Sapa is a town in the mountains of North Vietnam, originally a hill station for the French in 1922, now a base for trekking in the surrounding countryside through cascading rice…
Top 10 travel scams in South-East Asia
Long term travel means you are constantly watching what you spend, so avoiding being scammed out of your life savings is a big deal. More often than not, you…
Sun, Sea and Snorkelling on the Gili Islands
After bearing as much of Kuta as we could, we booked a bus and boat transfer to Gili Trawangan, part of a group of three islands off the coast of…
Bintang time in Bali
“They say If you like Kuta, you need to go home” is what Jimmy, our host on the Island of Gili Air in Lombok said upon meeting. We told him we’d…
Kyoto, Hiroshima and Osaka
The Shinkansen ‘bullet’ train from Tokyo took us the 513 km to Kyoto in just over two hours. Let’s put that into perspective. The 696 km train journey from Bangkok…
The Cameron Highlands
A four hour bus from Penang took us to the town of Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands. Another hill station from the colonial era known for its tea plantations,…
Penang – City of Food and Culture
We were excited to come to Penang, mainly because of its reputation for great street food. Anyone we’d spoken to or anything we’d read online raved about the hawker stalls…
Nasi Lemak
We couldn’t leave Penang without trying Malaysia’s national dish, Nasi Lemak. Traditionally eaten for breakfast and often seen wrapped in banana leaf parcels in food courts and on the the…
Tandoori Chicken @ Little India, Penang
Little India in Georgetown is a lively, vibrant neighbourhood with some fantastic food options. Walking down the road we saw this guy come out of the butchers with a large…
Char Koay Teow
Just down the road from our hotel is Kimberly Street, where in the evening dozens of Hawkers set up their stalls. Right outside Sin Guat Keong Coffee Shop is a…
Getting Curried Away In Penang!
We arrived in Penang about 2 hours ago and headed out straight away to sample some of its famous cuisine. We stumbled upon a Nasi Kandar restaurant called Hameediyah just…
Shan State: Trekking, Hill Tribes and Mr Shake
Hsipaw is a strange little town in the Northern Shan State. Most people visit for the trekking and hill tribe villages. This was on our agenda too but first we…
A Taste of Colonial Burma
Back in Mandalay and a 4am train took us to Pyin Oo Lwin, a former British hill station during the colonial era, then named Maymyo after Colonel May. For anyone…
This is Burma…
…and it will be quite unlike any land you know about – Rudyard Kipling once wrote. And he was right. After nearly 3 months already in Asia we thought we’d…