The runes only show for an hour. After that, it’s just trees. The Supertrees at Gardens by the Bay are not subtle. They rise at heights between 25 and 50 meters, clad in living flora, wired for light shows, visible from half of Marina Bay. Most visitors see them at night, when the Garden Rhapsody…
The Bowl That Rewrites Your Map George Town’s morning air tastes like diesel and fish stock. By 7:45, the hawker stalls along Kimberley Street have already been firing their woks for two hours, and the scent of prawn shells caramelizing in pork fat drifts into the open-fronted coffee shops. Most visitors come here for the…
The 4 PM Slick: What Ha Long Bay’s Most Famous Cave Won’t Tell You The concrete steps at Sung Sot Cave—Surprise Cave in English—are not particularly steep. They are not particularly long. But at 4 PM on a Tuesday in late November, they become something else entirely: a hazard dressed as infrastructure. A thin film…
The One Where I Finally Found the Weaver, Not Just the Bags The first three times I went to Baguio looking for a real Igorot bag, I came back with something that wasn’t it. Not fake, exactly. Just… distant. Like a photocopy of a photocopy. You know the stalls on Session Road, the ones near…
One Woman’s Jalan Nagor and the Case of the Missing Banana Leaves The first one I found was on Jalan Nagor, and I almost walked right past it. It was late afternoon, maybe four-thirty, and the sun was still fierce enough that the shadows were short and mean. I’d been wandering around George Town for…
Why I Ended Up Watching a B-Movie at 3 AM in Changi Airport (and Why You Should Too) I don’t remember what time my flight from Phnom Penh touched down. Somewhere around midnight, maybe closer to one. What I do remember is the humidity hitting me like a wall as I walked down the jet…
The Staircase That Nobody Talks About The thing about Dalat is that everyone goes there expecting one version of it and finds something else entirely. I’d read the blogs about the Crazy House and the cable cars and the Valley of Love — places that sound like they were named by someone who’d never actually…
I Chased a Ghost Called Hokkien Mee The first time I tried to find the charcoal-fire Hokkien Mee stall in George Town, I ended up eating a bowl of instant noodles at a 7-Eleven at 10 p.m., sitting on a plastic crate, wondering how I’d gotten it so wrong. I’d read the blog posts. You’ve…
I Paid $8.50 for a Rain Puddle That Had Other Plans The thing about Singapore is that it doesn’t do subtle. Everything is deliberate — the way the trees are planted, the way the MRT doors open exactly on the line, the way the humidity hits you like a wet towel the second you step…
The Morning I Almost Didn’t Go Up I’d been to Cradle Mountain maybe six times before that March morning, and I still made the same mistake. Left my rain jacket in the car. The forecast said “possible showers” which in Tasmania means you should assume you’ll be wet within an hour, but I was rushing…