Archive | My Travels

One of the often asked questions of me at parties and gatherings is from where we have just been back or when we would be going away, implying that friends have a perception that we travel a lot. Actually, that is not quite true. We did travel a bit more frequently in the beginning years […]

I left Chongqing by the first flight yesterday, leaving Su behind for some real sightseeing, food and bonding with my friends. From the pictures they sent back, I believe they had a great time. While waiting for Su to come back, I find time to write another short piece. Chongqing was only two hours from […]

Su’s parents were second or third generation Indonesian Chinese. They were high school classmates in a famous school in Jakarta and both came from well to do families. In 1951, they responded to calls from the Motherland to return to China to build up the country. They were then 19. They went to universities in […]

I did not tell many people I was visiting DPRK before the trip, partly because I had been traveling and partly because I don’t want to make it an issue. I have always tried to keep an open mind on many issues and am mindful that conventional and populist views may not necessarily reflect the […]

DPRK is often described as a secretive country that is not open to the outside world, let alone tourists; is hostile to the West, in particular to imperialist America; is poor and where the people have insufficient food and are dying from hunger; and so on. In practice, a lot of what have been and […]

Where do I begin, to talk to you about a country on which most people in Hong Kong and in the West have very little to no firsthand information?  Partly because of this and partly because a friend dared me to join him for a one-week trip, I took up the challenge, packed a suitcase, […]

I mentioned in previous parts in this series that we cut short our trekking in the mountains by one and a half days by hiring a jeep to take us to Pokhara. One of the reasons was that we found out from fellow trekkers that Nepal would celebrate Holi in a big way on 12 […]

Shortly after we checked into Pokhara and while there, Su outlined our trekking itinerary in the social media. Lest we forget and for the record, let me provide a summary of the villages we had passed for lunches or we had stayed overnight in the ten days. We began trekking from Birethanti (1,025m) and Tikhedhunga […]

The people we met in the mountains included fellow trekkers of all nationalities: many Chinese, mostly young, Malaysians, Singaporeans, Thais, Vietnamese, Australians, New Zealanders, Europeans, British, Americans, South Americans, Canadians and locals, namely Nepalese. Typically, some young people had decided to take a holiday of one to two weeks in the mountains. They were time […]