Wild Wild Life
One of the disappointments of my brief, seven day stay in Borneo is that I only scratched the surface of the natural splendors on offer. On one of my day trips I visited an orangutan…
Borneo At The Right Time*
If you play word association with Dorothy (which I highly recommend, by the way, as you’re 100% never getting back what you expect) and toss her Borneo, she replies with “leeches.” And while I’m not certain leeches are truly…
Land, Air, & Sea
Biomes, not theaters of war. A tour of Malaysian wildlife took me to all three zones. One of them, Land, was something of a war, if I’m being honest. But all of them featured fascinating…
Hardcore Hindu
Temple fatigue is real, especially when all of the temples we’ve visited in SEA have been Buddhist. Batu Caves, probably the single biggest attraction in the Kuala Lumpur area, offers up a Hindu response. While…
Not The Good Turgid
I am referring, of course, to the weather. I have spent some large number of months in SEA over the last year, a region renowned for its swampy weather, where average temperatures in the 90s…
Doi Inthanon
There appears to be something I haven’t done in Chiang Mai, some last adventure that will round out the entire experience. I’ve squeezed the lemon pretty thoroughly here (which is probably why I feel pulped),…
Life Is A Cabaret…
For a couple of reasons, this is going to be brief. The first reason is that I’ve only taken in two live performances while I’ve been in Thailand. The other reason is that photography was…
Thai Textiles
I’m sure it’s the decades spent with Dorothy, but of all the craft traditions, textiles seem like the deepest expression of a society’s culture. There may be a shared vocabulary of design motifs across the…
I’d Like To Speak To Your Manager…
Everyone else on my day trip visited a hill village and some temples, but not me. My tour featured an ethical tourism dilemma and wrestling questions of art and authenticity into submission. And they didn’t…
Wat Phra That Doi Suthep
Wat Phra That Doi Suthep is considered Chiang Mai’s most important temple, founded in 1383 by the Lanna kingdom. Hang on, because its origin story is… special. The official story is that a monk named…