Thais take their food very seriously. Combine this fact with Bangkok’s vibrant cosmopolitanism and you have a city that will consistently keep your taste buds singing. You might dine in a traditional Thai house serving the finest of Thai cuisine, or find yourself tucked away in a French restaurant able to compete with the best…
Read moreBangkok district guide
To put it simply, Bangkok can seem like a nightmare to the uninitiated. Sprawling expressways and overpasses, the huge new Sky Train and crowded streets full of vendors give the city a distinct Blade Runneresque feel. To confuse matters further, there’s no true ‘centre’ to the city, with various districts famed for different reasons being…
Read moreMighty Mekong
We’re sitting on the second floor verandah of the guesthouse, a perfect point from which to watch the traffic on the Mekong pick up in a rush to beat the falling darkness. Speedboats, a vivid mix of banana yellow and blood red, skip along the river, reaching speeds of up to eighty kilometres an hour….
Read moreGolden weekend escape
If you think about it, the perfect tropical island can’t really be reviewed in any lengthy way. There’ll be white sand, coconut palms, turquoise water – anything beyond that is really just ‘development’, right? And that can’t possibly good for our perfect island… Unless you’re talking about Golden Buddha Island in southern Phang Nga province….
Read moreScaling new heights
When we were kids, we believed there was a guest book hidden at the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge to sign your name in if you managed to make the illegal climb up. Also known as the Coathanger, the world’s largest single span bridge was there in the background as we kids threw up…
Read moreLush and lovely spot in Penang
Quiet, lush and teeming with plant varieties from around the globe – and monkeys – Penang’s 29-hectare Botanical Gardens are worth going out of your way to visit; no other such well-stocked public gardens exist in Malaysia. The gardens lie in a valley about eight kms outside Georgetown, Penang’s capital. They were established in 1884…
Read moreVang Vieng awakes
In 1994 the Song river flowed sedately through Vang Vieng, a small village-town just off Route 13 in Vientiane province, Lao PDR. Local women washed their hair in the river’s shallow waters, men pushed their bicycles across the smooth pebbles lining its bed and children pointed and cried when they saw some of the first…
Read moreSlurp up the cultural soup
Whether you’re a farang needing to kill a couple of days waiting for a visa or just a tourist wanting to immerse yourself in another culture for a few days, Georgetown is a gem of a destination. History lives in the colonial streets of this town, the capital of Malaysia’s Penang Island. What immediately strikes…
Read morePhetburi
Need to hire a motorcycle assassin? If you pay attention to the press, Phetburi is the place to go for some of the best. We didn’t notice any hanging around advertising their wares, but that’s not what we went to Phetburi for… Just three hours by bus or train from Bangkok, Phetburi was founded in…
Read moreChanthaburi
At only three hours drive out of Bangkok, Chantaburi makes a good weekend getaway if you’re keen on doing a bit of exploring. But let me be honest: none of the individual sites in Chantaburi are worth the trip alone. Combine all the sites together in a two-day trip, however, and you have yourself a…
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