If you are planning a long trip, you will need to take a slightly different approach to packing. Here are a few tips to help you to decide what to take and what to leave at home. Pack high-quality clothes The clothes you pack for a long...
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7 Things to Do Before You Travel
Planning a vacation can start anytime, it doesn’t have to be spring or summer to have a short break or a longer vacation. Most people prefer to travel during the summer and enjoy relaxing vacations before they and their kids start work, respectively school again. Planning a...
Book Your Travels: How Reading Fuels Wanderlust
I have a confession. I was a complete and utter nerd as a kid, always happiest with a stack of books under my arm. Long before my first airplane ride, I was already traveling the world of my imagination: Exotic British India from The Jungle Book and...
My complicated relationship with fruit
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with fruit. As a Vietnamese kid growing up in the US, dessert more often than not was just the fruit sitting in a bowl that had been staring at me all throughout dinner. My Banana self revolted. Why didn’t my parents...
Reinventing Sushi: From Tsukiji to Art
Burnout is a very real and sometimes inevitable consequence of long-term travel. My Fieldmarshal personality coupled with my job as a travel writer means I’m usually blitzing from one sight to the next, ticking off places on my list of must-sees with military precision. To restore the...
Secret Saigon: Mean Girls Edition
With the finale of Parks and Recreation last week, TV has entered a sad, sad era. It’ll be the first time in nearly 10 years that neither Tina Fey nor Amy Poehler will be on the small screen. In honor of their comedic genius, I’ve decided to...
New Beginnings – Vietnam’s Lunar New Year
Vietnam is recovering this week from another Lunar New Year – nine blissful days where the country practically comes to a standstill to ring in the Year of the Goat. The city slowly empties as work-obsessed urbanites head back to their countryside hometowns, shops are shuttered and...
Nima Chandler’s Bangkok – A Mapmaker’s Guide to the City of Angels
“I used to walk past this restaurant that was just disgusting. They had blackened rice cookers outside and dirty floors. No farang would ever go in there. But a friend took me and it was just fabulous. Everyone was there from the hi-so grandmother (Thai-English for “high society”), to a...
Nothing Hidden, Everything Sacred
I love meeting artists. I love seeing the world through a different set of eyes. Eyes that see in a palette of colors. The sky isn’t just blue. It’s cerulean. The bark of a tree isn’t brown. It’s burnt sienna with a touch of yellow ochre where the sunlight finds...
Castaway on Phu Quoc’s North Shore
I am what is known as a late adopter. (Fine. It’s not strictly one of the technology cycles but much preferable to being called a “laggard“.) I didn’t climb aboard the iPhone bandwagon as much as I was chloroformed-into-a-moving-van onto it by a friend who had an...