After living in Asia for a few years, you learn to love holidays you didn’t grow up with in your native country. Some, such as Songkran (the Thai New Year), see people travel to Thailand just to experience it. Indeed, the diverse cultures of Asia celebrate so many different holidays and festivals, it’s almost impossible to keep track. Today we are going to discuss some of our favorites, as well as a few that we’ve always attend or experience.
How you get from place to place during a trip can be a major theme of your travels—even the main focus. Some people take hiking trips, others go cycling, and some look to motorcycles to get around. Today we’ll chat with American Steve Mueller, who took his love for vintage Vespa motorcycles and turned it into a business, showing tourists the ins and outs of Ho Chi Minh City, and eventually other areas of Vietnam and Southeast Asia, on the back of vintage Vespa motorbikes.
Happy New Year – it’s 2017 and our gift to you is a celebratory episode of Talk Travel Asia. Today we’ll revel in our very favorite things about Asia in a multitude of categories from how to get around to where to imbibe and a whole lot in between. We take on a variety of categories from best transport, to airports, best movies theaters and a whole lot in between. This is our Best of Asia from more than 33 collective years living and traveling in the region. Ring in the New Year by celebrating travel and get planning your trip to Asia for 2017!
For Episode 59 we’re running an encore episode from the early days of the show, Episode 12: Phare, The Cambodian Circus with Craig Dodge. For those heading to Cambodia, this is one of the top cultural attractions; for those interested in grass-roots social enterprises, this is a wonderful story. Have a listen and learn about this troupe of performers consisting of disadvantaged Cambodian children.
Episode 58: Asian Bar Game Olympics
A game cafe trend took off in Asia a few years back that included both board game cafes and beer pong tournaments, and it doesn’t seem to be dying down. Today, there are a wealth of opportunities to get your game on both in and out of bars across the region. In fact Scott and I recently organized and competed in the first Bangkok Bar Games Olympics. Today we are going to talk about a variety of places to play different games across Asia, everything from family fun to just get drunk.
On this episode of Talk Travel Asia podcast, we talk with Chomwan Weeraworawit about the rich textile history and diversity across the region and how you can experience it.
The only thing that stays the same is that things are constantly changing and that’s nowhere more true than in rapidly developing Asia. Scott & Trevor talk about how places change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but they always change. Often it’s your memory that’s not accurate too and the people you were with, mood you were in, etc, can impact how you remember a place. On this episode of Talk Travel Asia podcast, Trevor and Scott talk about how a number of places in Asia that they know well have changed over the years, both for good and for bad.
On this episode of Talk Travel Asia podcast, Scott and Trevor talk with legendary chef Bobby Chinn about eating Vietnamese food, cooking Vietnamese food, and his experience on Top Chef Middle East. Have a listen and enjoy!
On this episode Scott and Trevor discuss the Land of the Rising Sun. They compare their thoughts on the Asian island nation prior to traveling there and discuss their experiences traveling to Japan. The following is a general outline of their discussion.
On May 31, 2015 we posted a special episode of Talk Travel Asia, ‘Traveling Nepal Post-Earthquake with Mads Mathiasen’, which was one of our more popular episodes. We are following that up, chatting again with Mads about how the country is fairing more than one-year post earthquakes. You’ll be surprised to learn that it’s still a great place to travel!
Now that he seems to have hung up his pen as a travel writer, Talk Travel Asia podcast co-host Trevor Ranges talks about his decade-long experience as a travel writer, discussing the highs and lows of living the freelance travel writing life. From writing pieces for magazines and websites around the world, to authoring for Fodor’s and producing first editions of the National Geographic Thailand and National Geographic Cambodia guidebooks, Trevor’s produced some pretty amazing stuff. So what’s that life like? Have a listen and all will be revealed!
