I’m sitting here in the lift, waiting for it to bring me to the top, contemplating my situation. It’s really quite strange when you think about it, you travel hundreds if not thousands of kilometers to some small town somewhere where everything is overpriced. When you get there you spend a large portion of your time sitting in a chair that’s suspended several meters above the ground with nothing but a thin metal bar keeping you from falling out, and you get get slowly pulled towards the top of the hill, all the while being exposed to the elements. When … Read the rest
The walkway is raised above the road, allowing pedestrians to navigate the streets without having to deal with the heavy Hong Kong traffic. It’s a couple of meters wide and covered but with open sides, and follows the street for several hundred meters, branching off here and there to follow the smaller side streets. Normally it’s nothing special, just a convenient way to get around, but today is Sunday, when all of Hong Kong’s maids (most of them Malaysian migrant workers) have their day off. Since they have no place of their own they can’t go home, and since Hong … Read the rest
The room looks like the basement of a school or something, thats been temporarily converted to a disco; an open space with low ceiling, bare white walls and a couple of support pillars. Against the back wall is a DJ booth on a raised platform and behind it, the letters “XXX” painted in white on a black background. On the left wall is an LED matrix display showing the words “Absurd TRAX – dj sniff”, and on the right wall is powerful light. The entire place is awash in red and blue light and the air is imbued with the … Read the rest
I’m in the most amazing market I have ever seen! The entire street is full of stalls, crammed so tightly together it’s impossible to know where one ends and the next one begins. In the the middle of the stalls is a narrow passage that is so full of people, both locals and tourists, that you can hardly turn around without bumping into anyone. Nearly every vendor in the market is selling things for the upcoming Deepavali festival. There are entire walls covered in garlands of artificial flowers; there are tables laden with boxes of fireworks; and from the canvas … Read the rest
Even with the lens of my camera set to the widest setting, a photograph cannot do justice to the tree in front of me. I’ve seen big trees before, ones that are much taller than average and ones whose trunk is so thick it would take ten people, their arms wide open touching finger tip to finger tip, to reach around it, but nothing like this. This is gigantic in every way. The trunk is thick and tall with knots and bulges here and there, forming a stout base that stands halfway down a slope and extends upwards, towering above … Read the rest
The street is filled with people, they mill about among the vendors, buying snacks and souvenirs. The air is filled with didgeridoo music, a deep driving rhythm, almost like hard rock. The sky is filled with floating lanterns, glowing orange lights that drift upwards on the breeze.… Read the rest
The grey trunk comes snaking around me from behind, the moist end sniffing out the bananas in the bag on my hip. At the same time, the elephant in front of me also reaches her trunk in my direction, trying to get at the tasty treats. I can barely get the bananas out of the bag fast enough for them. As soon as I do, it only takes a second before one of the elephants has grabbed it and deposited it in its mouth. They are as tall as me and weigh two thousand kilos each but they act like … Read the rest
Am I still in Thailand? It sure doesn’t seem like it with these surroundings. On both sides of the road are rolling hills, on the right they are covered in withering, brown corn stalks on the left, the dark green of pine forests, with brown, bare tea bushes in neat rows lower down in the valley. This high up, the sweltering heat of the lowlands is gone, the air is cool and crisp like an autumn day. If I didn’t know better I would think I’m somewhere in Europe.… Read the rest
The sign says 34 degrees and the one in the next pool reads 35. Somewhere off to the left is the source, the hot water cascading down from pool to pool, dropping in temperature along the way. This hotspring river as it were, flows through the forest, trees growing right at the edge. Thick vines grow from tree to tree, stretching across the water, hanging low down with people sitting or leaning on them as they relax in the heat.… Read the rest
A tall sandstone ridge runs through the forests, winding its way forward and branching off here and there, sending out tendrils of rock like tentacles into the undergrowth. A small footpath runs along the top of the ridge, at places barely wide enough for a person to stand, the sides falling away steeply without so much as a hint of a safety rail; one wrong step here and you go tumbling over the precipice. The part I’m on now slopes steeply downwards, and a deep fissure has been cut through the soft material, presumably by streams of water in the … Read the rest
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