Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic books and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
As the Football World Cup opens in South Africa today, I am republishing the only football story I´ve ever written.
Watching the World Cup Match between the USA and Iran in Esfahan in 1998, was one of the highlights of my time in Iran. The streets of this beautiful city were crammed with revelers, celebrating [...]
When Dan, Tim and Fred, three naive hippies, set off from London to Kathmandu with few funds and a dodgy bus, a drug deal in Pakistan seems like the most common sense way to make the journey pay. But the mountains of the Hindu Kush, a mysterious Frenchman, a set of Iranian Siamese Twins cum nightclub singers, [...]
Getting there is half the fun, they say.
That’s what I thought, when the fat cop with the stubble grabbed my nuts in his little roadside shack, a few miles across the Pakistan border into Iran, on the way to Zahedan.
‘You have any drugs? You smuggle anything?’ his stale breath is very close to my face.
Two [...]