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

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.…

Just returned from another motorcycle tour of Vietnam’s mountainous interior, along the Ho Chi Minh trail at the Cambodian border, for three days. People get rich here with coffee, and replacement their traditional but drafty wooden houses with gaudily ornamented concrete ones, sometimes right in the middle of the village next to a bamboo barn.…

Hang Nga in Dalat is also called the crazy house. It’s a large complex of buildings and connecting bridges, one lazily winding over the top roof, very narrow and without much in the way of handrails. The design lacks the angular simplicity of Gaudi’s work in Barcelona, it’s just… crazy. A large family of hobbits…

There’s a number of beaches around Hoi An and neighboring islands. Fine white sand (somehow managing to be scalding hot in the sun anyway), emerald water with soft surf, palm trees, little beach huts, and very affordable cocktail service. Not unlike Bali except only a handful of people enjoy the beach. Finding a bicycle big…

Much of the country was devastated in the American War, but a few ancient towns survived. Hoi An is the most popular of those. Almost all buildings in the old center have stood for centuries, and even newer neighborhoods try to be sensitive of the past. I have occasionally complained about towns that sold their…

The bus between Hué and Hoi An is so boring that all I remember of the last time I used it is being disappointed that it uses the new tunnel rather than climbing over the mountains separating former North and South Vietnam. So I used a motorcycle tour that took me all the way west…

On my last visit, they were still restoring the royal citadel of Hué, destroyed in the American War. Now several more buildings are completed, but there is still lots of empty space with the scars of that war. The walled old quarter is still beautiful, tranquil, and amazingly untouched by tourism. The eastern end of…

The city of Hue is famous for improbably elaborate meals. Went to a restaurant that I discovered four years ago and instantly loved. It hadn’t changed, except now a tour bus was parked outside. Had my usual ten-course lunch, starting with spring rolls. How would you serve spring rolls? Put them on a plate, add…

Spent a few days on tiny Monkey Island, just off Cat Ba. The area’s highlight is Halong Bay, a dream seascape of steep karst mountains rising from the South China Sea. But I have been there before – and the sky was overcast – so I decided to check out some islands. My island is…

Everyone here has a cell phone. There are phone shops all over the place, and they are all similar: a big and usually brightly colored and slightly fading sign over the door announcing “iPhone” or “Apple Store”, a brand-new sign wrapped around the display cases saying “Samsung”, and the actual display cases which are filled…

Didn’t feel like just taking the train back to Hanoi, so I got on a rickety local bus south to a big lake, at Thac Ba. It’s so off the tourist trail that it took me an hour to find a hotel – not labeled as such of course – ignoring several locals explaining that…

Bac Ha is much more impressive than Sapa. Trails run along the mountainsides, high above the valleys with great views. There are fewer villages up there but I had a great guide, Hung, who comes from a minority village himself and got us invited into numerous private homes. The houses of the Flower H’Mong tribe,…

The countryside around Bac Ha is a vertical version of Sapa. Roads wind along the edges of mountains, with beautiful views of valleys and endless ladders of rice terrace upon rice terrace. Scattered between them are the minority villages, just as poor as the ones near Sapa. They build with mud walls here though. The…

All around Sapa are the tiny villages of the H’Mong and other minorities, who live mainly as rice farmers. Every accessible piece of land in the valleys is terraced. I spent seven hours walking among the fields and villages, away from the tourist roads. We had a major thunderstorm yesterday so the paths are soaked.…

Sapa is at the northern edge of Vietnam, at the border to China. I am not planning to cross over into China though, they have tightened the visa restrictions so much recently that it’s not practical. I hope China won’t destabilize… They’ve arrested a politburo member recently. Anyway, Sapa is high up in the mountains,…