Asia Travel Information Blog

Bounded to the north by the Java Sea and the south by the low Bogor Hills, Indonesia’s overwhelming capital, JAKARTA, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. From a mere 900,000 inhabitants in 1945, the current population is well over ten million and continues to grow at a rate of 200,000 every year. [...]

A city as small as Singapore can be toured in just three days, many would say, but to see all the highlights and get beneath the skin of this charming place definitely warrants a longer stay. A tour planned around the major districts allows one to appreciate its history, people and rich cultural diversity in [...]

From a tourist map, the island of Penang looks somewhat like a mink’s pelt. Georgetown, its capital, sits roughly on the right arm of the skin, while the site of the Muka Head Lighthouse on the left signaled its strategic appeal when the British East India Company came calling two centuries ago. Somewhere near the [...]

On the edge of the Orient, TOKYO – the last great conurbation before the yawning chasm of the Pacific Ocean – is one of the world’s most perplexing cities. On the one hand, gaudily hung about with eyeball-searing neon and messy overhead cables, plagued by seemingly incessant noise, often clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic and packed [...]

Seoul is a great place to experience a wide variety of spicy yet mouth-watering foods, especially the local cuisine with its distinctive tastes based on garlic, ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil, red pepper powder and fermented soybean paste. Korean dishes, such as bibimpab (vegetables mixed with rice and hot pepper paste, topped with a cooked [...]

The headlong pace and flawed modernity of BANGKOK (called “Krung Thep” in Thai) match few people’s visions of the capital of exotic Siam. Spiked with scores of highrise buildings of concrete and glass, it’s a vast flatness which holds a population of at least nine million, and feels even bigger. But under the shadow of [...]

Taipei, the political and financial center of Taiwan, is the island’s most populous city. Taipei originated as a small trading port over two hundred years ago before becoming the administrative capital under the Qing Dynasty. During the last few decades there has been tremendous growth in the city. Now a sprawling metropolis, Taipei is an [...]

Hong Kong works as a useful gateway into Southeast Asia and into China. It is also an interesting place in its own right – an extraordinary, complex territory of seven million people that’s a repository of traditional Chinese culture, a recently relinquished British outpost, and one of the key economies of the Pacific Rim. The [...]

On first impressions, DELHI, with its jam-packed streets, tower blocks and temples, forts, mosques and colonial mansions, can be both disorienting and fascinating. It certainly takes a while to find your feet, as you attempt to weave a path through buses, trucks, nippy modern cars, mopeds, rickshaws, cows, bullock carts, hand-pulled trolleys and even the [...]

The capital of the Philippines, a grouping of twelve cities and five municipalities, is technically known as Metro Manila but usually referred to simply as MANILA, home to 9.5 million people. Manila will never be a serious tourist destination until the authorities deal with the twin evils of traffic and pollution; most tourists are in [...]