the lake, where all houses are built on stilts and are reachable only…

Mandalay is not a beautiful town. The city center is loud, busy, and ugly. The enormous palace ground has an authentic moat and wall, but the interior is mostly an army camp now plus a hastily built imitation of a few of the old buildings. The city doesn’t really have much in the way of…

Google‘s shoddy Blogger app finally posted the previous article on the 15th attempt, but not without losing the photos. Here they are. Do they test this stuff at all? Or only on the company network?… Read the rest

Rudyard Kipling never was in Mandalay, but I am. It’s a long drive from Bagan. I saw more pagodas (of course) and a number of villages. Only old people and children were there, everyone else was out working in the fields. The villages are built from bamboo and wood, there are animal pens, and large…

Yangon has the largest and the most golden pagoda, but Bagan makes up for that with numbers. They grow them like mushrooms. On forty square kilometers there are 2000 of them, mostly made of brick but there is some marble and gold as well. For rich people it’s chic to rebuild pagodas, so many of…

There are many pagodas around Yangon, more than one would think people would need, and I have seen a number of them today including one on an island in a lake, where no shoe may be brought to the island. But the largest and most famous one is Shwedagon. It’s almost a hundred meters tall…

Myanmar, also called Burma, was until recently a highly locked-up military dictatorship. Hard to get in, hard to get out. It’s now changing rapidly. Yangon, the largest city, is changing at a breackneck pace. Just now emerging from its time capsule, it’s full of beautiful but very dilapidated colonial architecture. Life happens on the street,…

Hello, I am back! Greetings from Bangkok. Tomorrow morning I’ll fly to Yangon in Myanmar, a country that was until recently an impregnable military dictatorship. Tourism is still highly regulated but possible. Trouble is, bringing a cell phone into Myanmar is illegal, and the Internet is somewhere between highly instable and nonexistent. So, this blog…

Surprisingly, electronics in Bangkok are not cheaper than in Europe. The selection is enormous, confusing, and colorful like only Asia knows how to do. The Panthip electronics mall is a vertical Akihabara – six floors with everything from cell phone protectors to blinking LED jewelry. The biggest game in town is Android tablets, not cell…

Left Vietnam on the last day permitted by my visa. The time passed quickly. Bangkok is easy to reach from anywhere in Asia, and I like it, so I’ll be spending a few days here. Although I have seen Bangkok Grand Palace before, it’s been a long time so I spent a few hours there,…

Can Tho is a much larger town in the Mekong delta. There are tourists here, but most come just for the floating market. Those who stay get to see it when it starts, at 6:00, before the day trippers arrive. All the farmers and fishermen load their wares on large boats, and park it on…

South of Ho Chi Minh City, also known as Saigon, the Mekong river reaches the sea and forms a huge delta. There are some well-worn tourist trails here, but Tra Vinh is too remote for that. I haven’t seen another westerner all day, and there are a lot of stares and hellos when I pass.…