Latest Posts
A small armada of tour boats pulled up at the floating fishing village and a gaggle of foreigners alighted onto the rickety platform that serves as its makeshift town square. They proceeded to the leaking rowboats and crusty kayaks that
How did three weeks turn into eight months? It’s not as though Saigon—I’ve been calling it Ho Chi Minh City in these pages until now, but let’s give it the name and respect it deserves—is so captivating as to necessitate
When I departed Australia for Spain last year, I had my Kindle packed and ready. My reading had been planned in advance: Booker winners and Russian classics and theses on the nature of democracy—a library’s worth of books at my
Solicitation is no strange thing in Vietnam. In Ho Chi Minh City and Dalat, Hoi An and Hanoi, the offers come at you thick and fast: sunglasses, massages, motorbikes, marijuana. But it throws you on the streets of Nha Trang,
A couple of years back, in the lead-up to a visit to Russia, my girlfriend bought a Lonely Planet guide that I took an immediate disliking to. Reading Alex Garland’s The Beach in my youth had predisposed me to disliking
The decision to kill Hillary involved little hand-wringing or soul-searching. She was a pretty annoying pig, truth be told, giving Farmer John a hard time whenever she could. She would knock down his walls, get into his greenhouse, stick her
It’s probably the first time the waiter in Ensenada has heard these two words, but he takes them in his stride: “Ta, cobber.” In turn, Chris Western takes to the largest steak on the menu—he double-checked to make sure—with gusto.
It was on the road to Tây Ninh that Thomas Fowler and Alden Pyle found themselves trapped, in Greene’s The Quiet American, in a watchtower surrounded by Viet Minh; on the road to Tây Ninh that they escaped into the