I’m home now of course, whatever home means, and I’ve been retelling a couple of stories. The same ones, but many of them, just because I’ve had such a crazy time in the Nordics. This one isn’t very much of a story. Just a little tale that, once again, shows you how crazy we Asians [...]
I go off to be one with nature, and all that jazz.
Helsinki in some Instagram pictures.
I have seen some places in my short travelling life, but rarely a place that offers me chocolate and naked women within two hours of arriving.
Helsinki turned out to be such a place.
Helsinki, Tallinn, Stockholm, Skinnskatteberg, Malmö, Copenhagen. Once in a while, I enjoy diving deep into places I know nothing about. I have a good feeling about this trip. (Also, is this the start of real-time travel blogging for me?)
Here I start a series of my best answers on Quora, starting with this one. It still has the highest numbers of upvotes! For those of you who don’t know, Quora is an amazing community full of smart people asking and answering interesting questions. I spend a lot of time on it. Follow Adrianna Tan [...]
A crash. A breakdown. 200 kilometres in the opposite direction. Andrew and I were left without our native son, and we screwed it up in as many ways as it was possible to. Yercaud more than made up for it, though.
There comes a point in every traveller’s life when the experience of going to a foreign place no longer feels the same, nor as exciting as it used to be when she first began. Cities blur into similar skylines, restaurants and bars. Non-cities remain precisely that—good in small doses but rarely more. The magic of travel fades into a succession of airports, suited executives and boring business hotels, or a kaleidoscope of lobster-red package tourists and concrete bungalows on dirty beaches. Even I could not avoid that fate.
If you looked on a map, the holy southern Indian city is merely 185 kilometres from Madras. If you took a bus, it would take just under five hours. If you travelled by car, perhaps three and a little bit. Since we took an autorickshaw, our estimated travel time was something like eight hours. Or before nightfall; whichever came first.
There are slower ways of seeing India. On a buffalo. On a “two wheeler”, a motorcycle, stacked to great heights with assorted luggage until you can’t see what’s in front of you. Or on foot, “by walk”, like a sadhu with no clothes on.
We travelled by autorickshaw.
There I was, sipping my welcome drink in a posh Ubud resort, when I almost choked on it.
I was accompanying friends as they sought the best wedding venue in Bali. Concerned about the monsoon, they asked the hotel manager why it hadn’t rained at all in the week we were there. Without batting an eyelid, she informed us there would be no rain for the entire month. “You see, Julia Roberts is in town.
It’s no secret I’ve lost interest in writing a blog — I’m not sure when that happened. It just did. Uni came and went. Life and love took me places. I got caught up in my projects, and soon the fun that blogging once was paled in comparison with real life. I still wanted to [...]