Explore Rations

I was in the Hong Kong International Airport in August when protesters took over the entire complex and shut it down to protest what was then a considerably tone-deaf bit of legislation that would have made it easier for the China government and Hong Kong authorities to send anyone over the border into Chinese detention. A Cathay Pacific 747 flies into HKIA, Photo by Andrew Leung, Pixabay Nowadays the airport is back up and running, and the prices for flights out of Hong Kong are dropping , and the number of travelers inbound is down by more than half, losing almost 1 million travelers to Asia's world city , the biggest drop in a decade. Visitors to Hong Kong were already down by 40% earlier in September . That night, however, I can only describe the experience as apocalyptic and surreal. It wasn't at all like a movie. But it did remind me of film clips I had seen about revolutions. When major infrastructure is taken over and produces a minor but ongoing inconvenience,...

I love the ceremony of the first flight of a new year. You open up the crisp cellophane wrapper on some headphones. You crack open some soy chips. You feel as though you are being pampered up in the sky as you make your way to a literal new destination after being in some place old. My first flight in 2020 will not be from my hometown. It will be from Sydney, where I spent the New Year with my wife watching fireworks in Darling Harbour, the smaller harbour to the west of Sydney's giant harbour. The flight prep is already putting me in a kind of mood. I realize that one of the reasons I am getting back into travel writing is because I have a huge amount of travel already lined up in the first month of 2020. My job is such that I am able to take vacations whenever I like, a very unusual thing for a Taiwanese company, if not for global companies. We will start out very basic, but the latter part of the year promises to open up some really great opportunities that I have been eager...

Here are some of my travel reviews , which I admit are sporadically updated. As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel room overlooking Darling Harbour in Sydney, Australia. The brush fires that have been burning for more than a month are still burning, but the smoke that caked the atmosphere seems to have dissipated. Perhaps the wind has started to blow a different direction. But you can see from the photos, which I took from 35k feet as we approached Sydney, they are tragically immense fires. I can't imagine the devastation these have caused people in the country.  My wife and I had spent a week driving around Tasmania. We took in a vineyard or two. We stayed on the Tarkine Coast for one night and spent an evening listening to nesting Fairy Penguins who had picked our garden shed as a rookery. We watched some very barely visible Australia Boralis dance across the sky, but mostly only discernible in photos, which I will post later. And we spent an evening on a farm ...