Bachelor

Freedom used to be my most cherished possession. I'd sooner have gone to prison than have my freedom taken away from me... oh hang on, that's the same net result.

The glimmer of freedom has tarnished since I met someone I like spending my time with, who I had to leave behind for a few weeks due to a combination of visa expiry and a cleansing religious festival that didn't exactly require boyfriends to be around.

Fortunately, I'm an expert at killing time and treading water in South East Asia, and I took the opportunity to visit a few places on my to-do list that Jackie probably wouldn't be that interested in when we started travelling together. Staving off my depression by visiting some of the bleakest tourist attractions in the world helped for a while, but then I accidentally checked in at a tranquil resort where everything was mockingly designed for two and the solitude was rubbed in my face.

As I watched the sun set over the Gulf of Thailand from my balcony with one too many chairs, I comforted myself by visualising the shackles of codependence slowly approaching over the horizon. We'd be together again soon. I'm a traitor to single travellers and the values I've stood for over the last two years, but I have to admit it's nice being able to share experiences and actually have someone to talk to rather than just typing my frustrations. Here's hoping this is my last solo excursion for a long time.

Let's actually do Cambodia properly this time and I mean it this time (for a week)

I seem to have an aversion to Cambodia that I don't have for other popular South East Asian destinations, but it's one I've tried to get over by staying for incrementally longer periods each time I buy the $20 visa and head into the kingdom of tuk tuks, amateur con artists and more tuk tuks. The first time I stayed for about 20 minutes, the next time a couple of days and this time more than a week, so it must be growing on me. Actually, I'm not sure why I haven't spent much time here before now.

It might all come down to the bad first impressions I had of the country, which were being scammed a fistful of dollars on a visa run in March 2011 and a few dollars more by a money changer when I went back in November. Although Cambodia isn't quite as bad as Vietnam in that regard, it left some indignant consumer rage in my system that cancelled out any awe I might have felt wandering around the ancient temples, which are spoiled by too many tourists anyway. Those photos from the Angkor Archaeological Park took ages to crop down and are my crowning achievement in precision tourist genocide. Hmm, maybe I should have used a less sensitive term.

Luckily for me, Southern Cambodia was a lot less photogenic and I seemed to spend a lot of the time deliberately taking photos of things that annoyed me. But for all its faults, I'll probably come back some time to stay slightly longer again. I can't say the same about Vietnam.

Ohhh, THAT Philippines

The typhoons that spoiled my last visit to the Philippines in 2011 did such an efficient job, they even washed away my memories of this country's more horrible aspects, which all came flooding back in the two days I spent in Cebu. (All this weather imagery is just for effect, it was only comfortably cloudy this time).

I specifically chose Cebu as my entry point over Manila and Angeles because I'd been to those other places before and have no desire to ever go back. Unfortunately, it turns out Cebu's basically the same, just on a more compact scale. It may be on a dinky island, but it's no paradise.

Things were even more pronounced as spending nearly two months in Australia meant I'd lost my South East Asia sensory immunity, and walking around the dangerous city streets I was overpowered by the stink of the jeepneys and polluted streams, the trash strewn all over the place, the depressing young girls hanging off the arms of foreign pensioners, the even more depressing beggars rolling around with skateboards for legs and the parodoxical holy imagery decorating dens of sin.

It was also distressing to notice other people's perception of me shifting from generally failing to acknowledge that I even exist in Australia (perfect) to being openly stared at and a target for all sorts of scams and services. Before Cebu, I'd been able to comfort myself that any times I might have been approached by prostitutes in Thailand, there'd been enough ambiguity that I could pretend they were asking about something else. But now I don't have that comfort any more, unless 'fucking' means something else in Cebuano. Why did I leave Australia?

I'm in this country for three weeks, so if this doesn't all become darkly humorous soon I might lose my mind.

Literally the Newcastle of the south

For a different perspective on these events (usually about two metres behind and to the left or right), see Oliver's exclusive behind-the-scenes report.

I can't tell you how Newcastle, New South Wales compares to its near-antipodean namesake because I never actually visited Newcastle upon Tyne. I never lived in North East England and never had any special reason to go there, so I felt no pressing need to make the 104-mile trip from Edinburgh or 185-mile trip from Crewe.

I never visited Newcastle under Lyme either, which was actually quite close to where I grew up. Assuming it to be just another boring market town like everything else around those parts, I never made the 14-mile trip from Crewe.

Come to think of it, I don't think I ever visited Old South Wales either.

However, I can confirm that the Newcastle of Australia is quite nice for a day out - just 10,462 miles from Crewe as the immortal crow that doesn't need to eat or rest flies.

What are we doing here?

You get a very different perspective on Australia if you cross the planet in stages and take your sweet time getting here. Flying from London to Sydney with a compulsory stopover in Shanghai or Kuala Lumpur isn't enough to build an anthropogeographical map of the world and its people in your mind that can be utterly demolished when you land in this far-off country, inexplicably run by white people. What the hell are they doing here?

I've visited plenty of fallen colonies in the last couple of years, some of which have only shaken off the European influence relatively recently, but this is the first one I've been to where they stayed for keeps (I haven't discovered America yet). After working my way through East Asia and noticing subtle marks of ancient colonisation and migration - Chinese-hybrid Thais, Malaysia's migratory melting pot, the malleable Buddhist faith - it's very strange to head south and see white people where you'd expect people to be darker than that.

Admittedly, most of them are slightly tanned. And - get this - they only speak bloody English too! Or a close approximation anyway.

A month of Sydneys

I don't normally celebrate New Year, which gets the same attention from me as my birthday, Christmas and Ramadan. Despite spending my last three December 31sts in capital cities where they don't let the arbitrary turning of the Gregorian calendar pass by unnoticed (Edinburgh, Taipei, Seoul), I preferred to spend those pivotal hours like any other: on my computer, avoiding contact with revellers or just being asleep.

But when I ended up spending this New Year in Sydney, and was invited to see in the New Year from the best vantage point in the city and enjoy several hours of drinking in the park, sleeping through the event this time seemed a little disrespectful. And anyway, this might be most easterly (and earliest) New Year I'll ever have, which, combined with the equally redundant time zone system and the end of my month in Sydney, somehow resulted in a night worth celebrating. Happy Early New Year!

Oh yeah, I'm in Australia. Didn't I mention that? I should probably backtrack a little...

Mandalay me down to sleep

Look, it's a place you've actually heard of for a change! Though that's probably just because of that unrealistic song about the emancipated elephant. Trust me, Nellie wouldn't make it more than 10 metres down the dirt road before a 1980 Toyota Corona with no headlights smashed into her. That'd give her something to trumpety-trump about. At least wait until daylight to give yourself a fighting chance, you stupid pachyderm.

There were more pristine payas and crumbling colonial constructions to see in the old capital of Mandalay, but its most striking feature is the four-square-kilometre Royal Palace, which I was already debating over buying a ticket for before a soldier told me it was off limits anyway, making the decision a lot easier. Sod it, I went up a big hill instead.

Yangon a minute

If you arrived in Bangkok and found your illusions of technologically backwards Asia cruelly shattered by the ubiquity of smartphones, head to the Myanmar embassy and arrange your visa pronto, as visiting this emerging travel destination is really like stepping back in time. Specifically to about 1986, judging by some of the nostalgic Toyotas trundling along the dusty roads.

Yangon is where most flights go to, and with its mixture of painstakingly maintained government parks and appallingly run-down public buildings it gives a fair overview of this slightly mad country. You might know it as Rangoon if you're more than 100 years old or the sort of stubborn pedant who refuses to acknowledge that names change and still insists on calling Myanmar 'Burma,' Starburst 'Opal Fruits' and people with darker skin than you 'coloureds.'

There's something very distinctive about Yangon though, and it took me most of the first day to realise what it was. There are no motorbikes here. There aren't even any bicycles, apparently due to a government initiative to reduce congestion that seems to have targeted precisely the wrong end of the spectrum. After going back and forth to Hanoi a few times the previous month, where cacophonous bikes are standard issue, this was a welcome shock.

Hello there Vietnam, how are you this morning? Good.

I think I'd been postponing Vietnam so long for the same reason as China, as I didn't fancy having to arrange an annoying and expensive visa when other countries let me in with just a passport stamp. It's nicer to feel welcome than like I'm some sort of annoyance (Hanoiance?)

But I'm glad I finally got round to it, as this might be one of my favourite South East Asian countries as well as one of the worst. Great sights, fantastic food and the most mental traffic I've experienced since Cairo. Those idealised images of Vietnam you have from 1990s travel documentaries of people in conical hats getting around on non-motorised bicycles are long gone. Hanoi's population of eight million owns six million motorcycles. That means everyone apart from the kids has one, though they probably have illicit scooters stowed beneath their beds.

I didn't enjoy walking in Hanoi very much, but risking almost certain death crossing the street was still preferable to getting ripped off by taxi drivers. If these blogs suddenly cease before I get to Ha Long Bay, you know what happened. Please give my organs to the needy and let the medical students make mistakes on my corpse so they don't slip up on living ones. As a precaution, I've always had a blog post scheduled to go live in the event of my death with more details - that's normal behaviour, right?

The Chiang Mai of the slightly to the north east

My break-neck tour of Laos lasted just 10 days, which is probably something like the average but was a shock to my system, as I'm used to giving myself about twice as long as I need in every place to account for work days and days where I just can't really be bothered to go out and would rather watch Red Dwarf and eat biscuits. I've been travelling for two years without a break, got a problem with that?

Laos was a testing ground to see whether I could get all my work done on long distance bus journeys to free up time once I got to my destination, now that I've replaced my laptop with one that has a battery life longer than two hours (how did I cope with that for so long?) This new system works well for me, but I still could have done with spending a little longer in the old capital of Luang Prabang - the first and last place in Laos that didn't just stress me out and reminded me a lot of Chiang Mai in Thailand.

Apparently, you can take a seven-hour speedboat journey between those two places, so could theoretically divide your time between Chiang Mai and Luang Prabang until your respective visas expire, making the trip across the border every two to four weeks until your inevitable death. Not the worst retirement plan.

Buddhy hell

I just realised I missed a trick by not using that title for the Ten Courts of Hell blog more than a year ago, so I had to get it in somewhere.

If you're the sort of free-thinking or stubborn traveller who prefers not to base their plans and schedules on the experienced advice of others, you might have made the mistake of spending more than one night in Laos' tedious capital Vientiane. But have no fear, there's a slightly unusual sculpture park constructed by an exiled shaman just an hour's bumpy bus ride away, which is well worth the trip to fill all those unforgiving minutes. Maybe I'll listen next time.

The dark side of Macau

I spent a little longer in Macau then I'd intended, having already booked my flight for the end of the month but cutting my time in the People's Republic of China mercifully short due to various stresses. I completely failed to make the most of this extra time though, and didn't even bother leaving the four square kilometres of the peninsula to check out the islands. There'll be more islands in other places - this was my China detox.

I always seem to end up getting stranded in these colonial outposts, and Macau is one of the nicer ones. For once, the colonists were Portuguese too, not British, so I didn't even have to feel guilty!

I don't really have a theme for these compulsory pictures of tourist sights. I notice all my pictures are usually taken in the day time, because my camera doesn't take very good night shots and I'm usually in bed by nine, so I stayed up late to get some blurry night time photos. Sorry to disappoint anyone who came here hoping to read about the disgusting stuff that goes on here - read this instead. But if you want a less depressing, conservatively bland experience, check out my photos.

You can Canton me

After the economic tedium of Shenzhen forced me to seek solace in model villages, I was happy that Guangzhou had a lot more going for it. Alright, so it's pretty much the same stuff I saw in Taipei when I first came to Asia almost two years ago, but at least that gives my time in this continent some kind of circular narrative. Like those circular doorways I'd been missing too.

Hong Kong - The Edinburgh of the East

So it turns out Hong Kong isn't 'the Singapore of the North,' as I'd been expecting, but bizarrely makes me feel like I'm back in Edinburgh. From paradoxical Scottish street names and First buses complete with distinctively unpleasant purple-n-turquoise interior decor to the city's persistent use of fireworks long after most people have become jaded by the expensive spectacle, this place made me feel oddly nostalgic for early morning work buses. I've got to get out of here.

The comparisons fall pretty flat after that, but that's fine. The lazy journalistic device of superficially comparing one place with another place is never obligated to stand up to scrutiny, though Hong Kong's history as a British colony at least means this comparison holds more water than Chiang Mai being 'the Chester of Thailand' just because there's a wall around it or Singapore being 'the Isle of Wight of Malaysia' just because it's at the bottom.

There are also more white people here than I expected, which always surprises me after I've got so used to being around Asian people. Though if you're racist, blind or an idiot, you could make a wry point about Britain basically being a Chinese colony these days, right? Ha ha! Please stop reading my website.

The quite good wall of South Korea

Have you ever failed to spot something that's right under your nose?

Maybe it was a boy or girl who was into you, but you assumed you'd never have a chance. Or only realising how arbitrary the religious convictions people live their lives by really are, when you take a wider look at the world and colonial history. Or finally getting that the name of Sonic the Hedgehog's fox sidekick Miles Prower was a rubbish pun on 'miles per hour' when you're 23.

Or that most Koreans wear glasses, something I never clocked the first time I was here, but which I haven't been able to stop noticing since I came back. I don't know if it's genetic, a combination of Korea's notoriously heavy-duty schooling with its heavy-duty gaming culture leading to a general lack of sun exposure, or if looking like a stock 1980s nerd character is popular right now in this conformist and fashion-subjugated society. Whichever way, it makes me feel more at home in the land of the visually impaired.

There's also the massive wall that surrounds Seoul, 18.2 kilometres in length, which I spectacularly failed to notice in all the time I spent here last winter, despite even taking a couple of photos of its gates when I came across them. What did I think they were attached to? You can see the southern section of the wall in my cloudy Namsan photos too, where it was literally right under my nose, but I must have been too busy squinting at the buildings in the distance. There might be some sort of meaningful analogy there.

That'll teach me to travel on the subway rather than letting my feet guide me. Walking around Seoul's perimeter did wonders for my psychogeography and gave me an idea of how the different parts of Seoul I've visited fit together, much like the very similar wall in Suwon last week, and it's more prep work for the inevitable mid-life crisis where I decide to walk across China or some similarly pointless feat. Let's see if this blog's still going by then.

The York of South Korea

Maybe if I wasn't so averse to looking at travel guides now and then, I wouldn't have missed out on Suwon last time I was in Korea. I somehow got the idea it was full of bored, racist English teachers, but this nicely sized city just an hour from Seoul turns out to have more going on than some places I took a long haul bus ride for. I'm looking at you, Jeonju.

But these are the reasons I came back to Korea - for the unfinished business of scrambling over broken walls, taking boring photos of reconstructed gates and dressing up like an idiot. There wasn't enough space to write all that in the 'Purpose of visit?' section of the immigration form, so I just went for 'tourism.'

Kyoto-tal recall

If Tokyo was a sci-fi utopia (let's face it, it practically is), its jumbled anagram namesake Kyoto would be the evil dystopian twin. But once you've spent some time walking between pleasant temples and gardens on this city's convenient grid layout, you realise it's sprawling Tokyo that's the evil, unhinged one. The used schoolgirl panties vending machines should have been a hint, really.

But evil is always a lot more fun, so Kyoto unfortunately seems a little boring by comparison. I hope you like temples and things.

Maid in Japan

I hadn't heard of maid cafes before I saw these morally dubious flyer girls on every street corner in Akihabara, but as someone who was brought up with the controversial world view of gender equality, and having seen enough preachy Star Trek allegories to know that servitude isn't generally something to be encouraged, things didn't look promising.

When I later found out what sort of stuff goes on behind that cheery facade it wasn't quite as bad as I feared, but was still pretty sickening. Which basically means the girls are paid to find all of their customers' conversations fascinating and their personal quirks endearing rather then creepy, but that any excitement the customer may get from this endorsed superiority has to remain a secret. He has to keep his hands to himself, and not in that way.

I'm using the third person because I decided not to cross the moral line and visit a maid cafe myself, but once I'd come up with the blog title I had to mention it some time. Plus, it was pretty expensive and I wanted to save my yen for the cat cafe, which isn't an outrageous Are You Being Served? style euphemism for pussy. They're cafes where you hang out with some cats. It's ridiculous, but at least they don't make the cats wear debasing French maid outfits. Actually, what am I talking about - they definitely do.

Tokyo good experiencing joy you 6 garden

Enough of wilderness excursions, cosmic choreography and minging museums, I know what you want from Tokyo. Shibuya is probably the best place to see iconic Tokyo sights like too many people crowding into cramped streets, cyberpunk fashions and deafening arcades packed with pensioners, though these static photos probably give a misleading impression of how stressful and frenzied it all isn't.

Even when my senses are being overloaded, I still feel a lot more relaxed in Japan than in most other countries I've visited (Korea excepted), and even during rush hour, the scales are tipped more in favour of order than chaos. That doesn't mean this city always makes sense and isn't completely bewildering on occasion - it's Tokyo, after all. Perhaps you've heard of it?

Tokyold and new

Tokyo may be a sci-fi city set permanently in the future, but there's some nice old stuff here as well. Or at least, what remains of old stuff and reconstructions of old stuff destroyed in some obscure Asian conflict called 'World War II.'

Budgeting my days out is fun and a refreshing bit of strategic thriftiness after being able to travel ridiculous distances in Thailand, Malaysia and even Korea for practically nothing, so today I planned out a rapid tour of Tokyo's east side that took in the old, the faux-old and the brand spanking new. What you won't see is the tangled subway knots and train connections linking these places together, which was all part of the experience.