Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic books and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
As I am currently the Daily Telegraph’s Bangkok expert, I will be taking part in a live web chat on Southeast Asian travel destinations on Wednesday the 7th of December from 12.30-2pm. London time of course.
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 one [...]
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.
My AWSJ feature story on Kep, a seaside resort on Cambodia´s southeastern coast, is now available online.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Kep-sur-Mer was a popular beach getaway for Cambodia´s elite, who built villas and modest palaces along the beach front and sipped cocktails to the sounds of Khmer Rock’n’Roll.
In the 1970s the small town on [...]
The website Tripbase offer information for would-be travel writers, on the whole very sensible and useful for prospective scribes.
The introduction -The harsh realities laid bare- is both sobering and spot-on: Travel writing is a tough and competitive business, a trade for which one needs to have plenty of persistence and low financial [...]
This city pulsates.
We cruise into town from the airport, Ahmed at the wheel of an old beaten up Peugeot. The traffic is a crazy as anything anywhere, fast, furious and jerky, a sea of cars, old and new, antique and flash, barely functional and elegant, weaving along three aside on a two lane road. Cars [...]
The following text is an account of a journey to the grave of Pol Pot near Anlong Veng, Cambodia in 2002. It is part of my non fiction book Beyond the Pancake Trench - Road Tales from the Wild East, published by Orchid Books in 2005, which made Book of the Week in the South [...]
I traveled to the source of the Ganges, India’s holiest river, accompanying my wife Aroon Thaewchatturat on a photography assignment, and wrote a book on the characters we met along the way, including Indian writers Ruskin Bond, Bill Aitken and Ganesh Saili. I wrote most of the book in a cottage in Landour, a village [...]
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, [...]