If I remember Jules Verne?s version of 80 Days Around The World Circumnavigating, India was a high point. It was full of gung-ho action and adventure, and also where he picked up the Princess. Thus there were many prospects for me. Action, adventure […]

One Night In Bangkok is all I could take. Ping Pong balls shooting out of the windows of every cheap knocking shop, and all the other stereotypes which suggests the only experience I really had of Thailand was cheap Channel Five documentaries. But I […]

I was a little bit off the beaten track, stuck – as I believe they call it – In Country in Vietnam. Very friendly people whose food was excellent and all their radios ran of batteries, which were easily stolen. In my time their the only m[…]

The problem with hitch-hiking with a bloke that you don’t share a language with is that you often have little idea where you are going. I’d pointed west to him and he smiled with a gappy grinned that reminded me of Elton John after I had […]

After a refreshing sleep in Stanley (away from the road) I got the maps out and started to plan the trip properly. I had traversed three quarters of the world in about three quarters of the time, though I had my biggest landmasses to come. The ancien[…]

You would think I would be used to traveling by boat after the last few months, but this trip felt like an age had passed since I left Japan. The boat was a piece of junk, which in retrospect might have been better if it was an entire junk. But the M[…]

I had had enough of Japan. Of its horrendous karaoke. Of its bigging up of minor UK indie acts as the kind of thing teenage girls should scream at (and yes, teenage girls should scream at lousy britpop bands, BUT THEN RUN AWAY). Of the tinitus caused[…]

Tokyo had defeated me. What with its cans of sweat and its omnipresent neon, it was like someone was constantly playing AC/DC at me all the time. And that makes Tanya a very upset girl. So I decided to get out of town and see more of this great natio[…]

I woke up with the poor dismembered bodies of the young karaoke singers around me. It was like a scene from a Japanese horror movie – such as Ring (nowhere near as frightening as the Abba horror Ring Ring which still keeps me awake at night). I[…]

I had resigned to going to Japan, despite David Sylvian. Can you really go around the world and not visit the land of the rising sun? I had already been to the House Of The Rising Sun as a girl and was partially responsible for its forced name change[…]