“Increasingly of late, and particularly when I drink, I find my thoughts drawn into the past rather than impelled into the future. I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of my earlier student days in England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.”
Vikram Seth, From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet

At home, in Shanghai, I have stuck about 120 of my own photographs to the living room wall. The pictures, now a little discoloured by the late afternoon sun, chart my overland journey, in 2006 and 2007, from London to Shanghai. The first is of the Thames on an overcast day. The next is of mountains and sea on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. The photographs move quickly on, left to right, top to bottom, through Europe, the Middle East, India, Nepal and eventually China.

Most are of scenery, sites and the people my girlfriend, Claire, and I encountered en route, but near the bottom I have stuck a picture of myself sitting on a train station platform. It is often the photograph that visitors comment on first, intrigued perhaps by the raw anger written upon my face.

The picture was taken in Gorakhpur, a city in northern India. Its station is the country’s largest broad gauge railway junction, and is as close to the Nepali border as you can travel by train. Claire and I arrived there after a month in Nepal. Although we would eventually travel into China from Kathmandu, we had come back to India to meet my family, scheduled to arrive in Calcutta, 816 kilometres away, in a little over a week. Read the rest of this entry »

By day and by night, opposite worlds exist within Thailand’s capital. Busy, yet relaxed, Bangkok bustles at all hours. I didn’t quite realize the extent of it until I spent 24 hours awake in a city that has forgotten the need to sleep .

I began the day by cruising through the city in the modern, affordable (40 baht) and delightfully air-conditioned Bangkok SkyTrain. Our guesthouse was at the end of the line, so we were guaranteed seats, a luxury not available to passengers who board at later stops. It took about 20 minutes to arrive at Mo Chit Station, next to Chatuchak Market.

The market is sprawling and enormous. Despite walking through it for hours, we only saw a small fraction of the shops. Hitoshi, a vagabond expat staying at our hostel, wanted a mudskipper to take home to Japan, so the live animal section was where we began. Creatures were everywhere. Most shops specialized, selling either aquatic animals or mammals. Read the rest of this entry »

Until two weeks ago, I had never heard of Quzhou but, when summer boredom began settling in, I started rummaging around in my slightly dated Zhejiang Guide and discovered there were a couple of cities I had never been to, including Jinhua and Quzhou. A few days later, my boyfriend and I bid our dusty top floor apartment farewell and hopped on a train. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello Holiday Fu, how are you?

My name’s Anderson, and I’m about to cycle through SE Asia. With my wife and three friends. For over four months. In Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. With no messy schedule to interfere with the fun.

Sounds exciting, exhilarating, and perhaps a little bit crazy, right? Well, that’s what I think, at least. But with a minimum of planning, a pretty tight total budget (under $5,000 per person), and the gumption to say “yes,” we’ll all be convening in Bangkok this week to begin what can only be described as an odyssey.

Fortunately, having already spent a year travelling in India and Nepal, as well as 16 months teaching ESL in Busan, South Korea – both with my wife Liz – I’m assuming (uh-oh), that I’m reasonably well prepared for the maddening hardships that low-budget travel often leads to. Thankfully, your job’s the easy part – you’ve just got to read about it to find out what happens.

My upcoming series of articles intends to balance the adventure of cycling, the energy of SE Asia’s many amazing places, and the opportunities provided by slow-paced travel. If you want the day-to-day updates – conveniently PG-rated for our families – you’ll have to read my blog. But if you want intriguing stories on modern travel, highlighting spectacular locations and unique people, with a dedication to actually keeping it real, then Back To Bangkok, An Asian Bicycle Adventure is going to be perfectly suited to you.

OK, that sounds great and all, but who am I? Read the rest of this entry »

In the metropolises of China, there lurks a deception that goes beyond the massage parlor posing as a brothel or the suspiciously under priced Prada handbag. The deceit of the city is, in fact, more insidious. Beneath a veil of modernity, cities confuse the visitor into forgetting that he or she is in a country that only recently escaped, and is still in flight from, the clutches of the Cultural Revolution, a period of time that witnessed the loss of not only vast treasures of history and culture, but also an unascertained number of possibly millions of human lives.

This is not to mention, in a hushed whisper, the daily censorship, propagandistic newsreels or downed websites that have become the norm in the maintenance of this vast country’s growth.

Yet, the facts of the last century and the social impacts of the present day system are, for the foreign visitor, virtually effaced from everyday urban life, aside from the occasional shop that hawks Chairman Mao t-shirts or insipid gossip between foreigners.

There is, however, the countryside and its villages, areas on the outskirts of China’s development where the past has not been entirely forgotten, where, in fact, even the least interested visitor cannot ignore its existence. Read the rest of this entry »