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Before I embarked on my latest set of wanderings around the world a few weeks ago, one of the things that was playing on continuous loop through my head was a nagging question. Can I do it? Not the act of travelling per se – I think I’ve done that enough times for it not to hold too many fears in and of itself. No, what my over-active brain was questioning was whether I was cut out for an extended period of solo travel, particularly through developing countries.

No trip to Vietnam would be complete without spending a few days checking out the mighty Mekong Delta. Easily accessible by bus from Saigon, the towns and villages on the Mekong River and its tributaries give you a glimpse of a way of life that has been largely unchanged for centuries. To get a better picture, however, you need to leave the safety of the shore and spend some time on the river. One of the best places to do this is in Can Tho – the largest town in the delta – by checking out its well known floating markets.

I hate goodbyes.

There are times when life’s serendipitous moments just take my breath away.
The night that chatting to a random friend of a friend at a dinner party in London many years ago kick-started my career in a way that I could scarcely believe, for instance, or the passing comment on a Tube ride that lead [...]

I was wrong about Twitter.

There, I said it.

For the longest time, I was probably one of Twitter’s more vocal critics. I absolutely could not see the point of it. As far as I could tell from media and other coverage, Twitter merely provided a platform for narcissistic, irrelevant posturing from celebrities and wanna-be’s. I don’t care what Paris Hilton or Ashton Kutcher are doing. No, I really, really don’t. To make matters worse, such posturing had to be done in 140 characters or less. Given that ppl ritng lik ths in text messages or on the internet annoys the hell out of me, that particular feature wasn’t likely to endear me to the product any more. The silly names (tweets? tweeps? what the … ?) and esoteric punctuation (@ this and # that) seemed to confirm my suspicions about the target audience. From the outside, Twitter appeared to be some kind of teenaged version of Facebook at best and a marketing tool for clueless PR departments at worst, and despite protestations from a couple of workmates in particular I wasn’t even inclined to try it.