Popagandhi / 654 posts / 5,845 comments / feed / comments feed / flickr feed
Needed: Nepal Experts
What shouldn’t I miss in a month in Nepal? Trekking—package, or independent? How much? Where—Dolpo, Mustang, Manang, Jomsom? And how—I probably won’t be flying, not even once; I don’t want to. I’ll be there in August, though I know it’s not a great time with the monsoon and all; I’ll be taking the land borders [...]
Wardrobe Malfunction
In the presence of other girls, I sometimes feel like an alien—or perhaps it feels like they are aliens, speaking an alien language, performing alien rituals, speaking about subjects completely alien to me. Why, I ask myself often, is it that they do not talk about things that are comprehensible? Things such as computers and [...]
What Am I Doing Here
I showed these pictures last night at Village Talk and talked myself hoarse about travel, photojournalism, passion and youth (and quite a bit about leprosy and tropical diseases). There should also be video and audio available sometime soon, but because my hair was really flat and disgusting, there’s a transcript at the end of this [...]
School Days
What has education become? A junior college (high school) student showed me her General Paper ‘notes’ (GP is that compulsory subject every junior college student sits for, comprising a comprehension text and an essay question in the English language). It is generally said to test one’s knowledge of current affairs, and ability in writing and [...]
Village Talk
I am going to be speaking this Friday at Village Talk, an event that promises to bring “people passionate about changing the world into one room” (yep, that’s me. I think!). Click here for more information about the event and programme. I’ll be the last speaker of the evening at 9pm—I can’t say what I’m [...]
Going Places, on Google Maps
Update Pictures now link to Google Maps page with short commentary for each destination. 2005: The idea that I could afford to backpack anywhere only just occurred to me at this point. I was 19. I was in love. I wanted to go to the Angkor Wat. Three weeks of Thailand and Cambodia set the stage [...]
Laos Earthquake Shakes Bangkok Skyscrapers (and My Two Storey Chiang Mai Guesthouse)
The earthquake of magnitude 6.1 rocked my second floor hotel room in Chiang Mai! The lights were shaking, my bed was shaking, I was lying down in bed at 3pm (that’s all I do these days, exhausted from the previous week of working). Mum: “What was that?” Me: “What was what?” Mum: “That shaking!” Me: “Oh, you felt [...]
A Tribute
She makes me sleep in backpacker dorms then makes herbal soup, chicken rice and dumplings for the other travellers, and screams about how I’m wasting the day by sleeping too much at 7 in the morning. She walks way too fast for me to catch up, and knows every country’s public bus and train system [...]
Marx, Mao and Mr Deng
As part of the interviews I am doing for my article, I have been randomly engaged in conversation with all sorts of people who live in Mae Salong. The people I was most hopeful to meet and interview—the lao bing, or the first generation who had fled out of China with the Fifth Army, spent [...]
Jing Zhong Bao Guo
When I was in primary school, I was very good in Chinese: most of my essays were read to the class, we did “Social Studies” in Chinese (ask me anything about Sang Nila Utama and the Pan Island Expressway, in Chinese). We had a good teacher; but like all the good teachers I’ve ever had, [...]