With the big C bearing down on us, I’m learning to reappreciate the outdoors, above all those patches with social distancing built in. Several days back, a friend invited me to hike Igidae, a coastal mountain trail running from Dongseangmal Observatory to Oryukdo, north to south. We flipped it, meeting in Kyungsung and bussing it…
Category: Asia
The Oncheoncheon, Busan
Busan is a bustling port city where certain times and places remind you just how many bodies call it home. Word on the street though often remarks on a kind of looseness in the air. The ocean helps. Escapes like the Oncheoncheon too. Not quite from beginning to end, but as far as I could…
Busan
I’ve grown lazy in the heat. The photos show some of the city’s offerings but I’ve been sticking to my Dongnae district streets. The effect of familiarity maybe, not a lack of options. Busan’s self-governing rat race is more an amble. A major port city of three and a half million, she feels more a…
Da Nang
It seemed like a ghost town after the bustle of HCMC, stretches of pedestrianless streets (under a ferocious early-afternoon sun mind you) and significantly less traffic but the air was breathable again. This was the back half of my trip. I cabbed it to my guesthouse, a calm and clean family business a four-minute walk…
Ho Chi Minh City
It’s been on the vacation radar for a while, partly motivated by others’ travel photos. The emerald greens and grottos of Halong Bay in the north, the hydro economy of the Mekong Delta to the south. In fact, I wouldn’t make it to either but split my time between Da Nang (the site of the…
In Taiwan
In some ways Taiwan was the Asian experience I’ve been waiting for. For a greater metropolitan size of nearly 7 million, there’s a relief in its order and its kindness. I was approached four times in as many days, twice for conversation and twice more with offers of help. Rachel then was a Taiwanese mother…
Tokyo Mem’ries
My first and only trip came and went in 2014, maybe a year earlier. That detail matters less and less, than the memories. Tokyo is a city I’m sure I wanted to live up to the fantasy, mine built mostly on recycled images: bird’s-eye views of pedestrian rivers, billboard neon and noodle bars, punk hair…
Cambodia
Cambodia is unforgettable for what it has and what’s been taken away. There are miles of the most vibrant pairings of earth and sky you might ever see. There are jungle licked temples that, more than any skyscraper, have the power to stun. There is horrifying education in the Killing Fields Memorial and Tuol Sleng,…
Hearts in Daejeon
The South Korean city of Daejeon, over a million and a half citizens comfortably and hopefully comfortable. Big number. With that many hearts there’s bound to be affection, for friends, for the magpie (the city bird), for tofu stew, for the streams that run north, for a sister city near you (Calgary, Brisbane & Uppsala),…
Colin Moore 