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 [...]
Virtually everyone in the Everest region now has a mobile phone. Even the lowest paid workers on the trails, the porters who carry the beer and noodles for the tourists, have phones and use them constantly. Nepal has a population of some 30 million people and about six million live outside the country and send [...]
The trailer of Camera Camera (2009), a documentary film by Malcolm Murray, about the nature and effect of mass tourism in Laos, offers an intriguing glimpse of the Land of the Million Elephants and the million backpackers that travel through it. Who said the camera never lies, one might as oneself, as one looks at [...]
In 2006, I researched and wrote a report for Fauna and Flora International (FFI) on the Bunong, one of Cambodia´s indigenous minorities. The Bunong live mostly in the north eastern province of Mondulkiri, an area of high barren plateaus, dense rainforests and virtually no roads, bordering on Vietnam. Traditionally, the Bunong practice swidden agriculture and [...]
In 2006, I wrote a report for Fauna and Flora International (FFI) on the Bunong, one of Cambodia´s indigenous minorities. The Bunong live mostly in the north eastern province of Mondulkiri, an area of high barren plateaus, dense rainforests and virtually no roads, bordering on Vietnam. Traditionally, the Bunong practice swidden agriculture and domesticate elephants. [...]
In 2006, I wrote a report for Fauna and Flora International (FFI) on the Bunong, one of Cambodia´s indigenous minorities. The Bunong live mostly in the north eastern province of Mondulkiri, an area of high barren plateaus, dense rainforests and virtually no roads, bordering on Vietnam. Traditionally, the Bunong practice swidden agriculture and domesticate elephants. [...]
In 2006, I wrote a report for Fauna and Flora International (FFI) on the Bunong, one of Cambodia´s indigenous minorities. The Bunong live mostly in the north eastern province of Mondulkiri, an area of high barren plateaus, dense rainforests and virtually no roads, bordering on Vietnam. Traditionally, the Bunong practice swidden agriculture and domesticate elephants. [...]
Kampot, southern Cambodia. The heat is infernal. Several salt farms lie outside of this small, sleepy riverside town. Large fields irrigated with saltwater stretch for miles across a flat and hot expanse. The evergreen Elephant Mountains loom in the distance, reflected in the stagnant shallow brine. Men and women, wrapped up in cloth against the [...]
In The Great Railway Bazaar, published in 1975, best-selling travel writer Paul Theroux described Bangkok as “a hugely preposterous city of temples and brothels”. More than thirty years later, first time visitors to the City of Angels could be forgiven for thinking that Theroux‘s analysis is as valid today as it might have been then, in [...]