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Jul 14

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Island Idylls in Bintan

Until this February, I’d never given any serious thought to visiting the holiday island of Bintan in Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago. It took a solo work trip for me to eventually hop aboard a domestic flight from Jakarta, a journey that was slightly longer than the usual 55-minute ferry ride across the strait from Singapore. That hardworking city-state often looks to its larger neighbors for places to lepak, a word borrowed from Malay to describe the act of loitering around, to chill and do nothing. The broad perception among Singaporeans – and one that I also held until recently – is that Bintan is all about lepaking in beachside resorts; that it is purely geared toward weekenders looking to cocoon themselves in the smart hotels scattered along the island’s northern shore. How wrong I was. Read more

Jun 24

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On the Cusp of Change: Semarang’s Old Town

In a previous post, penned a number of months after my first visit to Semarang three years ago, I described the old town district of Kota Lama as “one of the best-preserved historic centers of any major city in Indonesia”. Up until the mid-2000s it had suffered decades of neglect, compounded by poor drainage and a flood-prone location. Since then there’s been a recent push to restore the old town’s vitality with the ambition of becoming a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2020, though much still needs to be done before it can earn that coveted title. Read more

Jun 3

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The Historical Charms of Medan

Ask any Indonesian here in Jakarta about Medan and its people, and you will likely get one of several prevailing opinions. Some declare it a rough and aggressive place whose unruly residents speak with a coarse accent. Others rave about the food, particularly the non-Muslim fare of the Chinese and indigenous Batak communities. Still others might say the city has a reputation for crime: cue the Medanese friend who spoke of a break-in at his family home while his mother was around – the thief escaped after hearing her screams and realizing he’d entered the window of a room that had been locked from the inside. Then he told me of a cousin’s encounters with a (sympathetic) local mafia boss who was a regular at her restaurant. Few visitors – if anyone – would describe Indonesia’s fourth-largest city as beautiful, charming, or easy on the senses. But good food is not the only redeeming quality of the boisterous provincial capital of North Sumatra. Read more

May 24

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Malacca: Treasures from a Kristang Kitchen

Kumi nang bergonya! “Eat, don’t be shy!”

Those unfamiliar words jumped out from the opening page of a vermilion leather-bound menu, a reminder that I was no longer in traffic-choked Jakarta but the easygoing Malaysian city of Malacca. Sitting in a rattan cane–backed dining chair, I looked up to see pastel-colored walls decorated with replicas of historical prints and old photographs; wooden fans spun lazily from the high ceiling as the nighttime breeze filtered in through half-open windows. This was Melba at the Mansion, the upstairs restaurant inside a heritage-themed hotel called The Majestic Malacca, and I was about to get a culinary introduction to Kristang culture. Read more

May 6

36 Comments

What I Love About Seoul

The first thing you might notice about Seoul is the technological prowess: sleek, quiet trains whisk you from Incheon International Airport to the central station in less than an hour, inside spotlessly clean carriages fitted with electronic maps above each set of doors – a sequence of red and yellow lights to chart the 48-kilometer (30-mile) journey. Then, once you’ve navigated the maze of passageways at Seoul station to get on a subway train, there comes a jolt of global cosmopolitanism: you may well encounter a blonde-haired expatriate who speaks fluent Korean and a local student joking in English with two African friends. Read more

Apr 10

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The Long Slog to Seoul

“USA? USA?”

On board a Seoul subway train at half-past midnight, an elderly man who appeared drunk or lonely (or both) was accosting a young Western couple sitting just across from us. Bama averted his gaze and I bowed my head, closing my eyes to feign sleep while clutching the handle of my suitcase. Neither of us had the patience or energy to deal with his babbling. Not at this time, not after an exhausting journey that had been turned into a 20-hour ordeal by the whims of nature. You see, our Korean drama had begun the previous night, long before we had even landed at Incheon International Airport. Read more

Mar 28

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Sydney: Road to the Opera House

It was a blanket of thick cloud that set the scene for our early morning arrival into Australia’s largest city. Heralding the end of a seven-hour overnight flight from Jakarta, this gloominess suggested that much of the day would be spent indoors, though it barely dampened our excitement as the waters of Port Jackson came into view. “Look!” Bama gestured from his window seat toward the span of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the nearby Opera House: two landmarks I had longed to see ever since I was a child. We descended past the skyscrapers of the Central Business District, gliding lower and lower above the rooftops until the inner suburbs gave way to warehouses and the wheels hit the runway. We were in a new country, a remote outpost of the Western world – and a far cry from the place we had left just the night before. Read more

Feb 24

28 Comments

Penang: Street Art and Street Eats

Some of the most memorable travel experiences are those we encounter by chance. And so it was on a sultry August day in Penang, Malaysia, when Bama and I found ourselves staring into two heavenly bowls of curry mee at a quiet hole-in-the-wall on Lebuh Keng Kwee. This street food favorite was an ocher-hued coconut curry soup laden with yellow egg noodles, succulent cuts of chicken, crunchy beansprouts, fresh mint leaves, and porous tofu puffs that absorbed the rich, spicy flavors in the soup base. Read more

Jan 31

22 Comments

Tales from Bhaktapur

Arriving in a taxi, the first thing that caught my eye about Bhaktapur was the warm, rust-red brick that seemed to glow in the fading afternoon light. It was our first day in Nepal, and Bama and I had come straight from Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan airport, where we navigated a melee at baggage claim to get our well-worn backpacks off the conveyor belt. Fellow blogger Lex had likened her own experience at Tribhuvan to a wrestling match, and we could see why: no one knew exactly which of the two belts inside the overcrowded hall would spit out their luggage. In the confusion that followed, it took a certain amount of stoicism and readiness not to be shoved aside by aggressive Indian matriarchs. Read more

Jan 2

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The Miraculous Jungfrau Railway

Adolf Guyer-Zeller was a man with a singular vision. The Zürich entrepreneur had inherited a spinning mill from his father and founded his own textile export business, but in later years he would set his sights on the lucrative pursuit of building railroads. Switzerland at the end of the 19th century was in the grip of “mountain railway fever”, and Guyer-Zeller was determined to create the most impressive and daring of them all. Read more

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