Lush and lovely spot in Penang

Quiet, lush and teeming with plant varieties from around the globe – and monkeys – Penang’s 29-hectare Botanical Gardens are worth going out of your way to visit; no other such well-stocked public gardens exist in Malaysia. The gardens lie in a valley about eight kms outside Georgetown, Penang’s capital. They were established in 1884…

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An Equal Music

By Vikram SethMichael is a violinist in a string quartet in London. He lives a quiet life with music being his greatest joy – he simply can’t forget the woman he loved and abandoned while he was a student in Vienna ten years ago. A chance sighting of Julia on a distant London bus brings…

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Spiritual moves

Yoga has been around for longer than any archaeological records; by its very nature, it leaves nothing behind to point to its existence except for tales of the amazing powers possessed by some of the best yogis. In Bangkok, yoga has been taught formally for only around 40 years – which is rather surprising if…

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Walking tall

Around the globe there are a whole lot of fitness-freaks slowly coming to their senses. These are the people who maybe started aerobics in the ‘80s but have now had it with jumping around interminably on carpets stinking of sweat; or they’re the joggers of the ‘90s who are tired of being injured or just…

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Vang Vieng awakes

In 1994 the Song river flowed sedately through Vang Vieng, a small village-town just off Route 13 in Vientiane province, Lao PDR. Local women washed their hair in the river’s shallow waters, men pushed their bicycles across the smooth pebbles lining its bed and children pointed and cried when they saw some of the first…

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The Good Cook

Edited by Richard Olney This finely-photographed book is food pornography at its most sophisticated. It’s both more and less than a true cook book, with theoretical and practical information taking up the bulk of the book, and a recipe section with directions that need a good reading through before you start as they can be…

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