Vagabonding in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, without plan or destination.

Ceylon is the name the British used for Sri Lanka. Their tea plantations are still here, scenically covering the hills and valleys of Sri Lanka’s mountain region. Next time you buy an expensive small package of exquisite Ceylon tea, think about how it was scooped up from a huge pile on a factory floor here.…

There’s a train from Kandy that scenically winds its way up and down Sri Lanka’s Hill country. The views of the tea plantations in the steep valleys are fantastic, but the train isn’t -  it’s so packed with people that it makes the Tokyo metro look like a golf course. I am amazed that nobody…

Kandy is up in the mountains of Sri Lanka. Not sure I like it much -  lots of traffic, bus diesel fumes, and very narrow sidewalks with fences on the sides so cars aren’t bothered by human obstacles. They clearly don’t want pedestrians. But otherwise Sri Lanka feels like India 2.0. Much cleaner, far more…

Trivandrum is a major transport hub and international airport in southern India,  but it doesn’t have very much to offer to tourists. The main temple is closed to non-binding and the palace next door is closed to everyone,  except the museum. So we went to Kovalam for the day.  There is some debate on which…

Kanyakumari sits at India’s southernmost point,  and gets its fame from being the place where the Arab Sea,  the Indian Ocean, and the Bay of Bengal meet. People say that only here you can see dawn and sunset at the same point, a statement that needs so much qualification that it really doesn’t mean much.…

Varkala’s beaches have become a major attraction. The main beach is huge,  with fine white sand, warm water, good surf, and lifeguards waving red flags that are cheerfully ignored by everyone. Most swimmers are men; if women go into the water they are fully dressed and stay at the edge. India is still quite conservative.…

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…