Cam t'Asia

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...

If you go to southeast Asia, odds are you'll go to many temples. Most of the temples are Buddhist, some Tao, some Hindu, and probably some others. The temples are, by and large, beautiful: ornate trims, packed with symbolism; Buddhas in many different positions, which all mean something different; the smell of incense in the air; stories depicted on the walls through elaborate images; gold and gems reflecting brightly. One thing I wasn't expecting, however, is how it feels to walk through these places. I'm not religious or spiritual, but there's been an unmistakable "bigger than you" feeling as I've explored these places. The air feels almost thicker to walk through, like there's some ethereal presence there. I get a slight pit in my stomach. The high ceilings and the Buddhas and other statues towering over me make me feel small. My footsteps seem louder. The best example of this was the rock temple in Dambulla, Sri Lanka. I was lucky enough to walk...

Travelling alone makes you more of a target for scams, especially here in southeast Asia, so after a few months on the road, I was used to this and just assumed most people were trying to scam me in some way. Usually, this was true... but sometimes it wasn't. One of the first rules to live by out here is to always ask the price of something before you agree to it. Often in the case of transportation, someone will ask you where you are going and then, once you tell them, herd you onto a nearby vehicle without another word. Especially in the case of taxis or tuktuks, this is dangerous, because if you don't know the price beforehand, the driver can make up basically anything they want when you arrive at your destination, and you have no choice but to pay - it's not like you can say no and walk away at that point, like you can before you get in. I had a minor slip up in Colombo when I asked the price of a bus before I boarded it at the station. The driver told me, but for ...

The journey from Malaysian Borneo to Indonesia was not as straightforward as Dana and I had hoped. We were in Semporna, a port town in the southeast corner of the province, in hopes that we could catch a boat to Bali after doing some diving. The journey turned out to be a lot more convoluted than that, with many stopovers in "less travelled" places. Semporna is where we discovered how famous we were. Most divers elect to stay on nearby Mabul island to get to the famous Sipadan dive site, but we chose to stay ashore in Semporna and make a longer journey by boat to do our day of diving. As a result, everyone from shopkeepers to fishmongers hooted things at us as we walked by, whether we were heading to dive in the morning or looking for a place to eat dinner at night. They spoke amongst each other and pointed at us, sometimes with an excited tone, sometimes with a mocking one. Dana is tall, blonde, and Belgian, so she got most of the attention - generally people couldn't...

I went to Borneo because I pictured it to be lush and green, wild and untamed, teeming with rare birds and mammals. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case, at least not in the province of Sabah on the Malaysian side, where I decided to spend my time. It /was/ mostly green, but for a different reason: acres upon acres of palm tree plantations. Palm trees has always been a pleasant sight for me: they meant tropical weather, beaches, and coconuts. Here, though, seeing the organized mass production of them was a total eyesore. The reason why there are so many of them, I learned, is because palm oil is the biggest export in Malaysia. The country actually pays its debts in palm oil instead of money. People make relatively good money working in the palm oil industry, and even more if they agree to grow palm trees on their own land. However, a huge cost of this industry is that it endangers the amazing wildlife that used to thrive here. The Kinabatangan river is a great spot to do river...

One of the cooler things to do in the Sabah province of Malaysian Borneo is a safari along the Kinabatangan river. At the suggestion of a group of 4 Germans I befriended near Kinabalu national park, I contacted a man named Osman, who ran a homestay and did two daily river safaris. They had seen some amazing sights on his safaris: pygmy elephants, tons of monkeys, even a clouded leopard eating a proboscis monkey in a tree (which is basically once in a lifetime). Osman allegedly took David Attenborough out on the river, was an extremely talented guide, and had a very nice family. However, I read some reviews of his homestay on TripAdvisor and there were several pretty alarming ones about his temper. The Germans had said he was a bit crazy, but didn't mention anything about a fiery temper. I decided to go anyway on their recommendation, and the assumption that the reviews were being a bit dramatic. After contacting his wife, Yanti, through WhatsApp, I boarded a few local buses to g...