Thanks for reading. This blog is an opportunity for me to capture some of the diversity of my writing interests. My muse tend to appear on my shoulder as I board an international flight although not all of my writing is inspired by travel and foreign places. These blogs have been the basis of a novel (Flowers of Baghdad) but there are a few other writing projects in progress besides. Please feel free to leave a comment. Or two.

Cycle Culture ( II )

(Follows from “Heading for Ho Chi Minh City” ( I ) A tone which sets impressions straight away is the tide of motorcycles, although we would call them scooters and the branding type might insist on Vespa (though we saw Yamaha doing extremely well). We were sucked out of the airport at peak hour —…

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Ho Chi Minh City ( I )

October 2004 We bumped out of Singapore through muscled clouds that flashed and dropped rain on the Straits, finally clearing across their boiling tops into bright sunshine and a slight feeling of relief. As we bore north the hazy coastline of Malaysia kept us company on the left until geography and navigation separated us and…

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Dog Girl of Bangkok

I discovered Lumpini Park ten years ago. Countless thousands of Thais and others found it before me but it was a discovery nonetheless. It is a jade green oasis in the middle of a gritty city which offers some respite from the madness of the streets. Back in Lumpini, with my throat catching on the…

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Riding the Dog

This morning I am doing the American thing – sitting in a hokey little New Jersey Greyhound terminal waiting to catch a bus to New York. But there is a home feel to this adventure, for Frente is being playing on the radio. A small touch of home although if it wasn’t such a unique…

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All the Tea in China

Tiananmen Sqaure is a terrific melting pot. All sorts of people congregate there at all hours. Many are there simply to soak up the site, to say they have “been there” before moving on to other icons around the city. The majority of visitors are Chinese who seem to wear an air of surprise –…

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Drinking the Pickled Eel

In the backblocks of Beijing, up a filthy lane heaped high with refuse and rubble (the best places always are) is one of thousands of restaurants which feed the hordes. We stumbled into one, late in the evening, that advertised an English menu. The owners were true to their word but they could not read…

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