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Walk down any street in Luang Prabang, Laos, and you will be presented with any number of opportunities to interact with elephants. Some are more ethical than others. Indeed, at the Elephant Village, fifteen kilometres outside town, the motto is:
“This is a service we’re paying for,” complained the American girl as she and her bags were shoved unceremoniously into the admittedly too-full taxi that was to take us to the Hanoi coach terminal. “We’re going to give you the
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
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