Travel ,CNA Lifestyle ,Asia (Page 3)

We also spent time at the Selim Hill Tea Garden, which borders the town of Kurseong and dates to 1870. Sitting at 4,000 feet above sea level, the estate is named after the tea plantation’s founder, called Selim Sahab by the locals. The current manager, Shahab Mallick, explained to me that the estate is 100 per cent organic and that it has moved away from the commercial model of other tea plantations in the area. Instead, they’ve created the Selim Hill Collective, with an inclusive, sustainable approach to tea growing that’s designed to preserve biodiversity and treat workers fairly.

The estate’s 240 permanent staff receive accommodation, social security and medical care and we learned about the whole tea-production process from start to finish: Plucking, weathering, rolling, drying, sorting and packing. Mallick showed me around the estate’s cottage, now inhabited by the owners. I was excited to learn that Rabindranath Tagore, the 1913 Nobel Prize laureate for literature, used to stay there.

Those who want to visit Darjeeling to be immersed in its tea culture can do so even more easily by staying overnight at a luxurious tea estate such as the Taj Chia Kutir Resort and Spa, the Glenburn Tea Estate, the Ging Tea House or the Singtom Tea Estate & Resort.

By Romy Gill © The New York Times Company

The article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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Before relocating to Portugal to pursue a doctorate in tourism, Ly Tran, 34, who taught hospitality at an institution in Ho Chi Minh City, traveled to Hon Thom & nbsp with her Portuguese partner. This island is small and privately owned by Sun Group, and the Phu Quoc cable car leads there. Two more amusement gardens, three resorts, a modern building, and lots of villas are all planned by the business. The couple was relaxing in a coffee shop with palm trees while their journey companions played on enormous, vibrant waterslides.

According to Tran, Vietnamese appreciate the organization and cleanliness of tourist destinations like Sun World. She added that wire cars also make sense because Asian tourists take a different approach to sightseeing than Westerners do.

She remarked,” When you see Europeans going sightseeing, they’re going to be wearing sports shoes and clothing.” However, Asian people are typically seen wearing longer dresses, sandals, or high heels. They want to look stunning for the image capture.

The cable vehicles offered an unexpected viewpoint for Frank Ngo, a physical therapist from Anaheim, California, who was 41 years old and whose parents had fled Vietnam after the battle in 1978. On their first journey to Vietnam since they were teenagers, he and his wife Karen Do, 34, were astounded by the country’s advancements and the ease of the car ride up to Phu Quoc.

It’s absurd to look out at the sea in that manner. My kids were boat enthusiasts. They were out there in the open water for about five days, Ngo said as we entered the Colosseum-like place. ” I was trying to process that by picturing myself as them out there on the ship.”

The New York Times Company, by Patrick Scott

The New York Times was where the content first appeared.

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One girl and 41 boys, ages 8 and older, gathered for a race. The families used their cars and motorcycles to herd the horses to the starting line. Parents smiled and motioned for us to follow as they lined up their cars next to the horses. When the horses took off, we did too, speeding across the grass alongside the racers at nearly 50mph.

Just as the first horse crossed the finish line, it began to hail. What would have been a celebration turned into an exodus. Some of the riders crossed the finish line and then headed straight into the hills, braving pellets of ice.

As we drove on toward the hot springs, torrential rain overpowered the windshield wipers, and we began to slide. We passed Priuses, a favourite car in Mongolia, mired on the roadsides. Each time we forded a swollen river, the water rose closer to the cab, until we got stuck and it finally leaked in.

The storm had also flooded the hot springs. As we shivered in a tepid pool, one English-speaking boy commiserated: “Sorry you missed the hot water.”

ALONG CAME A SPIDER

After days of slow, off-road driving, we finally arrived at sparkling blue Khuvsgul Lake – our final destination. We wanted to spend the night in a ger, so we called Erdenesukh Tserendash, a 43-year-old horse herder who goes by the nickname Umbaa. His number was on Facebook.

Umbaa, his wife and two sons welcomed us into one of his family’s tents, lit by bulbs hooked to car batteries. For dinner, the family served boiled sheep and horse meat on a communal tray with carrots and potatoes. After dinner, they cracked open the bones and sucked out the marrow, and before bed, we sipped tea with yak milk. As I lay there scrolling, in the light of my phone, I noticed something on my face and swatted. It was a spider the size of a quarter.

The next day, Umbaa took us on a full-day horse ride. We cantered across meadows of wildflowers, saw reindeer and climbed a mountain overlooking the lake, lazing in the sun for lunch, an idyllic finale to our journey.

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Like many Singaporeans, my family loves visiting Japan. I’ve been to Japan eight times but mostly stuck to Tokyo. This time, travelling with my teenage son in June, we ventured further – to five different cities.

One reason was because we were already buying a 14-day JR Pass (47,250 yen or S$459 at press time; a seven-day pass costs 29,650 yen; a 21-day pass 60,450 yen), which allows unlimited travel on all local and high-speed trains throughout Japan. Come October 2023, prices will increase by at least 65 per cent, so we decided to make our money’s worth during our trip.    

Japan is split into eight regions but to cut down on travelling time, we skipped Hokkaido (northern Japan) and Kyushu (far south). Landing in Tokyo in the morning, we hopped onto our first Shinkansen to Takayama via transit at Nagoya.

Takayama, because of its well-preserved Edo-period historical centre – and because we wanted to eat its famous Hida beef. We also wanted to visit the UNESCO World Heritage site of Shirakawa-go, renowned for its unique Gassho-zukuri architecture and a 50-minute bus ride away.

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The museum is filled with photographs depicting the brutalities that the French and later the Americans committed in their losing campaigns against the Vietnamese. In addition to photos of rows of bodies in open pits, burning villages and instruments of torture, the harrowing displays are heavy on graphic shots of Vietnamese deformed by US chemicals like Agent Orange, with hardly any mention of the atrocities the North and South committed against each other.

11.30am: Relax in comfort

The Thao Dien area, across the river from the Binh Thanh District, is home to forests of condo and commercial high rises. Popular with expats and affluent Vietnamese, the area has all the accoutrements of the city’s upturn, from chic boutiques to gourmet eateries.

For brunch, visit Laang, a stylish, vegetarian-friendly Vietnamese restaurant that may be a welcomed alternative to the multitude of uncomfortably warm, open-air eateries. You can’t go wrong with a platter of wraps and rolls, including succulent grilled chicken and veggies wrapped in fresh leaves (239,000 dong), sweet and savoury grilled eggplant stuffed with shiitake mushrooms (109,000 dong) and the refreshing pomelo, lime and butterfly pea juice (79,000 dong).

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In total, over the course of my 28 days spent visiting all 88 temples, I was also given: 700 yen (about S$6), 11 candies, seven small cakes, seven car rides, six mandarin oranges, five rice balls, three cookies, three chocolates, three cups of green tea, two crackers, two mochi, two soda cans, two multipurpose cloths, two yuzu juice cartons, one yokan (a red bean jelly snack), one bicycle (lent to me for half a day), one bag of steamed chestnuts, one bag of cherry tomatoes, one lunch and one bowl of homemade udon.

The pilgrimage’s temples are scattered along the perimeter of the island – some near the coast, and some farther into the mountainous interior. Some are grouped together, and others are 50 miles apart.

As a pilgrim, I often arose early – by 5.30am in the spring – and spent a full day on the road. About 80 per cent of the route is on asphalt, mostly through open fields and small towns and past beautiful coastline. I spent a few days climbing up and down mountain peaks.

The fading of Japan’s rural population is dramatically evident on Shikoku. Young people have fled to the cities or to other islands that offer a better quality of life. My experience confirmed as much: Nearly all of the young people I saw were in the capitals of the island’s four prefectures.

For breakfast and dinner, many pilgrims take advantage of home-cooked meals provided by most minshuku, or family-operated bed-and-breakfasts, and ryokan, traditional Japanese inns. These meals usually consist of rice, miso soup, fish and pickled vegetables. For lunch, depending on one’s location, convenience stores can provide a quick bite.

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The usual images of Tokyo oscillate between two extremes: Gilded metropolis of the future and repository of the aristocratic past. The Q Guide evokes a different, real, thoroughly proletarian and much more intriguing city, most faithfully depicted in works of art and literature that I love.

I thought of Donald Richie’s Tokyo: A View Of The City, a short book published in 1999 that illuminates Tokyo’s downtown culture, when I waited in line outside Dote no Iseya, a basic but brilliant tempura restaurant in what was once a lively red-light district. Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s magnificent graphic novel, Abandon The Old In Tokyo, a collection of stories from 1970, focused on the city’s postwar, working-class culture, came to life when I ducked into Uosan Sakaba, an izakaya located on the far eastern side of Tokyo. I trailed two salarymen, obviously a little tipsy, into the steamy space. The counterman said to them, with no greeting or preamble, “Have you been drinking?”

“We had a few,” the men replied.

“Get out,” the counterman said, authoritatively, and that was it. Uosan may be cheap and loud, but they too have their rules. You can get drunk there, but you don’t enter if you’re already inebriated.

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