Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic crime fiction and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
Sacred Skin, my book on Thailand’s sacred tattoos, with images by Aroon Thaewchatturat, a current bestseller in Southeast Asia, has been reviewd on a blog named Free Tattoo Patterns Online who had this to say: “…Vater has a long history of writing about the subcultures of this part of the world and talks with authority [...]
Kathmandu offers much more than ancient shrines and palaces though the city does have a surplus of those and there’s a temple on almost every street corner, Buddhist, Hindu, often something in between. But beyond religion and age old tradition, the city in in flux, straining towards its own definition of modernity, with only the [...]
Kathmandu is booming, slowly. On my walks around the Nepali capital, I encountered, hung out with and spoke to these wonderfully friendly and accommodating people, a few of the city’s two million inhabitants.
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After a seven year break, far too long, I am back in the heavenly city for a few days. Kathmandu has grown into a little urban monster but once the shock at the congestion has worn off, the Nepali capital unfolds as a multi-layered, booming mountain town, quite happily bouncing between tradition and modernity, in [...]
In this month’s issue of Geographical, the magazine of the Royal Geographical Society: Reviving the spice of life Pepper from Cambodia’s Kampot region was once world renowned, but the industry almost disappeared under the Khmer Rouge. Now, a new initiative is helping to reinject some spice into Kampot’s growers. Luke Duggleby photographs. Tom Vater reports
Veteran roving Asia reporter Ron Gluckman wrote a great review of my new book Sacred Skin, the first English language book on Thailand’s spirit tattoos, in the Wall Street Journal, in tandem with a look at another soon to be published title on the same subject by Joe Cummings and Dan White.