great ave ruinsOpening the notebook…
Ninh Binh: Karst
Is it safer to understand things than to feel them? Has knowing ever actually protected me, and if it hasn't, why I do still reach for it first? About loving something that can't love you back, and about what knowing does and doesn't do.
Pulau Ubin: The Useful Ghost
I came to Ubin wanting proof that a slower life had survived somewhere. When I found traces of it, I began to grieve. Perhaps this is how a useful ghost is made: we ask a living place to hold the past for us, then struggle to see the people who are still there.
The Last Thousand Feet
You can see the shape of a life, or you can live in it. Written on the descent into Da Nang.
Fremantle: The Chart and Map Shop
We cannot stop making maps, and we cannot make one that is innocent. How do I take responsibility for a way of seeing that I need in order to move through the world, knowing that someone else may have to live with what I left out?
Melaka: My City of Arches
The mother tiger isn't looking at her cub. She's watching what might come for it.
Hanoi: Monsoon Music Festival
We imagine that history happens to places. But history is just the accumulation of presence. Of nights like this one. Of people who came for ordinary reasons and left traces they never intended to leave.
Hoi An: A Meditation on Fractals, Time, and the Strange Comfort of Pattern
We are creatures of nested time. Your circadian rhythms follow the sun. You move through seasons no calendar marks. Beneath all this, deep time—evolution, continents drifting—there is pattern, recursion; and recognising this anchors us.
Threshold: The MRT and the Art of In-Between
I want to say something profound about thresholds, about how we're suspended between departure and arrival. But what I'm actually thinking about is whether I positioned myself at the right door. This is the gap between how we think we experience the world and how we actually do.
Melaka: Tanghulu at Forty
My son will grow up in a world where culture is platform-native. Where he can learn thosai from YouTube, tanghulu from TikTok, pasta from Italian grandmothers who've monetised their nostalgia. Where "traditional" means whatever the algorithm surfaces.
On Solitude and Self-Possession: What We Learn When We Travel Alone
Without conversation, you notice flavour differently. Without accommodation to another person's pace, you discover your own. The focaccia is gone. I have traveled much farther than the distance from my hotel.