You’ve already heard about our venture into the malls on New Year’s Eve. We returned empty handed – almost. Asia Books had a good map of Laos – one with both Laos script and Latin letters. Our day for exploring was more successful. Fai, our guide from Chilli Paste […]
It’s difficult to imagine a city more different from my home town. There are fourteen million people in the metropolitan area – Napier has 61,000. In fact Bangkok has more than three times the population of my entire country! It’s winter in Bangkok now. Some locals are wearing […]
Oh, how I loved to poke and prod at the presents under the tree when I was little. And, oh how, when they were little, I tried to outwit my own kids’ attempts to snoop on Santa.
I’d like to see some monkeys, not in the zoo, roaming free, I told my son during my visit to Thailand in 2013. Lopburi is the place for you, he said.
The countdown has begun. It’s twelve months tomorrow since our last trip to Bangkok. And it’s seven weeks tomorrow until we leave on our trip to Laos, which includes a stopover in Bangkok. I can’t wait but I’m a grown up so I have to. As my Mum […]
I picked the wrong winner. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves didn’t win the Man Booker. The good news is that for the second year in a row the prize has come down here, to the bottom of the world. New Zealand’s very own Eleanor Catton won in […]
When we visited Ayutthaya we took an elephant ride. The old city, now a world heritage site, was the capital of the Thai Kingdom from the 14th century until it was sacked by the Burmese army in the 18th century. High on the back of the elephant, beneath the […]
Mid-winter is nigh and, with the bite of the cold, Thailand is on my mind. We’ve got another trip to the tropics in our sights – well, we’ve promised ourselves that come July we’re booking the flights. Our hoped for departure date is not till after Christmas so, […]
Travel Theme: Close-Up An early morning start, a taxi trip across town, the first and the most cramped tuk tuk ever, and we were in the middle of this. (The we on this trip was my husband, our daughter-in-law, both our sons and myself.) The welcome was […]
Twice, between the bus station at Trat and the pier at Laem Ngop, when fellow travellers learned we were on our way to Koh Wai and not Koh Chang they asked us why! It was as clear as the waters of the Gulf of Thailand they considered us […]
Jill's Scene 
The korero