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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
We climb long and hard into the mists of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, the vertigo hitting suddenly, nearly two thousand feet up. Only moments ago, or so it seems, we were down on the coastal plain with its stifling heat and
When several hundred supporters of LGBT rights took to the streets of Ho Chi Minh City last weekend, one could have been forgiven for fearing the worst. Strutting down Nguyễn Huệ pedestrian mall in drag and making a beeline for
I had not been long in Ho Chi Minh City when it was suggested by a regular at my local. We should set up a company and 3D-print rhino horn—using keratin, the stuff of which horns and fingernails are made—and
World Heritage site Ha Long Bay is one of Vietnam’s prime tourist spots but as hundreds of Australians floated around on luxuriously appointed cruisers a couple of weeks ago, looking at the wedding cake limestone islands and watching holidaying Russians
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 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
This time last year, I wrote a short piece about the hoops through which expats on the South Atlantic island of Saint Helena were forced to jump in order to watch Game of Thrones‘ fourth season. There, where cable television