Tag Archives: work

When we want to escape Bangkok, one of our favourite destinations is Prachuap Khiri Khan. Once you have broken free of the Bangkok traffic (and that can take a while!), it is an easy 3 hour drive south to a relatively quiet area with magic mountains and beautiful beaches. The province’s name means the ‘land of many […]

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Some trips are such a jumble of colours and textures that they more closely resemble a crazy quilt than a tidy tapestry. So it was for me on the short trip to Attapeu Province in Southwestern Laos in January: a mix of Wats (temples), waterfalls and monuments; rural plantations and rough-board housing rubbing shoulders with […]

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I was in Japan several years ago with three other reasonably well-travelled adults. We had arrived into Tokyo late in the evening and were tired and hungry. We went to a shiny restaurant of chrome and formica across the road from the hotel and were met at the door with a “Hai!”,  given menus, and shown to […]

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“How long does it take to get to the school?” I asked Khru Apichart who had just turned off a minor road into an even more minor road.  “About 45 minutes,” he replied.  Then, with a twinkle in his brown eyes, he added: “Twenty minutes when I don’t have passengers!” He was very proud of […]

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Luxurious resort accommodation in developing countries offers up some interesting dilemmas.  On the one hand, development for tourism brings money and job opportunities into otherwise under-developed communities.  On the other hand, it highlights the contrasts between the have-very-littles and the have-a-lots. The Bintan Resorts complex, on the north coast of Bintan (Negeri Segantang Lada), the largest of Indonesia’s […]

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