Photos Courtesy of Hotel Fort Canning
The thing with Singapore is a hotel opens and six months’ later, it is so jam-packed, you can hardly find space for you and your baggage in the lobby as you try to check in. This is Boomtown and make no mistake.
So it is nice to discover there is a [...]

KUKI is tucked away in a little fishing village in a most unlikely location. From the outlook it is almost like a concrete castle, something you do not expect to see in Japan. We were greeted by two very small Japanese ladies dressed in I can only describe it as a steam driver outfit complete [...]

Photos by Amber Rowlands
Should you go? My decision to go to the nation the ruling junta renamed Myanmar was perhaps easier than yours will be; I was assigned a story there and thus had the privilege to visit one of the world’s most complex and compelling nations.
Here’s some of what you need to know; [...]

Photo by Amber Rowlands
You would not expect a chic concept store in old Rangoon, now called Yangon. Yet Loft is that. Up a rickety staircase above a first floor restaurant called Monsoon, and thus two flights up from the street level cafe of that same name, Loft has a beautifully curated selection of treasures, from [...]

Photo by Amber Rowlands
Rudyard Kipling wrote of it thus in Letters from the East; “A golden mystery upheaved itself on the horizon - a beautiful winking wonder that blazed in the sun, of a shape that was neither Muslim dome nor Hindu temple spire…. ‘There’s the old Shway Dagon,’ said my companion. The golden dome [...]

Photos by Simon Bracken
We do love a stopover, and better than that, we love a “two-location-in-one” stopover, so you can do most of your exploring on foot. Off we go to Penang.
Check in first to the snazzy Rasa Sayang (get them to send their driver to the airport). Then, once relaxed after a few days [...]

David Thompson is, in his own words, “the white boy muscling in here” – “here” being Bangkok, where this Aussie chef has become the Western world’s leading authority on Thai food. If you are visiting Bangkok, you must eat at Nahm - even if you have to stay in a backpackers’ fleapit to save the [...]

Photo of Lantern Courtesy of The Fullerton Hotel
18-29?
30-49?
All grown up?
Take your age into account when selecting your room in Singapore, where it’s hard to keep up, given they seem to open a new hotel every minute. The reason for that? About 1 million visitors a month stopover in Singapore, which only had 44,000 hotel rooms [...]

Photo Courtesy of Travelfolio.com
This writer is feeling rather old. The last time I was in Singapore, as opposed to grabbing five hours kip between flights at the transit hotel at Changhi Airport, it felt like a languid colonial city with a teaming Chinatown at its heart. Then people said it got dull. So I didn’t [...]

Should you go to Burma? For the reasons not to, packed in a wry little film starring Jason Schwartzman and Famke Janssen, see this clip.
As you struggle to make up your mind, read Rory Maclean’s Under the Dragon and Benedict Roger’s Than Shwe, Unmasking Burma’s Tyrant. For a light, but surprisingly clever read, try [...]