Outsider Art: A Globetrotter’s Guide
SOUTH AFRICA | NIEU-BETHESDA: The dusty road bends into a blue bowl of hills. Suddenly, in a hollow lined in yellowing poplar trees and willows, the geese have the right of way. Complete with white roses in the churchyard, Nieu Bethesda is a little piece of England hewn from the badlands of the Karoo. This once-obscure backwater is home to the Owl House, South Africa’s premier example of Outsider Art – art created by driven individuals, outside of the mainstream, untrained and untainted by cultural expectations who are compelled to express their intense personal vision with whatever comes to hand. Miss Helen chose crushed glass and concrete. (Unpublished)
Kathmandu: The Land that Time Forgot
NEPAL | KATHMANDU VALLEY: Not again. Not another designer frolic in some far-flung corner of the globe. What is it this time? Ice-skating in Patagonia? Sun-bathing in the Sahara? Sniping in Sarajevo? (Publication: ‘Sunday Life’)
Taiwan: Behind the Bamboo Curtain
TAIWAN | TAINAN: In Taiwan, the past hovers over the present like the smoke of burning ghost money. Ghosts oversee the living while gods parade the streets. (Publication: ‘Sunday Life’)
Thailand: When Worlds Collide
THAILAND: Amid the overt symptoms of Western influence, the infestation of Western brand names and consumer fever, there are reminders still of the old Siam that lies beneath the glossy veneer of contemporary Thailand. (Unpublished)
Kathmandu: Valley of the Gods
NEPAL | KATHMANDU: If the Himalayas are a mystical region of fabled creatures, high adventure and tales as tall as the peaks themselves, then Kathmandu is a name to conjure with; a traveller’s incantation: ‘Zanzibar and Timbuktu; Mandalay and Kathmandu’. (Publication: ‘Marie Claire’)
Thailand’s Islands
THAILAND | KO PHI PHI, KO PHA-NGAN, KO CHANG: Close your eyes and picture a snaggle-toothed horizon framing a turquoise sea and powdered beaches of white sand. (Publication: ‘Sunday Life’)
Worlds Apart: Taiwan’s Forgotten People
TAIWAIN | LER YE: Guidebooks unanimously proclaim Taiwan a ‘bastion of Chinese culture’. The Chinese, however, were not the island’s first inhabitants. Up in the mountains, as remote from the twenty-first century as they are from the hubbub of urban life, live a people whose ancestors saw the first wave of colonial settlement. (Publication: ‘New Expatriate’; Image: © Luo Jikun)
Bureaucracy Blues: Teaching English in Taiwan
TAIWAN | TAINAN: I caught a brief glimpse of the island like a thumbprint on the sea, before it was swallowed up in smog. The plane was cocooned in it when we touched down so that my first impression of my new home was the dingy utility of the airport and a chalk-scrawled notice announcing the arrival of my plane. (Unpublished)