Elephant Artists
Elephant artists? Painting elephants? Now, like baby pandas, that’s something you don’t see every day. The pachyderms of Maesa Camp work with an incredible concentration....
Tagged: single parent
Seeing the Light
There’s a brilliance about the light in the medieval temples of northern Thailand. It glints off mirrored mosaics, gold buddhas and gilded towers, off gaudy...
Western-Thai Dating: A Driver’s Guide
One of the most consistently entertaining aspects of the courting ritual indulged in by ageing Western men and much younger South-East Asian women is the...
Does the Tooth Fairy Take Lao Kip?
So junior’s molar, which has been threatening to drop for the last few weeks, finally did the deed today. He hasn’t, historically, had the best...
Spirits of the Forest
The sheer complexity of the ecosystem in protected, mature forest, from lichens spinning their symbiotic webs across old bark to the chaos wild pigs wreak...
Global Time = Quality Time
My son and I set out to travel the world together in January. I’d imagined many wonderful things about the journey. What I hadn’t imagined is the sheer quality and quantity of time together.
Putting the Graphic into Ethnographic
As you can probably tell from the picture the Vietnamese Museum of Ethnography in Hanoi offers infinitely more fun than the rather cumbersome title would...
Making Incense, Vietnam
Incense is part of daily life in Vietnam. Joss sticks are offered at the altars which grace every business and almost every home, sold by...
Shopping Mission — Hanoi
It was S’s (the nine-year-old’s father’s) last day with us today. And we spent it in Hanoi. The bulk of it, in fact… drum roll…...
Madam, Your Husband…
“Madam,” said the chap on the scooter, eyeing the motorbike erratically parked some distance from the wrong hire shop (and, indeed, the pavement) with a...