WARNING: During this blog post you may experience excessive description and hyperbole of epic proportions. That was an example just then. It's incredibly disconcerting swimming in the water at Ha Long Bay. It's very cloudy and incredibly deep. I innocently remarked to another passenger that it would be a great place to dump a body: no one would ever be able to find it. That got her a bit worried. Still threats of murder aside all I could think during my two day tour of the bay was; "Surely there can't be anywhere else like this in the world." Ha Long [View Full Entry]

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I'm facing up to the fact that I'm not going to do justice to Vietnam in this single visit. As I write I've got 11 days left in which I will attempt to try to fit in Hoi An, Hue, Ha Long Bay and Hanoi. This is my folly. Still, to prepare myself for this onslaught as well as relax after my encounter with canyoning I travelled to the coastal resort of Nha Trang with the sole purpose of having a mud bath. I spotted the Thap Ba Hot Springs in my guidebook while I was wondering what to do in [View Full Entry]

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Catch Up: Apologies for leaving you blogless for such a long period, I've been in Ho Chi Minh City for the past week which should, and I'm sure would, lend itself to innummerable interesting posts, but any blog from me during this period would have consisted mainly of grunts of pain. This is because in my inimitable way I managed to distend my stomach, allow acid up my oseophagus and cause a inflammation. A side effect was that I couldn't eat anything more solid than yogurt. Anticipating a lack of interest in me being given a entire medicine cabinet to consume [View Full Entry]

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A German word which I may or may not have spelt correctly. It encapsulates the joy one feels when faced with the suffering of others. Any way, right now I'm feeling quite a lot of schadenfreudic joy. This is because I am on Phu Quoc Island right now and everyone else I know isn't. Admittedly just being on Phu Quoc itself is enough to make me joyful. But this feeling is increased exponentially with the knowledge that as I write, everyone else is having to deal with a Monday morning. As my first stop in Vietnam Phu Quoc makes a pretty [View Full Entry]

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"With a woman's whole affection fond and trusting Sita loved, And within her faithful bosom loving Rama lived and moved, And he loved her, for their parents chose her as his faithful wife, Loved her for her peerless beauty, for her true and trustful life, Loved and dwelt within her bosom though he wore a form apart, Rama in a sweet communion lived in Sita's loving heart!" This a summarised and translated section of the Ramayana, one of the great Indian epics. The passage I chose details the deep and truthful love of the two protagonists, Rama and Sita. Curiously I've [View Full Entry]

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My timing of when to go travelling ideally would have been better. However work constraints meant that I could only travel in the latter half of spring and during the summer. If I were Interailing round Europe this would be ideal. However I wanted to go to India and South East Asia. This desire caused an outcome that can be best summed up as damp. In India, dampness came from the sweat, in Thailand, from the rain. The sky's precipitation has replaced my own, but it has done so in Cambodia to an unexpected, but welcome, effect: the Angkor temple of [View Full Entry]

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Why is it so difficult for a humble blogger? All I want is either an easy time so that my travels are as enjoyable as possible or an absolutely awful time so I can moan about it here. What is of no benefit to me is an experience that is half of each. As I have already said previously in my posts my motto while traveling is "Subtlety? Sod It." Honestly. So the point of this post is that I've crossed the Thailand-Cambodian border, my first land border crossing if you don't count EU borders, which don't. And everything went absolutely [View Full Entry]

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Bangkok hasn't been what I expected if only because I was going on something that another traveller had told me in India: "Bangkok's airport is completely different to the city itself." So when I arrived from Delhi and got off the plane I wasn't surprised by the modern and bright airport, but I quickly expected that once I left I'd be in a city similar to Delhi where poverty and infrastructure lived side by side and there was noise and confusion everywhere. I was half-right because Bangkok's traffic certainly has a similarly optimistic view of road regulations as Kolkata's but the [View Full Entry]

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I have crossed India by myself. I've been repeating this statement to myself for the past 2 days. I am very proud of it. Sometimes I replace "India" with "the Indian Subcontinent" and "by myself" with "single handedly". And then I imagine briefly that I'm a pioneering explorer with an interesting and appropriate hat. In fact I have covered a tiny part of India, taking in some major places but only along a very thin line. In some cases, Varanasi and Agra spring to mind, the path I took has been a very well trodden one indeed. And I leave India [View Full Entry]

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I’m staying in Khajuraho at the moment which is a World UNESCO protected site because of the large amount of well preserved medieval Hindu & Jain temples. Tourists (including me) come here because of the smut. Along with carvings of the gods and armies marching past, there are also lots of carvings of us mortals getting it on in positions a lot more exotic than the missionary. I would like to be able to talk about the beauty of the sculpture and how imposing the temples are as well as perhaps touching upon the meaning of some of the sculpture. However [View Full Entry]

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