Family pics

Best current selection of family pics are on the Chan Family site on Facebook.

CNY

Chinese New Year (next Sunday 14 Feb) is everywhere. It features in shop sales (if you’re lucky, combined this year with Valentine’s sales) and a bizarre array of specialist goods. Celophaned gift packs are everywhere. Even branches of HSBC had a selection of fruit, tins, wine and sweets on sale in the branches.  Expensive specialist… Continue reading CNY

Hotels in Bangkok

I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the world with such a vast supply of five star hotels that are affordable to stay in. First time round we stayed in the Le Meridien for two nights for about £80pn. I don’t think there’s any other branch of that chain that we could have stayed in… Continue reading Hotels in Bangkok

Koh Kood

The resort is set on a hillside at one end of a long sandy bay, so that it looks straight down the beach. There’s a couple of rows of palm trees on a green lawn with the expensive villas (c. £100) on that level.  Above them is a row of cheaper villa (like ours –… Continue reading Koh Kood

Trat

Trat was a nice town.  A typical Thai provincial capital with a lively centre, an old heart of wooden Chinese shophouses and few concessions to foreigners. Well, there are a few. It’s fairly well-visited by tourists coming in and out of Cambodia and it’s a necessary stop-over for people waiting for ferries to Koh Chang… Continue reading Trat

Posh resorts

Sitting in the bumpy hour-long speedboat trip to Koh Kood I was squeezed up against a man typing – against the odds – into his Blackberry. He was a project manager on the newish Six Senses Soneva Kiri. This resort appears on few of the maps of the island and is not mentioned in the… Continue reading Posh resorts

Kep

Kep was the fashionable beach resort in Cambodia in the 60s. Its legacy survives in a ghost town of half-collapsed and moss-stained concrete villas dotted around the town. Even the King’s is no more than a shell. Some now house squatter families, one or two have been replaced with flash new three storied houses for… Continue reading Kep

Tuol Sleng

There’s a torture prison at the bottom of our street in Phnom Penh. It looks like any one of the many schools we’ve passed; simple three story concrete buildings with stairs at each end and balconies running the length of the upper floors. There is also PE equipment outside. Except here the frame for the… Continue reading Tuol Sleng

The hotel and the ladyboys

Siem Reap is awash with hotels including some very expensive ones and some very nice-looking ones. We’re staying in the very centre of things, next to Pub Street. The owner is an ex-pat American who started a bar here six years ago.  He then moved into the hotel business opening a one room hotel complete… Continue reading The hotel and the ladyboys