travels with an ageing punkrocker/publisher
Our last full day in Singapore, and, weirdly enough, according to our various step trackers, our most walked day of the trip. We kicked off with the Gardens by the Bay, that wonderful Singapore landmark with the crazy artistically fake trees that you see in all the tourist videos. Our rideshare driver taking us there was a hoot, had lots […]
Read moreGin. All over the world, countries that have never grown juniper berries are making this stuff. And then a selection of these come to Singapore, to the ground floor of a crazy faux art deco tower. Atlas Bar. I first came here in Feb 2020, during a Singapore boys’ trip that I meant to blog but never got around to. […]
Read moreIt’s kinda weird to be back in a place where people speak English, signs are in English, cars drive on the left all the time, intersections are controlled, people queue in an orderly fashion, yet at the same time looks and feels foreign. Singapore, somewhere I’m yet to spend enough time in to gain anything but a surface understanding of: […]
Read moreWas a little sad to say goodbye to Vietnam: for all the heat, chaos, hawking, and haggling, it’s now elevated to a home away from home, a place where there is much good food, friendly people, and a general good time to be had. It’s also proof that a country can bounce back from being screwed over by the US […]
Read moreAs our last full day in Vietnam draws to a close, I’m sipping freshly squeezed sugarcane juice, nibbling on a banana pancake, and throwing words at the screen in a bid to entertain my reader. Our day kicked off with a cooking class at Goian Homestay/Restaurant/Cooking School/Evil Villain Lair for all I know, with the incredibly friendly Vinh. She dragged […]
Read moreStill in Hoi An, today was even slower paced than previous. We did pretty much all of our final fittings, and picked up orders today. I now have a new pair of shoes, and many new shirts. Our extra batch of custom gifts, ordered at 25% lower than the lowest price, came through, strangely enough (or not really strangely at […]
Read moreSee yesterday’s post: same same but different. More clothes fittings, getting some of our more elaborate garments finetuned — there’s just something about the mandarin collar on my jacket that means it won’t sit level, hopefully a button adjustment will fix. Foodwise, I got to go back to Banh Mi Phuong, the other heavyweight banh mi joint in Hoi An, […]
Read moreToday certainly had marked similarities to the last couple of days: shopping, eating, sweating. A chunk of the day we spent outside was doing various fittings. Trying on shirts and pants and jackets and shoes and dresses (L for the last two). All of our clothes are looking pretty good, some are even finished. I had one of those moments […]
Read moreToday was pretty much a repeat of yesterday: shop eat rest shop massage eat. It’s a tough life. Hoi An turned on another typical hot season day, high 30s but somehow feeling a little less hot than yesterday. After breakfast at the hotel we headed to a Be Be, as visited on the last trip where I got an amazing […]
Read moreFor the right price, I’m not sure there isn’t anything that Hoi An can’t make. Clothes like business and casual shirts? Sure. Leather shoes and bags? Not a problem. Jewellery? We got that. Possibly the world’s best sandwiches? Come back tomorrow and I’ll probably have a post then. A house? Hoi An can probably make that too, possibly with an […]
Read moreToday was, simply, a travel day. We hit the hotel breakfast at 7am, just to get something into us before the day kicked off. Our goal was to get out of town before the various streetsellers, who we’d been telling that we were leaving Sunday so we’d be shopping Saturday, caught on and swamped us/set the car on fire/whatever they […]
Read moreMt Phan Xi Pang, at 3,143 metres (or, depending on the source, 3,174.3m) is the tallest mountain in Vietnam, and taller than anything in Australia, Cambodia, Laos, or Thailand. One nickname for it is the “roof of Indochina”. At times it can be covered in 60cm of snow. It is also probably the easiest 3,000+ metre mountain in the world […]
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