19 essays filed from Asia.
Kyoto, Japan
Kyoto has a famous-temples problem: there are too many famous temples in a small city, and the day-tripper bus from Osaka delivers tens of thousands of visitors to half a dozen of them daily. The other temples — and the famous ones at 6 a.m. — are still entirely yours.
August 23, 2024
Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo is large in a way that defeats the standard travel rhythm. It is not one city; it is twenty-three wards, each a small city, each with its own grammar. The right pace is to do less, daily, and to do it more carefully.
August 19, 2024
Singapore, Singapore
Singapore has, for two generations, been written off by travel writers as too clean, too efficient, too engineered. They were almost always passing through. Stay a week and you discover a small, dense, multi-ethnic city of profound urban design intelligence and one of the best hawker-food cultures on earth.
April 29, 2024
Seoul, South Korea
Seoul is most itself between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The bbq restaurants are at full smoke. The streets in Hongdae and Itaewon are full of office workers on a third bottle of soju. The 24-hour everything is open. The city that took ten years to be discovered by Western tourists became, almost overnight, the most influential cultural city in East Asia.
March 12, 2024
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Chiang Mai is what Bangkok was, possibly, before the expressways. A small grid of moated streets, three hundred temples within walking distance, the smell of charcoal and lemongrass in the evenings. It also has the best curry noodles in Thailand.
January 30, 2024
Bangkok, Thailand
Bangkok is, for most visitors, a transit city — a 48-hour stop on the way to a beach. Done at that speed, it is overwhelming and exhausting. Given a full week, it becomes one of the most rewarding urban experiences in Southeast Asia.
December 4, 2023
Hoi An, Vietnam
Hoi An's central trading town, the old port on the Thu Bon river, is one of the most architecturally preserved towns in Southeast Asia. It is also, on lantern-festival nights, a crowded selfie corridor. The trick is the early morning, the rainy afternoons, and the bicycle to the beach.
October 22, 2023
Hanoi, Vietnam
Hanoi is a city of small plastic stools. They are on every pavement. They appear at dawn, around the noodle carts, and disappear at midnight, after the last beer. They are how you eat in this city. They are how you watch the city. Get comfortable on them.
October 15, 2023
Ubud, Indonesia
Bali is several different islands depending on where you stay. The Bali of crowded south-coast resort beaches is real. So is the rice-terraced Ubud Bali. So is the surf-village Bali of the east. The trick is to pick the one you actually want.
July 18, 2023
Beijing, China
Beijing is a city of axes — the great north-south central axis from the Bell Tower through the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven — and of pockets. The pockets are the hutongs, the grey-brick alley neighbourhoods, and they remain, in the surviving sections, one of the most distinctive urban textures on earth.
July 7, 2023
Shanghai, China
The Shanghai of the headlines — Pudong, the LED-skinned skyline, the supertall towers — is real and worth seeing once. The Shanghai of the *longtang* lane houses, the morning markets, and the plane-tree-lined French Concession streets is where the city actually lives.
June 30, 2023
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Hong Kong's verticality is famous. What's less famous is how walkable it remains. The Mid-Levels escalator alone covers 800 metres of climb. The city is layered — street level, podium level, rooftop level — and the trick is to keep moving between them.
April 4, 2023
Varanasi, India
Varanasi is not for everyone, and it does not pretend to be. The city is dense, intense, ancient, and dedicated to a kind of religious practice that does not soften itself for visitors. The morning river, at dawn, is the experience that justifies the journey.
December 18, 2022
Jaipur, India
Jaipur is the rare planned 18th-century Indian city — Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II laid it out in 1727 on the Hindu Shilpa Shastra principles, with the famously rose-pink colour washed onto every building inside the old walls for an imperial visit in 1876 and never washed off.
November 25, 2022
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Mongolia is, by population density, the emptiest country on earth. The steppe and the Gobi Desert stretch for thousands of kilometres of grassland and arid plain. The nomadic-herder culture, with its felt gers (yurts) and seasonal migrations, remains the country's defining cultural form.
August 15, 2022
Paro, Bhutan
Bhutan is the only country I have visited that requires a daily Sustainable Development Fee (now US$100/day) and a state-licensed itinerary. The cost is the point. The kingdom uses tourism to fund its national health and education systems, and to keep the country from being overrun. It works.
May 28, 2022
Kathmandu, Nepal
Kathmandu is two cities — the dusty, traffic-choked, modern capital, and the medieval Newari city of pagoda temples, hidden courtyards, and 1500-year-old shrines. The second city is the one to come for.
March 12, 2022
Luang Prabang, Laos
Luang Prabang is small. The entire peninsula between the Mekong and the Nam Khan rivers can be walked in 20 minutes. It is also one of the most preserved colonial-and-monastic towns in Southeast Asia, and the dawn alms procession remains, for now, an unforced daily ritual.
August 14, 2021
Kochi, India
Kerala is the antidote to the intensity of northern India. The state is greener, slower, and structurally different — Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish historic religious mix, a 100% literate population, a houseboat culture that lets you sleep on a rice barge in the canals.
February 28, 2021