Cam t'Asia

"You have to do X while you're here." I can't count the number of times I've heard that, from other travelers or people touting tours on the street. You can't come to this city and not go to this museum, or this waterfall, or this temple. Yeah? Watch me. The reality is, my travels are my own, and I don't have to answer to anyone or live by anyone else's itinerary. I can't spend two or three days in each city I visit, or do 29 countries in 29 days. It's not fun for me. I need chill days. Sometimes, I even need chill weeks. Don't get me wrong, I do love doing the touristy stuff and visiting the "must-sees" most of the time. But for me, it's way more important to take my time. If there are a few attractions that are each several kilometres away from where I'm staying, I'll take a whole day to visit each of them and walk, rather than get a tuktuk to cart me around to all of them in one day. As a result, I tend to spend

"My husband is with me. Honey! Come here. He and I are just here for a few weeks..." "Yeah, we've been best friends since we were children, so we decided to travel together after university..." "We actually met on an app for people looking for travel buddies..." "...are you here alone?" One of the most common questions I've gotten over the course of my time here (other than, "What's your favourite place?") is if I'm traveling alone. Some people ask it with a sense of wonder, others with concern, others with a mixture of surprise and pity. After talking with other solo travelers about it, it's not uncommon - we all get asked this question, with these tones, and most of us have the same response: an enthusiastic "Yep!" This is the first time I've traveled by myself, and I've loved it. I make my own schedule, and I don't have to answer to or worry about disappointing anyone else. I take ch

One of the weirder places on my mom's tour through Sri Lanka was a three day stop in Beruwala, on the west coast about 60km south of Colombo. It's a beach town, so stopping there makes sense in theory. However, we were there in June, which is the rainy season in the west and the south of the island, which meant it was low season. And it was really low season there: there was almost no one around, and I got questioned several times about why I was there at all, especially in low season. Of course, the double edged sword of being somewhere in low season is that with not many other tourists around, prices are lower and there aren't hundreds of people trying to take selfies with Buddha everywhere. There were no hostels here, so I splurged for a nice guest house called Isabella's. The owners here were German but they weren't there in low season, so a few local ladies ran the place in their absence. The most notable thing about Isabella's was the breakfast, which

I've been asked several times if I had any scary experiences while traveling. There haven't been many, but two of the most memorable ones involved animals. There were tons of times that creepy insects or lizards scared the hell out of me, but those were just jump scares that lasted a few seconds and subsided when doors were slammed, sinks were blocked , or, if necessary, guts were sprayed on the floor. However, there were two standout experiences involving animals that were slightly larger. The first time was in Indonesia, on the island of Lombok. I had a nice routine of walking an hour to a beautiful white sand beach in the morning, getting some lunch, and spending the afternoon reading and swimming there. One day, I was en route and I spotted a macaque monkey about 50m away from where I was walking. I had seen many macaques before, some up close and personal on the river safari with Osman , but usually they were just doing their thing and minding their own business. This

A while back, I wrote about some memorable fails from our experience trying out many different foods in Japan. Here are some dining experiences that turned out a little bit better: We ate a lot of sushi Japan is, of course, known for sushi. While I've enjoyed stuffing my face with sushi at the all-you-can-eat places back home, I was excited to try the "real thing" in Japan. Just like back home, there are places that range from relatively cheap to pretty extravagant. The cheap ones tend to be the "conveyor belt" sushi places, or kaiten. Here, there's one large bar with a small conveyor belt that everyone sits around, and moving along it are plates containing a few pieces of sushi each. The plates are differently coloured, with a code on the wall matching colours to prices. If you go for the cheapest ones, you can eat 20 pieces of sushi for around $10 - not bad. We tried to mix it up between some of the cheaper, plainer options, like tilapia and some myst

I was only in Japan for 10 days, half of which were spent in Tokyo, the other half in the north chasing cherry blossoms. However, in those 10 days, I noticed four distinct aspects of the culture there: Nerd culture is everywhere This was very evident in Tokyo, and I'd hazard a guess that it is in other parts of the country as well (e.g. Kyoto, where Nintendo headquarters is located). There is an entire district in the middle of Tokyo called Akihabara, or Akiba, that is dedicated to all things nerdy, which here is mostly anime, electronics, and video games. At night, "electric town" looks like something straight out of a sci-fi movie - neon lights, tall buildings, and giant anime characters everywhere. There are huge 8 floor buildings dedicated solely to manga, whether it's the comics themselves or action figures derived from them, and grown men in suits browse these places just as (or more) often than the younger people you would expect. Other electron