80 Daysin Asia

We landed in the evening, dumped the bags and walked over to Senso-ji. Half ten at night and there was nobody there. Just the gates and the pagoda lit up.

We went back in the day later that week and it was heaving. Do both.

First up was the Forbidden City, with an English-speaking guide. Thirty-seven degrees and shoulder to shoulder with everyone else who had had the same idea. Still worth it.

The whole reason to stop in Xi’an. Pit 1 is a hangar the size of a stadium, full of warriors, and no two faces are the same.

Off to one side are the ones still in pieces, being put back together. Two thousand years old, and someone is doing the jigsaw.

Chongqing is built where two rivers meet, on hills so steep the roads and railways run over and through the buildings. We spent the afternoon around Raffles City at Chaotianmen, on the point where the rivers join.

We also got talked into a game of laser tag against a group of local kids. We lost.

Chengdu is panda city, so we did the panda base. Too hot for them: most were hiding and the ones we could see were flat out asleep. The museum next door had more pandas moving than the enclosures did, and those ones were stuffed.

The sandstone pillars that inspired the floating mountains in Avatar. Photos don’t get across how many of them there are.

You go up in the Bailong elevator, a glass lift bolted to the outside of a cliff, then walk viewpoint to viewpoint along the top with the pillars fading off into the haze. Our hotel sent someone to collect us from the station, which set the tone for the whole stop.

Furong is an old town built on a cliff with a waterfall running out from under it. One night is enough, and the night is the point: they light the waterfall and the whole town up, and the mist sits on the river below.

One night in Xiamen, spent entirely on one street-food lane: skewers, everything on a stick, and a Turkish ice-cream man who messed Zak about for a full minute before handing over the cone.

Watch the video. Best thirty seconds in China.

Shenzhen is where a lot of the world’s electronics come from and it shows. At the science and technology museum a robot arm made our coffee and another robot did a Rubik’s cube faster than I could follow it.

Last stop in China. Three weeks of trains, and the end of the line.

We stayed out at Kai Tak, where the old airport used to be, and walked the promenade at night with the harbour on one side and the towers on the other.

The museum in the afternoon, where one of the old street signs on display said Wellington Street. Then the movies, to see The Odyssey. Two seats, D-14 and D-15.

After that, the waterfront at Tsim Sha Tsui, watching the lights come on across the harbour.

First night on my own. Manila from the back of a car is jeepneys, overpasses and traffic that doesn’t move.

The evening was in BGC, which is the opposite: wide streets, glass towers, and a glowing ring in the middle that people queue up to walk through. Then I went out drinking, which is where the photos stop.

A couple of hours up the coast to Sabang, an outrigger boat out to the national park, then into the cave by paddle boat with helmets and one torch between us.

The river runs for kilometres under the limestone. The guide swings the torch at shapes in the rock and tells you what they are called. Outside, the macaques and the monitor lizards work the beach like they own it.

Bucana is a village on the beach a few kilometres out of El Nido town: one dirt road, a white church, a surf school offering a free drink with every lesson, and a cottage twenty metres from the water.

Swim, read, pork and rice, a Red Horse, get adopted by a beach dog, repeat. After a month of trains that was exactly right.

Landed in the evening and went straight to Finns in Canggu, which is less a beach club than a small city with a queue.

After that it settled into a pattern: a cafe in the morning, the beach or a surf in the afternoon, a beach club and a few beers after that. I checked out early and moved in with my mate Aditya at his Airbnb for a couple of nights.

The Bukit is the southern end of Bali: white cliffs, temples, and beaches at the bottom of a lot of stairs. Three days on the back of a scooter, a different beach every afternoon, a clifftop bar at sunset.

Bali came last in my rankings, which isn’t really a knock on it. The whole week was cafes, beach, surfing, beach clubs and beers, and no sightseeing at all, because I was with a mate and there was no reason to.

Hanoi is scooters, narrow streets and power lines in knots. I did the big list in a day: St Joseph’s Cathedral, the mausoleum, and the Temple of Literature, Vietnam’s first university, with rows of stone turtles out the back each carrying a tablet of everyone who passed the exams.

Then a banh mi, sat on a plastic stool built for a much smaller person. That is the correct way to eat in Hanoi.

Bun cha is grilled pork in a bowl of broth, with noodles and herbs on the side. Best thing I ate in Vietnam, tied with a bowl I had much later in Chiang Mai.

Then Train Street: an alley of cafes with a working railway line down the middle. You sit with a drink, and at the right time everyone pulls their chair in and a train goes past at arm’s length. Nobody there seems remotely bothered by this.

Cat Ba sits at the edge of Lan Ha Bay: the same limestone karst scenery as Ha Long, with a fraction of the boats. The day on the water was the best day I had in Vietnam.

Out on a boat in the morning, kayaking between the islands and past the floating fish farms, seafood lunch on board, then bikes through Viet Hai, a village on the far side of the island with a road in and not much else.

One night in Da Nang, in a hotel called the Dylan Hotel. I did not plan this and I will never stop bringing it up. Even the water bottles had it on them.

Late afternoon up the Son Tra peninsula to the Lady Buddha, about seventy metres tall and looking out over the bay, then dinner on the beachfront.

Hoi An is the prettiest town in Vietnam and it knows it: yellow shophouses, lanterns strung over the river, boats selling candles to float.

I did two classes here. The cooking class started at the market, then a basket boat through the coconut palms, then spring rolls, banh xeo, a noodle salad and pho. The coffee class the next day was black, white, egg, salt and coconut, one after another. Five coffees in an afternoon is too many coffees in an afternoon.

Two nights in Saigon, and the day in the middle went out to the Cu Chi tunnels: trapdoor entrances the size of a laptop, displays of the booby traps that were set in the jungle, and a crawl through a section of tunnel that has been widened for tourists and still feels far too small.

There is a shooting range at the end of it, which is exactly as odd as it sounds. Every photo I have of Saigon is from that day trip.

The bus from Saigon takes most of a day. You get off at Bavet, walk your own bag through the border, get the stamp, and get back on. It cost about the same as a taxi across a city.

First dinner in Phnom Penh was basil pork and a fried egg, on a plastic table on the street, for a couple of dollars.

This is the day I still think about. Tuol Sleng was a high school before the Khmer Rouge turned it into a prison, S-21. Thousands of people were held there and almost none of them came out. The buildings have been left much as they were found, and the audio tour is told largely by the few survivors and by the families of people who died there.

In the afternoon I went out to Choeung Ek, one of the killing fields. It’s quiet, mostly grass and trees, with a memorial in the middle where people leave lotus flowers and bracelets.

I’ve kept the photographs small on purpose. One of them is a board of prisoner portraits: those are real people, photographed on the day they arrived, and they deserve better than being scrolled past.

The next day was lighter. Koh Pich is an island in the middle of Phnom Penh built to look like Paris, with its own Arc de Triomphe and Haussmann-style streets, which is a very odd thing to walk around in 34 degrees.

Then a glass of sugar cane juice from a cart on the way back.

In the afternoon I went to APOPO, where they train giant African pouched rats to find landmines. Cambodia is still full of mines and unexploded bombs left from decades of war, and the rats are good at this because they smell the explosive and ignore the scrap metal, so they clear ground far faster than a person with a detector. They are too light to set anything off.

You get to hold one. Last thing I expected to be a highlight of eight countries, and there it is.

After a night by Don Mueang airport I flew up to Chiang Mai and stayed in the Old City, inside the moat. It rained most days, which suited me by then: markets in the evening, food back at the Airbnb, no plan at all.

A morning at an elephant sanctuary: no riding, no shows, just feeding them and then standing back while they get on with it. Some have been there years after being retired out of logging or tourist camps.

The next day was Wat Umong, a forest temple with tunnels under it, and Baan Kang Wat, a little art village next door.

Muay Thai at Rajadamnern the night I landed. It calls itself the first Muay Thai stadium in the world, and it sounds like one. Then a masked Khon dance at the Sala Chalermkrung, the same story as the temple murals, performed in gold.

On the last afternoon, in Thonburi, I found a New Zealand-themed tea shop. Eighty days out and the trip pointed me home.