501 Places

Phnom Penh was one of my favourite stops on our SE Asia trip. Considering I spent a large part of one day there (Christmas Day to be precise) in close proximity to our hotel bathroom, that is quite a compliment. It’s not a pretty city, with only a few buildings of note. The Royal Palace […]

For many visitors to a country their interactions with local people form the highlight of their stay, and create their most vivid memories. And of these encounters the ones with children inevitably tug at the heart strings and foster feelings of joy and, too often, sadness and helplessness. It was no different for us in […]

Using Bangkok purely as an entry-exit point to SE Asia, we ended up with three nights and only one day in the city. It was our final day, and we were relaxed at the fact that we would do little more than scratch the surface of this giant city. We have so many plans to […]

I wish we’d had more time to spend in Cambodia. The little we saw of it was captivating, and the warmth of the people along with the delicious Khmer cuisine meant that we were sorry to leave when we did. I am grateful at least that we did get to see a little of the […]

We had arrived in Siem Reap in the early afternoon and made plans to visit the Angkor Wat temples for the next three days. So after a painfully slow check-in we set about exploring a little of the city. I took a strong dislike to Siem Reap at first glance, and while I did learn […]

Angkor Wat was without doubt the most famous and most visited stop on our SE Asian journey. I don’t think I met anyone who was travelling in Cambodia for whom this wasn’t the main purpose of visiting the country. Yet I have to confess that by leaving Angkor Wat to the end of our itinerary […]

In a recent Lonely Planet article, Tony Wheeler described his visit to northern Laos to hike the 100 waterfalls trek. It had only been discovered (for non-locals of course) in 2008, and a local ecotourism company Tiger Trails was taking small groups of visitors to the falls. We love hiking, we love waterfalls: we just […]

While the tourist paths of northern Laos are becoming increasingly well trodden, the number of visitors to the south of the country are still relatively small. Those who do make the trip to the areas close to the Cambodian border, dominated by the Mekong and the life that is centred around it, are well rewarded […]

Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated three million people lost their lives under the barbaric rule of the Khmer Rouge and their murderer-in-chief, Pol Pot. Initially welcomed as a revolution of the proleteriat over the previous corrupt system, the killing and torture of the Cambodian population started within days. The infrastructure to conduct genocide on […]

It’s hard to walk down a street in the big cities of SE Asia without seeing a huge number of massage establishments. In some places massages are even available in the public squares or in the doorways of buildings. I’m not talking about the seedy image of massage parlours, but regular places where both tourists […]