35 stories, 49 fun facts, 16 quotes on this page. It covers Asia, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Vietnam and 35 other places. Page 2 of 3.
35 stories, 49 fun facts, 16 quotes on this page. It covers Asia, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Vietnam and 35 other places. Page 2 of 3.
Every country page collects its entries in one place, with a fact sheet and the guides for going there.
Shinrin-yoku: forest bathing, the practice of walking slowly among trees with no goal at all.
More than two million tonnes of ordnance fell on Laos between 1964 and 1973, and clearance teams still work today.
Three thousand people waited for the sunrise photograph at the front pond. We walked ten minutes to the east side and had a nine-hundred-year-old temple entirely to ourselves.
Hundreds of monks collect alms in silence at sunrise, a daily ritual that has continued for centuries.
He sold noodles in the morning and taught English in the afternoon and refused to charge us for a bowl once he learned we were teachers too. We came back three times to argue about it.
More than 2,000 brick temples and stupas still stand on the Bagan plain, survivors of over 10,000 built between the 11th and 13th centuries.
Wabi-sabi: finding beauty in what is imperfect, weathered and temporary.
Indonesia is the largest archipelago in the world with around 17,500 islands, roughly 6,000 of them inhabited.
The advice for crossing the road was to walk slowly and never stop. It is terrifying for two days and completely obvious on the third.
On Nyepi the entire island stops. The airport closes, lights stay off and nobody goes outside for 24 hours.
We drank iced tea sixty centimetres from a railway line. Twice an hour everyone stood, moved the chairs, and sat back down as the train passed.
Komodo dragons are found wild only on a few Indonesian islands and can grow past three metres.
Sleeper buses have three rows of reclining pods and a strict no-shoes policy. I slept for six hours and woke in fog with rice terraces underneath it.
The 1883 eruption produced possibly the loudest sound in recorded history, audible in Australia and on Rodrigues Island.
Jugaad: a clever improvised fix made from whatever is at hand.
The Petronas Towers remain the tallest twin buildings on Earth, joined by a double-decker skybridge at level 41.
The stall opened at eleven and sold out by one. On the third day the owner recognised us and put extra herbs on the plate without a word.
Parts of Borneo's rainforest are estimated at 130 million years old, far older than the Amazon.
We had booked for the view and got two days of white. Then on the last morning it burned off in about fifteen minutes and sixteen hundred islands appeared at once.
Singapore has expanded its land area by roughly a quarter since the 1960s through reclamation, importing sand from abroad.
Mai pen rai: never mind, it's fine. The most useful phrase in Thailand.
Selling chewing gum has been restricted since 1992, with therapeutic gum available only from pharmacies.
For twenty-four hours the airport closes, the lights go off and nobody leaves the house. At night the sky over Bali is the darkest it gets all year, and everybody looks up.
The Philippine archipelago counts over 7,600 islands, and new surveys keep adding a few more.
Two in the morning, a gas mask, and miners carrying ninety kilos of sulphur up the same path in flip-flops. Nobody in our group complained again about anything.
The Puerto Princesa Subterranean River flows more than eight kilometres through a limestone cave straight into the sea.
Kaizen: small continuous improvements. Pack a little lighter every trip.
The ranger carried a forked stick, which seemed insufficient. The dragon was entirely uninterested and we walked around it feeling both relieved and slightly insulted.
Carved into the Cordillera by hand, the Ifugao terraces are still farmed by the descendants of their builders.
Kazakhstan covers 2.7 million square kilometres without a coastline, larger than all of Western Europe.
There is an entire economy in a traffic jam: water, snacks, phone chargers, umbrellas. We bought lunch through a car window without stopping.
Nunchi: the art of reading the room without a word being spoken.
The world's oldest and largest operational spaceport sits on Kazakh steppe and is leased to Russia.
The guide switched off the engine and we drifted. The forest was louder than the boat had been. Something large moved in the water and nobody asked what it was.
Uzbekistan is one of only two countries surrounded entirely by other landlocked countries, the other being Liechtenstein.
A packet of tissues on a table means the table is taken. This is not a rule anyone writes down, and breaking it once is enough to learn it.
Samarkand's Registan square was the commercial and intellectual heart of Timur's empire in the 15th century.
Guanxi: the network of relationships that makes things possible.
A gas field collapse near Darvaza was set alight decades ago and the Door to Hell has been burning ever since.
It rained at four in the afternoon for five days in a row, for exactly twenty-five minutes each time. By day three we planned our coffee around it.
Over 90 percent of Kyrgyzstan lies above 1,500 metres, and summer pastures are still reached on horseback.
Routes are painted on the side and fares are passed forward hand to hand from the back. Nobody loses a coin. Nobody keeps the change.
The Pamir Highway crosses the Ak-Baital pass at 4,655 metres, one of the highest paved roads on Earth.
Namaste: the light in me honours the light in you.
Band-e Amir's six lakes are dammed by natural travertine walls and glow a deep mineral blue.
The boat stopped at a beach with a hut and a barrel of diesel. The refuelling took twenty minutes and the swimming took the rest of the afternoon.
Yazd's badgir wind catchers funnel breeze down into homes and over underground water, cooling rooms without electricity.
The ferries stopped for four days. We ended up in a fishing village with four other stranded travellers, learned to play a local card game badly, and were sad to leave.
The ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire was destroyed by fire in 330 BC, which ironically baked and preserved its clay archives.
Shalom and salaam come from the same root and both mean peace.
Uruk and Ur in southern Iraq were among the first true cities, and the world's earliest writing appears there around 3200 BC.
There are two thousand temples and no rule about which one to climb. We picked one at random, sat on warm brick, and watched the light change for an hour.
The Nabataeans cut Petra's facades directly into sandstone cliffs and engineered a water system that supported thousands in the desert.
Every teahouse on the trek kept a paper ledger, and the prices went up predictably with altitude because everything had been carried on someone's back.
The Dead Sea surface falls around a metre each year as the Jordan River is diverted, exposing sinkholes along the shore.
The mountain is not the hard part. The hard part is the fourteenth consecutive dinner of dal bhat and the discovery that you would happily eat a fifteenth.
A traveller can swim in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Dead Sea within a single day's drive.
Atithi Devo Bhava: the guest is equivalent to God.
The walled Old City covers less than one square kilometre yet contains sites central to three world religions.
He carried thirty-two kilos with a strap across his forehead and overtook us on every climb. At lunch he asked, politely, whether our bags were really that heavy.
The Cedars of God grove holds trees over a thousand years old, remnants of forests that supplied ancient Egypt and Phoenicia.
The idea is that the wind carries the prayer, so a faded flag has done more work than a bright one. Nobody takes the old ones down.
Before the war, Aleppo's covered market ran for roughly 13 kilometres of vaulted alleys, one of the largest in the world.
The lighter the load, the longer the road.
Parts of the Saudi desert frontier remained undefined into the modern era because the sand simply had no landmarks.
They installed one once and took it out because people preferred the policeman. He directs traffic like a conductor and clearly enjoys it.
Pumping concrete 600 metres up the Burj Khalifa required specially developed mixes that would not set in the pipe.
We crossed at 4,655 metres in a shared jeep with a cracked windscreen. The driver stopped at the top, got out, tied a ribbon to a pole and got back in without explanation.
The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque contains what is considered the largest single hand-knotted carpet in the world.
Slowly, slowly the egg walks on legs.
The tiles are a blue that photographs badly and looks unreal in person. An old man selling bread at the gate told us to come back at six, and he was right.
Building height rules in Muscat keep the skyline low and white, preserving views of the Hajar Mountains.
Qatar has almost no natural fresh water and produces most of its drinking supply through desalination.
Non is never placed upside down and never cut with a knife. Our host corrected all three of us in the first ten minutes and then fed us for two days.
The frog in the well knows nothing of the great ocean.
The name refers to fresh springs bubbling up within the salt sea, once the basis of a famous pearl industry.
We arrived to find the family moving camp for summer pasture. They fed us anyway, from a stove already half packed, and then rode away.
Shibam's tower houses of sun-dried mud rise up to eleven storeys and date from the 16th century.
Kumis is offered with both hands and refusing is rude. It tastes like sour yoghurt that has had opinions. I drank two cups and got better at hiding my face.
A third of Socotra's plant species exist nowhere else, including the umbrella-shaped dragon's blood tree.
Fall seven times, stand up eight.
Pakistan holds five of the world's fourteen highest mountains, including K2, widely considered the hardest to climb.
We stood under a badgir on a 42-degree day and felt actual cold air coming down. It was built in the fifteenth century and has never needed electricity.
The Khunjerab Pass between Pakistan and China sits at 4,693 metres and closes with the first heavy snow.
We were invited home for dinner by strangers three separate times in one week. Refusing politely is a whole art form and we never learned it.
The Sundarbans span roughly 10,000 square kilometres of tidal forest shared with India, and shelter Bengal tigers.
Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one.
Hundreds of rivers cross Bangladesh, and some shift course by kilometres in a single monsoon season.
There is the main path and there is the back trail with eight hundred steps. Take the steps at seven in the morning and the Monastery is empty when you arrive.
Juche years count from 1912, the birth year of Kim Il-sung, and appear alongside Gregorian dates.
You cannot swim, only float, and you must not get it in your eyes. I got it in my eyes within ninety seconds. A stranger walked me to the shower.
Oymyakon has recorded temperatures near minus 68 degrees Celsius, the coldest for a permanently inhabited place.
Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.
Moscow to Vladivostok is 9,289 kilometres and takes about seven days without stops, crossing 87 cities.
After the generator went off there was no sound at all. Not wind, not insects, nothing. Six people sat in the dark for an hour and nobody spoke.
The Gobi can drop below minus 30 degrees in winter and sometimes gets snow on its dunes.
We crossed between quarters six times in an afternoon and the smell, the language and the music changed each time inside two hundred metres.
Ammonite fossils found near Everest prove the range was once seabed before India collided with Asia.
Fishermen, joggers, families, and a man with a coffee cart doing better business than any cafe. At sunset the whole city seemed to be walking in the same direction.
Both the highest land on Earth, Everest, and the lowest exposed land, the Dead Sea shore, sit on the same continent.
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The missed ferry. The stranger who handed over a key. The meal that ran until midnight. If something happened to you on the road and you still think about it, send it - a few sentences is plenty, and we do the tidying up.
