Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic crime fiction and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I watched hundreds of sharks pooling around coral ledges at thirty-five meters, so many they kept bumping into me. I watched giant tuna glitter in the dark thirty meters below me, leading tens of thousands of giant barracuda through the depths. I saw guitar sharks the size of [...]
German climber Ralf Dujmovits took pictures of 100s of tourists on the slopes of Everest in May. Some died on the mountain, due to overcrowding, inexperience and crass commercialism as The Guardian reports. The entire Everest region suffers from tourist overkill. And the locals, for the most part, are frozen out of the financial equation [...]
Chris Taylor, author of Harvest Season, a dystopian backpacker novel set in China that I recently reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, recaps and comments one of our meetings in Bangkok and our discussion on the future of backpacking, guidebooks and my novel The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu, which will be republished as an e-book [...]
My review of Chris Taylor´s excellent novel Harvest Season is running in The Wall Street Journal this week. A thoughtful meditation on backpacker mayhem in Southern China, quite unlike Alex Garland´s The Beach. Read the full review here.
Tom Vater talks pop music in Asia with Sean Hocking, owner of Metal Postcard, Hong Kong´s most prolific alternative record label. In 2010, Metal Postcard released the debut single of Phnom Penh`s The Cambodian Space Project. This year, Hocking will unleash a 7″ vinyl single of Pussy & The Learjets, Bangkok’s loudest RocknRoll band, on [...]
Every day, we appear to be moving a little closer to a state of affairs where governments could become obsolete. Large parts of the world have always been ruled by people who don’t really qualify as governments, but in recent years, perfectly respectable rulers have also shown signs (not for the first time) that they [...]
About two weeks ago, I reported on the satirical website ChinaReallySucks.Com, which until then had evaded the Chinese censors. The website takes pot-shots at Chinese linguistic inadequacies and features hundreds of photographs of inordinately undemocratic public signs, bizarre slogans on T-Shirts, as well as images of corporate rip-offs such as Star Fucks, Pizza Huh and [...]
Before I get accused of anti-Americanism, I´d like to take the opportunity to inform readers of a very naughty site on China, www.chinareallysucks.com. You´re not going to find any objective analysis here, the makers of this site clearly don´t like China much. Amazingly though, it is claimed, the site is produced, researched, ridiculed and uploaded [...]
Marc Eberle’s The Most Secret Place on Earth (The CIA Covert War in Laos), co-written by Tom Vater, has been nominated for the prestigious “Jade Kunlun” Awards of the 2010 World Mountain Documentary Festival of Qinghai, China. The film has been nominated for the “Best Director” category. The Most Secret Place on Earth (The CIA [...]