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On the edge of Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas, lies an overgrown ashram reminiscent of the great ruins of the Mayans. Fifty years ago this year, the Beatles arrived at this unlikely location at the invitation of the
The young boy sitting across from me in the tuk-tuk smiles politely and asks me my name. I hate to be a cheapskate, put out by the loss of a couple of dollars, especially when everything here is so cheap.
The smell hits you before anything else, about halfway between the bus station and the town centre, filling your nostrils and urging you onward. Then there’s the sight of it, a literal smoke signal, wafting upwards from street level before
It’s the end, as they say, of an era. Or at least it was meant to be. On Saturday last week, the RMS St Helena departed the South Atlantic island that gives it its name for what was supposed to
The following book reviews were written for The Weekend Australian back in 2016. For whatever reason — probably the fact that I didn’t file them on time — they were never published. I’m putting them out there now for posterity’s sake. From the review
Every morning in Transnistria, the self-proclaimed Eastern European country that no other country recognises, there’s a run on the banks. You wouldn’t think there would be much demand for a currency like the Transnistrian ruble, which doesn’t have an ISO
Songkran is not the best time of year to be a correspondent in Pattaya. It’s not that the story you’re after – a hard-hitting piece on sex tourism, naturally – has gone anywhere. Given the Thai New Year tradition of
The fastest way to find a cockfight in Ubud is to find yourself a man with a cock. (The double entendre, as Clifford Geertz put it in his seminal piece on the Balinese cockfight, is entirely deliberate: “For it is