Travel essays

Ayutthaya: a Buddha head held in the roots of a bodhi tree

The Siamese capital burned in 1767 is an island in the river, and people still live among its red-brick ruins.

Bangkok

The broken china on Wat Arun came over as ballast

A ferry of a few minutes from Tha Tien pier, beside Wat Pho, crosses the Chao Phraya to Wat Arun.

The one old Chiang Mai gate that still has its wooden doors

On Sunday evenings Ratchadamnoen Road closes to traffic, and food and craft stalls run from Tha Phae Gate to Wat Phra Singh.

In Chon Buri the buffaloes are judged on looks as well as speed

In 2026 the Chon Buri buffalo races reach their 155th edition, and the racing itself comes on the last of nine days.

Dan Sai: a white stupa where no one wears red

On a hill outside Dan Sai, the ordination hall, pagoda and memorial hall of Wat Neramit Wipatsana are all built of porous, reddish-brown laterite.

Upstairs at Phuket's first Chinese school, Chinese is still taught

Hokkien migrants who came for tin in the nineteenth century lined the old town on Phuket's east side with Sino-Portuguese shophouses.

The wax lines on Aomori's Nebuta floats

The floats parade on the nights of 2 to 7 August and spend the rest of the year in the Wa Rasse museum beside the station.

Fukuoka: ramen at the river stalls and a city name kept by one vote

In the evening, yatai stalls set up along the Naka River in Nakasu, each a wooden cart with a single counter and room for only a handful of customers.

In Gujo Hachiman, each pair of dance geta is cut from one block of cypress

In Gujo Hachiman, a castle town in the Gifu mountains, the Bon dance runs on more than thirty nights from mid-July to early September.

Kyoto

Chion-in's great bell stays silent on ordinary days

A short way south of Chion-in, Yasaka Shrine holds the Gion Matsuri for the whole of July.

Osaka: one dip only in the kushikatsu sauce

When Daruma opened in Shinsekai in 1929, it sold only beef and potato skewers, at one sen each.

Sapporo's clock tower began as a college drill hall

Sapporo addresses count grid blocks north or south of Odori Park and east or west of the Sosei River.

Keelung, the rain port, had 174 days of rain in 2025

East of the main harbour, at Zhengbin fishing port, Keelung's boats are moored in front of a row of old houses painted in different colours.

Kinmen's kitchen knives are forged from propaganda shells

After the 1958 bombardment the mainland shelled Kinmen only on odd-numbered days, a pattern that lasted until 1979.

Lukang: a Mazu blackened by incense

Once its harbour silted up, Lukang was never rebuilt wholesale, so Zhongshan Road still has its cake shops and old temples and the lanes keep their original width.

Nantou

Yuchi bred a black tea and called it Ruby

Black tea growing in Yuchi began with Assam plants brought in under Japanese rule, and only the bud and one or two soft leaves below it are picked.

New Taipei

In thirty years the Queen's Head at Yehliu has lost nearly half its neck

The Pingxi Line leaves the main line at Ruifang, a single-track branch that follows the Keelung River valley upstream to its end at Jingtong.

In Tainan the beef for the soup never sees a freezer

The streets of Tainan's West Central District still follow the line of the Qing city wall and the Five Canals that once ran to the harbour.

A canang sari on Bali's doorsteps, every day

Even at Tanah Lot, Uluwatu and the palace in central Ubud, where the crowds are biggest, the day's offerings sit outside the shops.

Baliem Valley: a salt well worked with banana stems

The outside world first saw Papua's Baliem Valley in 1938, from the window of an expedition aircraft.

Bonjol: the days when noon casts no shadow

North of Bukittinggi, in the hills of Pasaman Regency, a roadside park marks the equator on the ground, one foot in each hemisphere.

Three hundred mother palms from a coconut grove in Buol

Buol Regency lies on the north shore of Sulawesi, facing the Celebes Sea, and coconut and cloves are its main cash crops.

Denpasar: a square named for 1906

North of the square, the tallest shrine of Pura Jagatnatha is a white stone lotus throne whose seat is left empty for the supreme god.

Jember tobacco, grown for the outside of a cigar

In 1859 George Birnie and his partners leased land around Jember to grow tobacco, and the East Java town has lived on the leaf ever since.