Where the Maps End, the Riding Begins The northern loop through Ha Giang has been written about so many times that the secret is no longer a secret. By 2024, more than 300,000 foreign visitors made the trip — a number that has nearly doubled in three years. Almost all of them took the same…
Three Failed Visits and One That Worked — Chasing Penang’s Hainanese Coffee Past The first attempt ended before it began. A Thursday afternoon, 2:47 PM, and the metal grate was down across a shophouse on Lebuh Kimberley. A handwritten sign taped to the bars read “Tutup” — a word the traveler did not yet know…
The Blue Flash Before the Sun Hits the Water The path along Punggol Waterway is empty at 5:47 in the morning, which is surprising for a place that turns into a corridor of strollers and cyclists by seven. A jogger passes every few minutes, headphones in, not looking up. The streetlights are still on, casting…
The Last Bowls at Jalan Berseh The wet market at Jalan Berseh doesn’t announce itself. It sits under a concrete block near the intersection with Kelantan Road, unremarkable from the outside except for the produce crates stacked unevenly along the footpath and the occasional bucket of live fish breathing through a thin layer of water….
The Trail the Maps Don’t Name Most visitors to the Cameron Highlands arrive expecting an orderly landscape. Neat rows of green tea bushes, a visitor center with packaged product, a viewing platform with railings. Gunung Brinchang gets the crowds. The Boh Tea plantation at Sungei Palas gets the tour buses. But the highlands also contain…
When the Menu Is Just a Suggestion The first problem with foraging in Hoi An is that nobody tells you where the wild herbs actually are. Not the guides, not the cooks at the cooking schools, not even the grandmothers who sell bundles of them at the morning market. They’ll show you what a leaf…
The Morning I Ate Snakehead Fish Porridge on a Saigon Rooftop While the Owner Told Her War Story Most coverage of Saigon’s breakfast scene sticks to the obvious: the plastic-stool pho joints on Pasteur Street, the broken-rice stands around the market, the endless banh mi carts on sandstone sidewalks. And those are worth eating. But…
Hunting Down the Abandoned Rail Bridge in the Cameron Highlands Where the Train Stopped 40 Years Ago The Cameron Highlands are known for tea plantations, strawberry farms, and cool air, but a lesser-known relic of an old railway project lies hidden in the jungle. Somewhere along the abandoned track bed of a line that never…
The Last Charcoal Scorch: Finding the Only Wonton Mee Stall in Katong That Still Does It Katong, on Singapore’s east coast, has long been a place where food traditions hold on a little longer than elsewhere. The neighborhood’s Peranakan shophouses and old coffee shops have seen a generation of hawkers retire, their stalls replaced by…
The Morning That Rewrote Cambodian Coffee Most coverage of Southeast Asian coffee flows through two channels. Vietnamese egg coffee gets the lifestyle-magazine treatment; the robusta-heavy drip of southern Vietnam gets the connoisseur’s nod. Cambodia, by contrast, is treated as a footnote — a place where the same beans get the same treatment, just a little…