Category: Excursions
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Notes on Genocidal Tourism in Cambodia
One of the emotionally complicating factors of constantly living in and travelling through countries with troubled pasts is that you will inevitably end up having many conversations with and interacting with people who had lived through that troubled past. And given that troubled pasts often involved death, betrayal, torture, imprisonment and whatnot, it’s a disconcerting…
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Brief Notes on 15 Days in Cambodia (part 1)
We just got back from Cambodia last night, returning to a cold, grey Shanghai and a chaotic jumble of bills, dirty laundry, empty fridge and dusty floors. The two flights from Phnom Penh to Guangzhou to Shanghai had been turbulent and cloudy and the taxi home from Hongqiao airport was lead-footed and jerky. We attempted…
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How much would YOU pay to be bit by a rabid monkey: More good times in Phnom Penh
Have I ever mentioned how much I loathe monkeys? In India, on an island just off Mumbai, a monkey once mugged me with a snarl for my bottled water; in Ubud, in Bali, a monkey lunged at me and dug his claws into my leg and wouldn’t let go. I wasn’t even teasing him with…
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Shouldn’t it be…harder?: On Travelling in Comfort
Let me introduce you to a few key examples of how I have traveled in the past. Let’s start at the beginning, when I was barely 20 years old. In 1994, I spent two months sleeping on my friend’s sofa in a small flat above a pagan shop in Galway, Ireland. I lived on packets…
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Meat and Mops- My Parents’ Journey to Qibao
So we went to Qibao yesterday, our first grand excursion in a week or so, as I’d been busy with stupid school stuff and having my jaw sledge-hammered, and my mother was battling her semi-inevitable post-flight cold. Doug and I had gone there about two years ago when we first moved to Shanghai, back when…
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It’s MAO’s Annual Self Criticism Time, Shanghai Style
I missed the new year deadline for resolutions by a few days but I was too busy drinking litres of tea in bed and eating Doug’s Christmas gift of German chocolate covered gingerbread and posting endless photo spam of frozen mops and singing students. Sometimes one just has to tread lightly upon the blog before dropping…
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Christmas Day Odyssey in Shanghai: A Quest for Doug’s Destiny
So remember how I said my next post was going to be all about the Christmas Party at the tea house, and how it would contain all my much-better camera photos rather than my crappy, grainy phone photos? Yeah. I lied. My bad. Unfortunately, we went out today. And when I go out, I tend…
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I Hate Crowds: Travelling in China During National Holidays
I really do hate crowds. Crowds make me want to hit people or queue jump just to escape from the queue (because in China, some queues are so vast and switchbacky that to get out you have to go forward). I don’t like noise. I really like quiet, empty places. People en masse exhaust…
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Awesome Things We Ate in Myanmar
Before we went to Myanmar, we really had no idea what to expect, food-wise. It wasn’t a cuisine that was well represented in the South East Asian culinary repetoire internationally. We knew it was just across the water from all things Indian and Bangladeshi, and surrounded on the other side by Thailand and China, with…
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Photos from Yangon
I’ve been experimenting with ways to get my photos up on here without having to go through Facebook links each time. Below is my attempt at uploading my Yangon album into a WordPress gallery. If you weren’t able to get past the Great Firewall to access the photos I posted yesterday, here is my first…
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Can I Show You a Bit of Myanmar?
And we’re back. And I’ve been floored with a tummy bug that whacked me over the head sometime last night, after we got back into Shanghai in a taxi that thought it had a jet engine. After 7 white-knuckle flights in a month (3 of them on Yangon Airways, whose motto is, unnervingly, “you’re safe…
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On travelling and on staying put
We’ve been in Myanmar about two weeks now, travelling close to the ground (usually about 6 inches from the pavement when facing backwards on a trishaw) and grinding our way from Yangon to Moulmein to Kyaiktiyo to Yangon to Mandalay to Hsipaw and I’m tired. For about two days I have been wanting to stay…