Category Archives: Asia

Lhasa-Nepal 1995

I spent early September- late October of 1995 in Tibet. I traveled around Lhasa visiting various monasteries. Sera, Drepung, Ganden and the Tsurphu Monastery, home to the Karmapa rinoche. I prayed at each one for my baby brother’s departed soul. Michael had died of AIDS that summer. I especially liked the Jokhang. There was no […]

South From Tibet 1995

In early November 1995 I had hitched a ride from Shitgatze, Tibet south on my way to the Nepali border after spending a month in Lhasa. After a few hours on the Friendship Highway I was dropped at the t-intersection of two dirt roads; National Highways 318 and 219. The van disappeared west and I […]

Singapore Air NO NO 2013

Back in the 1950s more adventurous western travelers to Singapore frequented Bugis Street to view the Pearl of the Orient’s notorious cavalcade of beautiful transvestites. The laissez-faire atmosphere of the sex entrepot was an affront to the city-state’s puritanical President and by the late 1980s Bugis Street had been sanitized of perversion and by the […]

Bugis Street Selama-Lamanya

From 2020 The Bugis people were great voyagers from Sulawesi. They sailed small crafts from Padang Padang to many ports of the Far East ranging from Burma to Northern Australia. Many practiced piracy and as Thomas Forrest wrote in A Voyage from Calcutta to the Mergui Archipelago, “The Buginese are a high-spirited people: they will […]

30,000 Feet over Burma – May 5, 1990 – Journal Entry

Previously published May 24, 2023 I have a flight to Kathmandu. I wish I could stay in Bangkok, but my money is getting low. I called New York from the Malaysia Hotel lobby. A collect call to Rickie Boy, who complained, “I haven’t had anyone to drink with since you left. The city sucks. The […]