Story#342
Vending machine dinner
Everything closed at eleven and we ate hot corn soup and a boiled egg from a machine on a residential street. It was the least romantic meal of the trip and the one we still talk about.
294 travel stories, part 2
100 stories on this page. It covers Japan, South Korea, Korean Peninsula, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and 34 other places. Page 2 of 3.
Page 2 of 3
100 stories on this page. It covers Japan, South Korea, Korean Peninsula, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and 34 other places. Page 2 of 3.
Countries on this page
Every country page collects its entries in one place, with a fact sheet and the guides for going there.
Entries on this page
Story#346
The convenience store test
A local told us you can judge a country by its convenience stores. We ate egg sandwiches from a Tokyo konbini at midnight and understood immediately what she meant.
Story#349
Cherry blossom in the rain
The petals came down with the rain and stuck to everything. Nobody left the park. People simply opened umbrellas over their picnic blankets and carried on.
Story#352
Onsen etiquette lesson
An older man wordlessly demonstrated the whole sequence: stool, bucket, scrub, rinse, then in. Then he nodded once, satisfied, and did not look at me again.
Story#356
Silence at the temple gate
The cemetery has two hundred thousand graves under cedar trees. A monk walked past at six in the morning and the only sound in a kilometre of forest was his sandals.
Story#360
The ramen counter
Eight seats, one man, no menu in English and a paper form with boxes to tick. He looked at my form, changed one box, and handed back the pen. He was right.
Story#362
Cycling Shimanami
Seventy kilometres over six bridges between islands, with a blue line painted on the road the whole way. You cannot get lost, which leaves you free to look at the sea.
Story#366
Bathhouse in Busan
A woman scrubbed me with a mitt until I questioned several life decisions, and I emerged feeling like a new person and slightly smaller.
Story#370
Seoul at four in the morning
The city does not really stop. At four we ate fried chicken with people finishing work and people starting it, and nobody could tell which was which.
Story#374
The DMZ tour
The most surreal part was not the soldiers, it was the gift shop. We bought a fridge magnet at the edge of the world's most fortified border.
Story#376
Hutong hospitality
We took a wrong turn into a courtyard and were handed sunflower seeds by three grandmothers who wanted to know our ages and marital status in that order.
Story#380
On the wall at dawn
We started at five to be alone. For two hours the only people on that section of wall were us and a woman selling water who had walked up ahead of us and was not out of breath.
Story#384
The overnight sleeper to Xi'an
Six bunks, thermos flasks of hot water, and a card game we did not understand but were dealt into anyway. By morning we had lost imaginary money and gained four contacts.
Story#386
Tea horse road
The old caravan route is a hiking trail now. In one village a man was still pressing tea into cakes by hand with a stone and a cloth, exactly as the museum described.
Story#390
Rice terraces at flooding
In February the terraces fill with water and the whole mountainside becomes a mirror in fifteen hundred pieces. Then the rice grows and it is just a hillside again.
Story#394
Hong Kong at eye level
We took the Mid-Levels escalator up through the city and looked into offices, kitchens and living rooms. It is public transport that is also a documentary.
Story#396
The night market rule
Pick the stall with the longest queue of people who are not holding cameras. It worked five nights out of five.
Story#400
Sleeping in a ger
The stove goes out at three in the morning and someone gets up to feed it. On our second night it was my turn, and I got it wrong, and the family were extremely polite about it.
Story#404
Eagle hunter's arm
The bird weighed six kilos and he held it out one-handed for twenty minutes without a tremble. Then he handed it to me and I lasted eleven seconds.
Story#407
Altitude arithmetic
We flew from sea level to three and a half thousand metres and thought we felt fine. Walking up one flight of stairs corrected that opinion within thirty seconds.
Story#410
The chai stop
The bus stopped where there was nothing except a man with a kettle. Twenty-eight people got off, drank tea from clay cups, smashed the cups on the ground, and got back on.
Story#414
Wedding on the train
Half the carriage was a wedding party travelling to the ceremony. By hour three, they had taught us a dance and by hour five we were invited, sincerely, and we still regret not going.
Story#417
Varanasi before sunrise
The boat pushed off in the dark and the ghats woke up in stages: bathers, then bells, then flowers on the water, then the sun straight up out of the far bank.
Story#421
Kerala backwater bus
The public ferry cost less than a coffee and served as the school bus. Children got off at their own gardens, one by one, waving at the boat.
Story#424
Living root bridge
It takes fifteen years to grow a bridge and about six hundred steps down a valley to reach one. The man who showed us said his grandfather started the one we crossed.
Story#427
Traffic as fluid dynamics
There are lanes painted on the road and everyone treats them as a suggestion. After a week, crossing the street stops feeling like courage and starts feeling like grammar.
Story#431
The Sri Lankan train to Ella
Doors open, feet out, tea plantations for four hours. Somebody's grandmother told me to move back from the door, in Sinhala, and I understood every word.
Story#435
Stilt fishermen
The men on poles now pose more than they fish, and they say so themselves. One of them told us the technique started during a wartime fuel shortage in the 1940s.
Story#437
Full moon, no alcohol
Every full moon day is a public holiday and the bars close. We ended up at a temple at nine in the evening with a thousand people holding oil lamps, which was a better night out.
Story#441
The tuk-tuk negotiation
He named a price, I halved it, he laughed, we settled in the middle and then he took me to his cousin's suit shop anyway. The suit was actually quite good.
Story#445
Songkran ambush
We stepped out of the guesthouse dry and were soaked within nine metres by a five-year-old with a bucket and no remorse. It was 39 degrees. We thanked her.
Story#447
Monks at dawn
Two hundred monks in silence, and one tourist with a flash. A local woman kneeling with rice glared at him with such force that he put the camera away for good.
Story#451
Slow boat down the Mekong
Two days on wooden benches with a boat full of strangers and one guitar. By the second afternoon everybody knew everybody's story and nobody knew anybody's surname.
Story#455
Bomb crater fields
The craters are green now and farmers plough around them. Our guide explained the colour code for unexploded ordnance markers in the same tone you would explain a bus timetable.
Story#459
Angkor at five in the morning
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.
Story#461
The teacher at the market
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.
Story#465
Motorbike lessons
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.
Story#469
Train street tea
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.
Story#471
Overnight bus to Sapa
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.
Story#475
Bun cha at eleven
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.
Story#479
Ha Long fog
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.
Story#481
Nyepi silence
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.
Story#485
The volcano hike we regretted
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.
Story#489
Komodo standoff
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.
Story#492
Jakarta traffic economy
There is an entire economy in a traffic jam: water, snacks, phone chargers, umbrellas. We bought lunch through a car window without stopping.
Story#495
Borneo river night
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.
Story#499
Hawker centre etiquette
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.
Story#502
Rain at four
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.
Story#506
The jeepney route
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.
Story#509
Island hopping fuel stop
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.
Story#512
Typhoon week
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.
Story#516
Bagan by e-bike
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.
Story#520
The teahouse ledger
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.
Story#522
Ten days to base camp
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.
Story#526
A porter's load
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.
Story#530
Prayer flags in the wind
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.
Story#532
Thimphu has no traffic lights
They installed one once and took it out because people preferred the policeman. He directs traffic like a conductor and clearly enjoys it.
Story#536
The high pass
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.
Story#540
Samarkand blue
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.
Story#544
Bread you do not put face down
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.
Story#546
Yurt camp in the Tien Shan
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.
Story#550
Fermented mare's milk
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.
Story#554
Wind towers of Yazd
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.
Story#556
Invited three times
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.
Story#560
The Petra shortcut
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.
Story#564
Floating badly
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.
Story#566
Desert camp silence
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.
Story#570
Jerusalem in four quarters
We crossed between quarters six times in an afternoon and the smell, the language and the music changed each time inside two hundred metres.
Story#574
The Beirut corniche
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.
Story#577
Souk directions
We asked for a shop and were escorted personally for ten minutes through covered alleys by a man who then refused to be thanked and disappeared.
Story#580
Sunrise over Cappadocia
A hundred and fifty balloons launched in twenty minutes. From the ground it was chaos. From above it was completely still and you could hear other baskets' burners.
Story#584
The ferry that crosses continents
Twenty minutes, a glass of tea, seagulls following the boat for bread, and you have changed continents on a commuter ticket.
Story#587
Turkish breakfast arithmetic
We ordered breakfast for two and eleven small plates arrived. Then bread. Then eggs. We did not eat again until nine that night.
Story#591
Hammam scrub
The attendant showed me the grey rolls coming off my arm with visible pride, as though we had achieved something together, which I suppose we had.
Story#594
Kangaroos at the tee
The golf course had a local rule about kangaroos on the fairway. There were fourteen of them and none of them moved for anyone.
Story#597
Driving the Nullarbor
Ninety miles straight, no curve at all. We passed four road trains and one cyclist who waved with an energy that suggested he had not seen anyone for a while.
Story#601
Cassowary crossing
The signs say dangerous. Then one walks out of the rainforest two metres in front of the car and you understand the signs completely.
Story#605
Sydney to Bondi at six
The coastal walk at six in the morning was full of runners, swimmers and one man doing tai chi on a rock. Nobody had a phone out.
Story#607
Uluru at the wrong hour
Everybody goes at sunset. We went at eleven in the morning in 38 degrees, saw four people, and the rock was a colour nobody photographs.
Story#611
The great ocean detour
We drove the whole road in one day, which is a mistake. Someone at a bakery in Apollo Bay told us to take three, and she was right.
Story#615
Tasmanian silence
We stood at Cape Grim in wind that had crossed the Southern Ocean untouched. It smelled like nothing at all, which is apparently the point.
Story#619
Milford in the rain
Everyone hopes for sun. Locals told us to hope for rain, because that is when a thousand temporary waterfalls appear on the cliffs. They were right within an hour.
Story#621
The Tongariro crossing
Nineteen kilometres, four weather systems and a lake the colour of antifreeze. Somebody in shorts passed us going the other way at a run.
Story#625
Hitching in the South Island
We waited eleven minutes and got picked up by a shearer who talked about sheep for two hours and dropped us forty kilometres past his own turnoff.
Story#629
Glowworm ceiling
The boat went silent and the guide pulled us along a rope in the dark. The ceiling looked like a star map and was in fact several thousand hungry larvae.
Story#631
Hangi under the ground
Food cooked in a pit with hot stones for four hours. The steam when they opened it was worth the entire wait and the whole meal tasted faintly of earth.
Story#635
Fiji time
The boat was due at ten. It came at half past twelve. Everyone we asked said Fiji time with a smile and we eventually stopped asking.
Story#639
Kava circle
You clap once, take the cup, drink it in one, clap three times. Your tongue goes numb and the conversation slows down and improves.
Story#641
Land diving at Pentecost
The tower is built from vines and branches with no nails. The divers aim to touch the ground with their shoulders. The mothers watch from a distance and do not look away.
Story#645
Sailing between atolls
Two days out of sight of land and then a line of palms appears that is only three metres above the water. You understand navigation differently after that.
Story#649
The bus that circled the island
There are two buses: clockwise and anticlockwise. You cannot get lost, and if you miss yours the other one arrives eventually going the long way.
Story#652
Diving with the mantas
They arrive silently and are far larger than anything in the briefing prepared you for. Our guide held up nine fingers, meaning nine metres of wingspan, and then just watched.
Story#655
Waiting for the supply ship
The ship comes every few weeks and the whole island knows the day. Everything changes when it arrives: the shop, the menu, the mood.
Story#659
Sunday singing
Nothing is open and everything is quiet, until the churches start. We sat outside on the grass and listened to four-part harmony coming through open windows for an hour.
Story#662
A sea that changed colour
The skipper said the reef changes every year now. He had been diving the same site for twenty-three years and pointed out exactly where the colour had gone.
Story#665
Night dive with manta rays
We knelt on the sand with torches pointed up. Plankton gathered in the light and the mantas came to eat, rolling over us, close enough to feel the water move.
Story#669
Volcano road closed
The road ended in black rock that had not been there two years before. A sign asked us not to take any lava home, which is apparently both disrespectful and unlucky.
Story#672
Snow on the Icefields Parkway
It snowed in June. We pulled into a viewpoint, three other cars did the same, and six strangers stood in a line watching a glacier disappear behind cloud without saying anything.
Story#676
Bear bell arithmetic
We were told to make noise. After two hours of singing badly we stopped, and thirty seconds later a black bear crossed the trail ahead. We resumed singing immediately.
Story#679
The tide at Fundy
We walked on the sea floor in the morning and kayaked over the same spot after lunch. Sixteen metres of water arrived while we ate.
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