Travel magazine
Six running series and hundreds of articles, written by the people who plan the trips.
When to go
Seasons, month by month, region by region
What it costs
Real budgets in dollars, with tables
Routes that work
Tested itineraries and combinations
Eating across Asia
What to order and where
On foot
Treks and long walks, described honestly
Before you book
Visas, permits, timing, practicalities
Myanmar with children
The first thing to say is the thing that comes before the packing lists.
What a trip to Myanmar costs
Two things make Myanmar unlike anywhere else we price. The first is that it is genuinely cheap on the ground and genuinely…
Myanmar month by month
Myanmar has three seasons and they are unusually clear cut. Cool and dry from November to February, hot and dry from March…
Myanmar for the first time
Most first-time articles on this site are about what to pack and how the trains work. This one has to start somewhere…
Monsoon in Asia: which countries it actually ruins
"Monsoon" is one word doing far too much work. In southern Vietnam it means an intense hour in the late afternoon, after…
Mongolia with children: what works and what we change
Mongolia is a surprisingly good family destination and a bad one for the wrong family, and the difference is entirely in how…
Mongolia month by month: a season that lasts four months
Most destinations have a best time to go. Mongolia has a season, and outside it most of what you have read about…
Mongolia for the first time: what surprises people
Mongolia is the emptiest country on earth by population density and that emptiness is the whole appeal. It is also the whole…
What does a trip to Mongolia really cost?
Mongolia is cheaper than most people expect and priced in a way that surprises them. The hotel line, which dominates a budget…
The Maldives with children
The Maldives is either the easiest family holiday in Asia or an expensive mistake, and the difference is almost entirely decided before…
What a trip to the Maldives costs
The Maldives has a reputation for being expensive, and the reputation is only half right. The country runs across a wider price…
The Maldives month by month
The Maldives has no seasons in the way a visitor from a temperate country understands them. The temperature barely moves all year:…
Local islands versus resort islands
There are two Maldives sharing the same water, and most visitors only know about one of them.
The Maldives for the first time
There is one thing to understand before you look at a single photograph, and everything else on this page follows from it.
Diving and snorkelling the Maldives, honestly
The rest of this series is about walking. This one is about a country that is 99 per cent water, where the…
Macau in one night or two
Macau from Hong Kong is an hour by ferry, which is why almost everybody does it as a day trip, and why…
Luang Prabang, slowly: three days and the fourth we argue for
Three days in Luang Prabang is the standard allocation and it is one day short. The town is small, a peninsula about…
Lhasa in three days
Lhasa has about two days of sightseeing in it and we give it three, and the reason is not that we have…
Laos with children: what works, what does not, and what we change
Laos with children is a better idea than it sounds and a worse idea than it looks, depending entirely on how the…
Laos month by month, and the two months nobody warns you about
The best time to visit Laos is November to February and almost every source will tell you so. What almost no source…
The best two-week route through Laos, and the three alternatives
Two weeks in Laos is enough to see the country properly and not enough to see all of it, and the whole…
Laos for the first time: what actually surprises people
Most people arriving in Laos for the first time have already travelled in Southeast Asia, usually Thailand or Vietnam, and their expectations…
What does a trip to Laos really cost?
The cost of a trip to Laos is easier to answer honestly than the same question about Japan or India, because Laos…
Kyrgyzstan with children
Kyrgyzstan is one of the best family destinations in Central Asia and one of the easiest to get wrong, and both facts…
Tell us roughly what you want. We will tell you honestly what works.
A named consultant in Tel Aviv, our own people on the ground, and a written plan you can argue with before you commit to anything.