Jail in Japan: Tales of Pocket Knives, Bathtub Antics, and Utter Cluelessness
I am being ordered to strip down to my birthday suit. Every experience is a good experience, I tell myself, trying to believe my traveling credence with the same passion it usually warrants.
The Three Wise (Business) Men
On the Gobi Desert the author meets three men on camels, bearing gifts that can be yours for a very good price.
Discovering the Great Wall of China - in Pakistan
Moscow Remembered – A Tourist at Home
When I walk through Union Square on an occasional sunny Saturday in San Francisco, I resent that the people around me might mistake me for a tourist. I make myself abundantly clear – I wear no fanny pack, carry no Macy’s bags and plaster a trademark sneer on my face at all times, punctuating it with an occasional roll of my eyes.
Maybe I go overboard, but seeing every other sneering local in my adopted city reminds me of the confusing, maddening and humbling time when I was, indeed, a tourist in the city of my birth.
Lucky Woman
2007 was the year my best friend and I decided to do a mini-tour of Asia: four countries in two weeks sounded perfect. In retrospect, however, trying to tour Bangkok in one day was probably not the best idea I’ve ever had. Perhaps it might have helped if Maggie and I had more of a plan than “Let’s see a temple and go to a market”. Or if we could speak more Thai than “Thank you.” Maybe then we would have had a proper tour instead of trying to break some kind of speed record. But we had a copy of The Lonely Planet; surely, we thought, that was really all we needed.
Good to be Home
Photo by the author
21 Aug 2006 6:14 AM - SO GOOD TO BE HOME.
A 5-star prison
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia—A five-star room with a view, and what a sight—a full overhead of Malaysia’s most notorious prison, gallows and all.
A few floors down and I’d be locking eyeballs with the tower guard.
But wait! Don’t leave, this is no ghastly travel article. It gets better, almost inspirational. You can show it to the entire family, for goodness sake.
The question: Can a brand new five-star hotel and a nasty old hard-core prison live happily-ever-after, side by side?
That’s not exactly what the Berjaya Group had in mind in 2003 when it spent $1.3-billion U.S. to construct its Times Square Hotel & Convention Center in the heart of Kuala Lumpur. The infamous Pudu Prison across the street, which had housed the worst of the worst criminals for over 100 years, had been closed since 1996 and was operating as a museum and tourist attraction, something like Alcatraz.
Now, five-star hotels and museums are a nice fit, even prison museums. So for a few years visitors would tour the old penitentiary with its tiny cells and shoebox-size windows, the dreaded rattan caning area…even the death house and hangman’s platform.
But then the bottom dropped out of the museum business while crime showed an unhealthy increase, much like in this part of the world. So in 2005 the Old Pudu Museum became Pudu Prison again, and the Times Square Hotel now had prisoners instead of paintings across the street.
There goes the neighborhood—right? Wrong. The hotel’s occupancy rate rose higher than ever and many guests are now asking for rooms with a view of the prison instead of Kuala Lumpur’s city center and its dazzling twin towers.
“We used to sell those rooms only after we were filled,” said Julian Arthur, a guest relations officer. “Now they’re in demand. People always seem to want something different, something they can go home and talk about.”
The strange fascination wasn’t limited to room selection. The hotel’s main dining area sprawls from the east to the west (prison) side and the latter was usually filled first each morning with everyone, including me, vying for a window table.
One morning a long line of prisoners in their orange jumpsuits were led single file from one wing to another. Most everyone left their breakfasts to watch the procession. Little wonder why two of the hottest TV shows this season are “Prison Break” and “Lockup.”
I decided to have a closer look at our sinister neighbor the next morning. The exterior walls of the prison were covered with murals painted by the more gifted inmates—obviously under heavy guard– back in 1996 when the prison was being closed.
I approached the main gate and to my astonishment, it was slightly ajar, so I edged in sideways. Now I was in a small area, much like a foyer, facing another walled-off section that contained a small window. I started to walk towards the window when I heard a man’s voice say something indiscernible, turned and saw a uniformed guard in a booth.
He spoke a little English and told me there were about 400 prisoners being held for various crimes, that the death house and gallows were still there but that all executions were now taking place at another interior prison in the middle of nowhere.
Then he asked me, politely but firmly, to leave. While I was taking some exterior photos, I heard another voice inside and the steel gate was sealed.
Back at the hotel that afternoon I stopped in the lounge, where the windows also face Pudu. Some newly-arrived guests entered, walked towards the glass and one man half-shouted in English, “Look, it’s a prison!”
Being an old hand at this sort of thing, I just smiled and kept looking out the window.
Buddha Story
Photo: Xiandu Qiu
What I am going to describe to you is the discovery of another world, experiencing a culture miles from the westernized society.
Sick to Death of Bali
Photo:Flickr/Tabea-Marie
The air was dense and sweltering as I lay on a sweat-soaked sheet gazing forlornly through the mesh of a mosquito net, attempting to glimpse what lay beyond, just outside the door of my rented bungalow in Bali’s art capital, Ubud. Delirious, writhing in pain, and folded neatly into a fetal position, I was furious that such beauty could lie only a few feet away.
A Boat Called Rambo or You Can Get There From Here, But You Don’t Want To Go
There are several ways to get to Phom Penh from Siem Reap in Cambodia. You can travel by plane which is fast but expensive; or you can go by bus which is very cheap but requires about 18 hours. There is also a steamer that takes you across the Tonle Sap lake and then down the Tonle Sap river. This is pricey but reputed to be a leisurely paced trip of three days in a luxury wooden riverboat. Then there is the express ferry which makes the trip in five hours for only $25.
