Similar to neighbouring Laos, the area of northern Thailand was settled by Tai immigrants from China. In the mid-13th century CE several smaller kingdoms, scattered throughout the region that would later become Burma (Myanmar), Laos and the Thai highlands, were unified as the Kingdom of a Million Rice Fields, the Lan Na Kingdom. The royal…
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As we plotted out our travels through SE Asia, we decided to make Thailand our last destination. Cost-wise it wasn’t ideal to throw a few days in Laos in between our time in Bali and Thailand, but we’d heard it was a beautiful country and logistically it worked nicely to fly to Luang Prabang and…
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Indonesia is composed of more than 16,000 islands, of which only about 6,000 are actually inhabited. The islands sit on the “ring of fire,” a 40,000 km (25,000 mi) stretch of volcanic and seismic activity ringing the Pacific Ocean. Bali is home to two of the country’s more active mountains. In the northeast is Mount…
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Straddling the equator is the third-largest island in the world, Borneo. The tiny Kingdom of Brunei sandwiched between the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak (both of which historically belonged to the Sultanate of Brunei) combine to occupy about a quarter of the island situated in the Northern Hemisphere. The rest of the territory lying…
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I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m kind of a history nut. Sometimes it’s a bit overwhelming trying to distill thousands of years of history into a manageable chunk, and Vietnam’s past was one of those challenges; I kept getting lost in minutiae. So I finally admitted defeat and what follows is just a…
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Jutting out from mainland China, the 900km (559 mile) long Korean peninsula separates the Sea of Japan from the Yellow Sea. An ancient civilization populated by often warring tribal states was unified into three kingdoms (Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla) in 57 BCE. The Baekje kingdom established their capital of Hanseong in the area of modern-day…
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After spending 9 nights in Tokyo and 7 nights in Kyoto, we ended our time in Japan with a whirlwind journey west, covering roughly 1100 km (690 miles) and using just about every mode of transport possible: train, bus, ferry, street car/tram and taxi, before finally catching a flight to Seoul, South Korea. Visiting Japan…
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Kyoto Prefecture (a prefecture is analogous to a province or state) has a population of 2.61 million people, with just over half of those people living in the city of Kyoto, one of the oldest municipalities in Japan. While the mainland has quite a lengthy history of China encroaching on its neighbours, simple geography shielded…
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We left the sunny California desert and headed for the largest megacity in the world – Tokyo, population 37,274,000. February weather in Tokyo isn’t terrible, by Canadian standards. During our stay temperatures hovered around the 10° – 14°C (50° – 57°F) mark (we did have one day of snow with a high of only 0°C…
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I wonder how different the world would look if the Portuguese hadn’t been such intrepid explorers. Their maritime empire lasted for nearly six centuries and touched every continent save for Antarctica. Expansion began in 1415 with the conquest of Ceuta in North Africa and, ended in 1999 when they transferred sovereignty over Macau back to…
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