I have an article in the April issue of Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia magazine about a recent six-day trip I took through the northeast of Vietnam on a Soviet-era motorbike. The issue isn’t online, but if you’re in the region you can find the magazine on newsstands. If you’re in Bangkok, look for it […]
Great story — and images — from New Mandala (which, by the way, is an excellent blog about Southeast Asia):
The Vientiane Scooter Club recently conducted its annual rally from Laos to Vietnam, a journey which saw many of its members rediscover their origins. A group of urban middle class Lao nationals of Vietnamese and Chinese […]
Bikes of Burden is a coffee table book featuring images of Vietnamese motorbike drivers hauling around enormous amounts of various and sundry items. I saw a copy in a bookstore here in Bangkok recently; it’s fantastic. The author is Hans Kemp, a Dutch photographer. Here’s a gallery of some pics from from the book. This […]
Reuters:
A court in Vietnam has upheld child molestation charges and a three-year jail sentence for former British rock star Gary Glitter, who had proclaimed his innocence and lodged an appeal.
Let’s see: Glitter’s had similar troubles in the UK, Cuba, and Cambodia. My guess: he’s certainly guilty, and the Vietnamese government is using him as an […]
Phnomenon is an excellent new food/drink-centric Cambodia blog. It is for the Kingdom what Noodlepie is to Vietnam.
Don’t miss Matt Gross’s fascinating piece in today’s New York Times detailing the rise in luxury tourism in Cambodia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia:
In almost every part of the country, you can find a conceptually and architecturally ambitious hotel: In mountainous Ratanakiri, there’s the Terres Rouges Lodge, a former provincial governor’s lakeside residence that has, […]
Gary Glitter, the shamed former glam rocker, has been detained in Vietnam for alleged sex abuse — and is professing his innocence, natch.
Judging from the photo above, here’s my reaction: guilty of crimes against tasteful attire! Would a sane man (apart from Bill Cosby) truly make the conscious decision to don a sweater such […]
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Everyone’s favorite washed-up glam-rocker/pedophile has done it again. After being deported from Cambodia, Gary Glitter’s on the lam in neighboring Vietnam.
AP:
HANOI, Vietnam — Authorities said Thursday they are searching for former British rock star Gary Glitter over his alleged relationship with a Vietnamese teenager.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung said officials have confirmed that Glitter, 61, […]
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Today’s Washington Post travel section has a great article on motorbiking in Northern Vietnam — and doing so on fabled Minsk bikes, no less.
Dustin Roasa describes the two-week journey he took with his girlfriend; he does an excellent job of conveying both the cultural and historical details of the trip along with the unique […]
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NYT:
The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar with the historian’s work say.
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WaPo: “Vietnam Buffs Bring Jungle to Va.: Reenactors Evoke a War Many Would Rather Forget”
I consider myself to be way ahead of the curve, so I shall be staging an Iraq war re-enactment this weekend in the Arizona desert. (I’ve got Syria, Iran, and North Korea re-enactments tentatively planned for next summer contingent upon current […]
Erik at the travel blog Gadling has selected one of my Vietnam pics, below, as his Photo of the Day. It’s one of my favorite images from what was a fabulous trip that Jill and I took there last March; in Erik’s words, the image captures “the sun simmering in a saffron haze.”
Mark Morford, in the SF Chronicle:
There remains this enormous and wicked sociocultural myth. It is this: Hard work is all there is.
Work hard and the world respects you. Work hard and you can have anything you want. Work really extra super hard and do nothing else but work and ignore your family and spend 14 […]
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I’ve finally gotten around to posting the photos–all 68 of ‘em–from the trip Jill and I took to Vietnam in March. Enjoy.