Everywhere I go, people always ask me…..

….who I am and where I come from….
The Myanmar people are either the friendliest or the nosiest people in the world, they all seem to want to talk and find out all about you, they call out to you in the street, chat to you in restaurants and temples, sometimes they only want to know [...]

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You want to go where?

One thing that surprised me while I was in Yangon was that the taxi-drivers really don’t the city at all, it seemed that anywhere I wanted to go, my hotel, my friend’s house, their workplace, they never knew where it was, it was amazingly consistent!
There’d be huddled conversations between groups of taxi-drivers as they tried [...]

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What’s in a name?

Is it Myanmar or Burma? Is it Beijing or Peking? Mumbai or Bombay? So often now names of countries and places have changed from what we once knew and were comfortable with to strange alien names that confuse us and we never can quite remember…
And so it is with Burma, the country was called Myanma [...]

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Money makes you fat….

… but spending makes your slimmer.
Money is always a bit of an issue here in Myanmar, I have it, the locals want it and it’s usually a question of how much they get, but its not simple….
There is an official exchange rate between the dollar and the Kyat but no-one seems to know what it [...]

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A Tale of Two Beaches – Kuta

After the quiet of Nusa Lembongan I really wanted some action so I went to the ultimate beach, Australia’s unofficial colony, Kuta.
This is first, and sometimes the only place, that people go to when they get off the plane, there’s a long sandy beach, plenty of facilities and big waves for surfing. It’s funny, you [...]

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A Tale of Two Beaches – Nusa Lembongan

I couldn’t just spend my time in a cultural oasis like Ubud, there was more to Bali than good food, nice people and culture – there was the beach!
I chose a nice quiet beach on a small island called Nusa Lembongan which is known for it’s good diving and snorkelling, after 5 days of relaxing [...]

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Bali

When you think of Bali you think of beaches and then more beaches, so it got me to wondering why did I come to Bali, it’s not really a very Dermot-place, is it?
Well it’s not just beaches, a hour inland from the beaches is the small town of Ubud, not far from the beach but [...]

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And for your next course…..

It’s said that a soldier marches on his stomach and the same can be said about the traveller, everywhere you go there are strange and exotic foods to try, though it wasn’t quite like that in Tibet, Tibet was filled with the familiar, the two staples were yak meat and potatoes, what more could a [...]

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Spit on it!

There’s this terrible habit people in the west have of sealing a deal by spitting on the palm of their hands and then firmly shaking hands – thankfully this particular Western habit hasn’t been adopted in China because boy can they spit! Each spit is a performace in itself, there’s the long drawn out HOCK [...]

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If you go down to the woods today…

When I arrived in Chengdu last week just off the train from Lhasa it was grey and smoggy and I really didn’t the looks of the city at all. My first thoughts were to get out and go anywhere but there and that’s pretty much what I did (and this was before I found out [...]

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