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A quick word of introduction. My name is Stuart McDonald and this is Couchfish—the perfect tub of ice-cream for the traveller stranded on the couch. The newsletter has both a paid edition which traces a fantasy itinerary through Southeast Asia, and a free one that covers, well, everything else. You’re reading the latter here—but if you’d like to read the former, you can upgrade your subscription via the button below. Thanks!

Not satisfied by adding up my carbon earlier this year, I’ve been digging more into this stuff—ok, in part to finish a university assignment, but what’s wrong with a bit of multi-purposing? Anyways, I saw a post somewhere that led me to Yet Another Carbon Calculator, and, well, you know the drill, enter your flights, get a “value” and send some of your cash to some mob to do something productive with it ... in theory.

These calculators are pretty variable, but boiled down, they work to dovetail some averages, some math, and a bit of guesswork to give you a number and a price. The screenshot below, from the carbon calculator at Conservation.org, is typical of the experience.

$2.10 … bargain!

I was struck. What is this helping me to do? I mean, other than funnelling some money into Conservation.org to plant trees or whatever, and to act as a salve on my environmental guilty conscience, what is the point?

On their results page it reads:

“Here is the footprint of your flight and how you can neutralize your impact on the climate.”

That’s drawing a pretty long bow if you ask me, but overpromising aside, these results are really kind of “take it or leave it,” they’re not actually helping me reduce my carbon emissions at all. All they’re doing is handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.

Making it better

So, how could this be improved? For that I’m going to need to subject you to my graphic design abilities. Perhaps we could start with providing readers with a bit more context—note the figures for train and bus are just for illustrative purposes, walking though is about right.

Oh, I have options?

There’s plenty of OTAs that specialise in transport, in Southeast Asia 12Go and Baolau are two of the more comprehensive—and both have affiliate programmes, thus providing a means for the calculator provider to earn revenue without people getting on a plane. Hell, they could plant even more trees—or hire more consultants, or whatever they do with the money.

The stuff of life

Why stop here though? As I’ve written before, transport—particularly flights—accounts for the majority of emissions, but depending on your style of accommodation, emissions—and particularly water use—pile up fast. Consider the chart below which I tossed up onto LinkedIn the other day, or this piece on water use on Ko Samui in Thailand. My chart compares the water use per room night in a selection of luxurious hotels in Malaysia, then compares it the the HOUSEHOLD average there.

To explain the lines, the average daily household use in Malaysia is 191 litres (source). At the Ritz Carlton Langkawi it comes in at a whopping 5,005.49 litres (source, though just looking now, their reported figure is 5,387.51 litres, I guess someone took a long shower, or perhaps I made a mistake in recording it earlier)—remember, these hotel figures are Per Room, Per Night. I’m writing another piece all about this, so I’m just going to touch on water briefly here.

Shower long and hard like there’s no tomorrow.

So, rather than obsessing solely on carbon emissions from our ghastly flights, if we assume the travelling calculator-user has an interest in their impact, what could we do with the above and, as with transportation, how could we nudge travellers towards less impactful practices? How about something like this?

Does brushing your teeth count?

Again, the above numbers (all per room night) are very rough, I’ve got another piece in the pipeline (geddit?) on water use, so take the above as just a rough indicator. Basically, if you’re staying at something like a Ritz Carlton, you’re probably responsible for more water use before you check-in than the backpacker at a homestay uses in a week—insert quip about “smelly backpackers” here I guess.

If you keep the current treatment of flights and emissions in mind, then it is easy to think of a calculator advising something like:

“So your lux resort is going to use a hell of a lot of water, so what you can do is pay us an extra $5, some portion of which will go towards efforts to improve local access to water.”

Better than nothing I guess, but to my mind, you’re better off illustrating in plain English the environmental costs associated with the choices people make, and nudging them towards other perhaps more sustainable options.

Now I’m not for a moment suggesting a Ritz Carlton guest will be penning a five-star TripAdvisor review after their stay at Ketut’s Homestay, but perhaps this sort of nudging could encourage them to, I dunno, rough it at a Sheraton now and then. Likewise the small hotel guest may hit a homestay between horizon pools. Perhaps they’ll even like it.

Just say no to towel torture. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

This sort of thing, soft pushes—informing people rather than billing them—can be very effective. There’s been all sorts of research into this, and I’m barely scratching the surface here. As an example, I liked the last bit of this video that looks at how different messaging towards guests modified their use of water and the towels in hotel rooms. All we need now is some research into towel abuse and why it should be a crime for hotels to twist them into freakin swans.

People power

I’ve written about leakages before, but just to quickly recap, an economic leakage—in the context of tourism—is where a portion of the money you pay for some service or whatever, beats you to the departure gate in heading offshore. Common culprits are inbound tour companies, where anything from 60 to 80% of what you pay to the tour company gets offshored. Claims from tour companies suggesting this isn’t the case should be treated with extreme caution, which is a polite way of saying they are almost always b******t. Hotels however, are another handy flogging horse on this count, be it through foreign managerial staff, imported booze, technology, or whatever.

With this in mind, the calculator could have another section (don’t worry I’m not going to mock this one up), similar to the water one, showing some typical differences between different styles of properties. I need to emphasise the “typical differences” here, as a homestay can be foreign-owned and -run, just as a luxurious hotel can be locally-owned and -run, but broad strokes, there is a single basic truism at work here:

“The more expensive the price of your room, the higher the probability an increasing proportion of what you pay for your room is not staying in the destination and is instead getting offshored.”

Don’t believe me? This study (while dated) looks at leakages from hotels in Ubud, Bali. The authors found that four- and five-star chain hotels had a leakage rate of 51%, while non-star rated properties (homestays) was under 9%. The biggest source of leakages were F&B followed by staff and management fees.

So what’s the point?

You can’t throw a satay stick without hitting a survey proclaiming that travellers put a high value on the “sustainability” of their travels, and, as I’ve written previously, this term has been so often miss-applied and twisted, that it should come as no surprise that if I was to ask ten travellers what they think sustainability is, I’d get ten different answers.

I mean, who the hell is going to say they prefer to take an unsustainable holiday?

A better calculator however could work to better explain to leisure travellers—in plain English—considerations that are worth, well, considering. Instead of subjecting travellers to some nebulous fee structure in order to keep travelling as they are, instead use the opportunity to nudge them in another, more constructive direction.

Calculators are but one example of a means to nudge travellers. On Travelfish I recently re-ordered most of our destination travel pages—we used to list them with flights up top, then train, bus, ferry and goat. I’ve moved flights to the bottom, so the list now starts with trains (if available). This is a cosmetic change, but it does mean the reader has to scroll past all those other options to finally find out about flights.

Perhaps a few will slow down and consider taking the train instead—and that would be a good thing.

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A quick word of introduction. My name is Stuart McDonald and this is Couchfish—the perfect tub of ice-cream for the traveller stranded on the couch. The newsletter has both a paid edition which traces a fantasy itinerary through Southeast Asia, and a free one that covers, well, everything else. You’re reading the latter here—but if you’d like to read the former, you can upgrade your subscription via the button below. Thanks!

It was 19 years ago last week that Sam and I launched Travelfish.org. In the years since, we’ve had some ok years, a few ace ones, some ordinary ones, and, more recently, some decidedly less than ordinary ones. So it goes—if nothing else, travel is always interesting.

Over those same 19 years, travel has changed somewhat. With that in mind, in no particular order, here are 19 thoughts for 19 years on things I’d do the same—or different—if I was starting Travelfish today. If you’re thinking of starting a travel website, you might find some of the following of interest.

“BETA” passport stamp from my passport that was stolen in Phnom Penh not long after. Fun times.

1. Wouldn’t accept freebies

This is probably the easiest one for me. Indeed, finding out how most travel publishing worked was one of the primary reasons we started the site in the first place. I’m irrationally stubborn on this point and while it immediately put us at a cost disadvantage, I wouldn’t do it any other way.

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2. Wouldn’t have ads

I was late to this point of view. For years Travelfish was, at least in part, a programmatic-advertising support website. Getting rid of most of these was one of the best wholesale changes we made to the site. While I could write a PhD on the whys of this, in summary I’d say ads are (a) an awful reader experience, (b) a privacy nightmare, and (c) fuel a “writing for Google” approach to travel writing, writing stuff that will rank and get clicks rather than help the reader.

3. Would have a paywall

When the ads went, the paywall came shortly after. Travelfish is now around 50% paywalled. Making this change saw a shift to writing what readers would think is worth paying for versus what might get a high-revenue ad impression. I believe this is a far better result for readers as we’re serving them—rather than advertisers. Pre-pandemic, Travelfish earned more through the paywall than it did through programmatic advertising, so to that extent, that’s enough proof for me.

4. Wouldn’t work with properties and/or tourism boards

This is perhaps a bit of inside baseball, but ties in with my first point about freebies. Complimentary stays from hotels and comped fam-trips through tourism boards, agencies and other related underlings, are a fab way to reduce one’s research costs. The downside, as far as I’m concerned, is tainted copy. My favourite way to summarise this is via a conversation I had many moons ago with the regional head of a Southeast Asian national tourism board. They’d got in touch regarding possibly working together, then when we met said that they required editorial control—essentially veto power—over anything we wrote. So Much No. Yes, it was a short meeting.

The 2008 look, back when the Cambodian islands were still “near deserted,” guess I wasn’t thinking of the residents.

5. Would use in-house copy only

In the beginning, all Travelfish copy was written by me and edited by Sam. As the business grew, so did the list of people writing for us. At one stage we had 17 freelance writers—an approach I don’t really recommend! The important thing was that if a reader read something on Travelfish, it was written either by me, or when we had them, one of our full-time writers, or by a writer I specifically contracted to write for us. Without dishing too hard on “influencers” if you’re reading Travelfish, you know what you’re going to get—and you’re not going to get a vacuous top ten whatever. For the reader, I think this matters.

6. Would hire more local writers

This ties in with the previous point. I never managed this well—over the years most—though not all—of our writers were Westerners based in Southeast Asia. To a point, I still think having an “outsider” view is an important one, but obsessing on this throws the baby out with the bathwater. There is no shortage of talented local writers who are perfectly capable of writing for an international audience.

7. I wouldn’t build my own website

When we started Travelfish, platforms like Wordpress etcetera were a shadow of the robust affairs they are now. I couldn’t find anything to do what I wanted, so I built my own. The learning curve was severe, and today, 19 years later, I’m still fixing and undoing self-made disasters. If I was starting afresh I would not, repeat not, build my own website from scratch. If there is one thing I’ve learned, this is it.

8. Would have a newsletter

To be honest, today I’d be pretty close to having only a newsletter. There’s a few significant advantages of this—including not needing to built a website—but also that a newsletter is easily the best way to build a direct relationship with readers. Many newsletter providers now support having a paid version, and this is a great opportunity for starting a travel-ish undertaking without having to invest massively—in time and/or money—to build a website.

9. Would write for me, but I’d better consider the needs of others

Anyone who knows me knows I walk my talk. A major driving force behind Travelfish was to build the sort of website that I wanted when I travelled. Over the years we strayed from this a bit, particularly in covering some more luxurious properties I’d most likely never stay at, but the website’s roots have always been in the sort of travel that normal humans can afford. That said, not a stretch goes past where I don’t get an email asking after travel advice that doesn’t involve getting on a motorbike. Travelfish readers tend to skew older, and more often than not they get in touch asking me to cover car hire as well. As one reader memorably put it, “I may look like I was in Easy Rider, but I prefer the safety of cars thank you.”

2013: Oh poor Burma + Gadling was still a thing. Travel—ever-changing.

10. Would focus far less on accommodation

When you spend half a day looking at a dozen near-identical cookie-cutter hotels on a single Ho Chi Minh City laneway you question what you’re doing in life. Over the years, we’ve reviewed 8,688 resorts, hotels, guesthouses and homestays in Southeast Asia. No, that isn’t a typo. This madness must stop.

The accommodation scene has changed massively over the last twenty years. Not only are there now a bazillion properties, there’s also been an incredible commodification (McDonaldisation) of them, as hotels have become similar to the point they’re interchangeable. Spending days—or weeks—looking for the needles in the hay is a waste of money and the writers’ time.

While platforms like Agoda, Airbnb, Booking, and Expedia are very problematic for destinations (and the properties), they are the easiest way to filter the insane number of options. Use them, but only to a point. Pick what area you want to stay in, filter the reviews to nine out of ten, and lower the budget to what you can afford. Pick something from there and then contact the property direct. As a part and parcel of this, I’m dramatically reducing the number of properties we list. In some cases places have closed (due to natural attrition or the pandemic), but in others the places simply are not noteworthy. By the time I’m done, I expect to have removed at least half the properties we currently list.

11. Would treat food, and to a lesser extent, transport, in the same manner

Where are you? Are you hungry? Are you lazy? Open Google or Apple Maps, filter it to restaurants, top rated only, open now, by cuisine, then see what is within walking distance. As with hotels, getting on top of food in a traditional format, is, to my mind, a bit pointless. Somewhere truly outstanding? Yes, perhaps list it, but overall spend more time talking about what types of food are noteworthy in the destination, and why they are worth your attention.

With transport, is there a bus station? Where is it? Where do buses/trains/donkeys go? All this remains important information, and is worth providing to readers. Detailed timetables and costs? No. Most, though not all (yet), have this information online on their own sites. We’ll link to that.

12. Would concentrate more on how to do it best

To use accommodation as the example, the important question now isn’t “what hotel should I stay in?” so much as “where in X should I stay?” I would spend far more time addressing the latter rather than the former. Likewise for sightseeing, yes, it remains important to cover what there is to see, but the most important angle is perhaps the hows and whys rather than the whats. Putting readers in contact with quality local guides is an important bit of value adding, but likewise for those who prefer to travel unassisted, it is important to advise on how best to visit or experience whatever. Often this information can only really be gained if you’ve been there yourself, which, if it’s on Travelfish, we almost certainly have.

13. Would better explain the value of guides

Expanding on the guide comment in the previous point, for years, I was down on guides. I’d often considered government-trained guides to be garbage, better able to provide the guest with propaganda rather than true insight. In a large part this is still true—the guiding, particularly at “monuments of national importance” often remains woeful. Unfortunately government training of guides is often a mandatory part of becoming a licensed guide, which makes it all the more important to find good ones—even if unlicensed. Emphasising the consideration for local tour companies over foreign operators is another important aspect. Will be putting a good deal more effort in on this front going forward.

14. Would emphasise sustainable/responsible travel

With two decades of travel writing under my belt, I’m inexcusably late to this, and there is plenty of copy on Travelfish that highlights my shortcomings. When I watched the early stretch of this video interview with travel writer Adam Skolnick, he says, in talking of his nine years writing for Lonely Planet:

“One of the things I never ever once considered was my carbon footprint, I never once considered the environmental aspect of it, not one time, and I’m an environmentalist!”

I thought, yes, that is me. So, better late than never and all that. If I had to pick the single greatest shortfall in Travelfish, it is this—and it is something I’m working to address, both in reworking existing content and writing an entire new section of the website covering it. So in summary, if I was starting Travelfish today, the mental question “is this sustainable and/or responsible” would preface every sentence on the site. Yes, there is much rewriting to do!

2017: Burma, again. Sadly many got on boats—they had no choice.

15. Would ask “why” more often

Why? Why are you travelling? Why do you want to go here, stay there, eat this and drink that? These questions deserve far more thought from publications—along with the mirror statement “Why you should not go there.” For now, on Travelfish, only one of Cambodia’s armpits, Sihanoukville, gets this treatment, but again, more will. By thinking more about the why, then perhaps travellers, especially first-timers, will be better positioned to not contribute to problems in the first place.

16. Would have a “front and back of the book”

When you think of a legacy printed travel guide, traditionally the front of the book is dedicated to history, culture, society, environment and so on, while at the back there’s the nuts and bolts—visas, costs, language etcetera. In between the two there’s the meat of the sandwich. On Travelfish we have a few of the nuts and bolts and a good part of the meat, but little else. We fail at providing sufficient context, be is historical, cultural or whatever, to countries and destinations. We do supply some material around specific listings, but it is more the exception rather than the rule. This I would change. I’m not talking about a PhD length history on Thailand—Wikipedia does a decent job of that—but providing some context, particularly wrapped up in tourism, could better educate readers, help them travel in a better manner and get more out of their trip. Context is everything.

17. Would concentrate far more on the big picture stuff

This ties in with the previous point, but particularly with regard to broad-strokes travel planning. We have some great sample itineraries, and some awful ones— the bad ones are in the process of being re-written, but there is also plenty of scope to zoom in, why do we have a suggested itinerary on spending two weeks in a country but few examples of telling people how they can stay another day in a specific destination. For all my talking about a need for slowing down and smelling the coffee, it would be a great help to readers if we gave some suggestions on how exactly to do so. Again, this is in process.

18. Would talk more about impacts

To write about the changes a location has seen, both the benefits tourism may have brought, and also the considerable costs that came with it, provides important context to the traveller. By this I mean anything from participating in a beach clean-up to staying at a locally-owned homestay or a community based tourism scheme instead of a foreign-owned resort. What simple steps can visitors undertake to better contribute throug

A quick word of introduction. My name is Stuart McDonald and this is Couchfish—the perfect tub of ice-cream for the traveller stranded on the couch. The newsletter has both a paid edition which traces a fantasy itinerary through Southeast Asia, and a free one that covers, well, everything else. You’re reading the latter here—with a Kuching food guide at the end for paid subscribers, but if you’d like to read the former, you can upgrade your subscription via the button below. Thanks!

PS: If you are on the free Couchfish list, when you receive this, the podcast link above reads “This episode is for paid subscribers.” This isn’t correct, or, is at least very misleading, but I can’t figure out how to change it. If you click through to the web version of this newsletter, then you should be able to listen to the free version of the podcast (which has everything except for the food bit at the end). My apologies for the confusion.

To my mind a sign of a good trip is realising you’ve already arrived at the final day of it, and our time in Sarawak has been such a trip. With that in mind, here are some observations on what we got right, what we got wrong, and where there’s some room for improvement. Please bear in mind the following is based off of a two-week trip to a very limited range of destinations within Sarawak. There’ll be a few follow-up posts in the coming weeks that will be adding some more detail and thoughts to some aspects of our time there.

Couchfish is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And, for paying Couchfish subscribers, at the end of this post, there’s about 1,500 bonus words on some of our favourite spots to stuff face in Kuching.

The basics

We arrived in Kuching via Kuala Lumpur on the 23rd of June and started what turned out to be a very long trip home on the 7th of July via Singapore, so all up two weeks and a day.

Our itinerary had us starting in Kuching for eight nights, Miri for two nights, Mulu National Park for three, then back to Miri for a night and then out. This schedule, looking back, wasn’t ideal, as in the least we should have shaved two nights off of Kuching and added Sibu to break up the trip to Miri. Lesson learned.

Kuching

Kuching is a great town—if you’ve travelled in Peninsular Malaysia, think of Georgetown and Ipoh, and consider the difference in “tourist vibe and volume” between the two, then apply that difference again from Ipoh to land at Kuching. To put it another way, Kuching has all the same good—the beautiful architecture, the terrific food, some excellent museums, a pleasant setting, friendly and ever-helpful people; and yet precious little of the bad—being throngs of tourists and the gentrification that often comes with them.

Kuching offers up both the old and the new. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Aside from the above-mentioned aspects, Kuching also serves as a base for short tours out in all directions, be it to natural attractions or “cultural experiences.” We visited some of these on tours and others under our own steam, and yet still left much on the table—Kuching has a lot to do and see, but even if we’d taken a more military expedition type of approach, we’d still have needed at least three nights to take in the top shelf items.

One of the most popular tours is to Bako National Park, but the accommodation was closed—a blessing in disguise perhaps, as, of all the national parks we visited in Sarawak, it was easily the most underwhelming. For foreign tourists, it is the most popular national park in Sarawak, attracting over 40,000 foreign visitors in 2019—over double the next highly-ranked. This has to be a product of its proximity to Kuching more than anything else, as the park infrastructure, as with most of the parks we visited was in a delapidated state. It’s main selling point, the chance to see wildlife, is curtailed by a less than ideal transport situation, one I assume implemented to encourage people to stay—but not so ideal when you can’t stay! More on this in a latter issue.

These trees are actually crawling with proboscis monkeys, but I don’t have a zoom lens sorry! Photo: Stuart McDonald.

We did two tours while in Kuching, a group wetlands tour, and then a full-day trip with a private guide to Semenggoh Wildlife Centre and Annah Rais Longhouse. These are but two of many tours available—Sarawak’s public transport isn’t what it could be, and once you start weighing up the cost of your time versus hiring a car for the day, they’re often the most time- and cost-efficient way to get stuff done.

Have a friend thinking about heading to Sarawak? This post is public so feel free to share it.

The wetlands tour was something I would never have chosen to do—it was my son’s pick, but it turned out to be excellent—not perfect mind you, but certainly enjoyable. We saw plenty of wildlife—dolphins, crocodiles, proboscis monkeys, and a tonne of birdlife. The guide was solid, though I could have done without the propaganda spiel at the end of the tour.

For Semenggoh Wildlife Centre and Annah Rais Longhouse, we hired a private guide with a car for the day. The guide, Lucian, was excellent, and if you’re looking for a professional and extremely knowledgable Kuching guide, I’d recommend him without hesitation—you can contact him on Whatsapp at +60198187938. The trip to Annah Rais was interesting, and I’d say worthwhile, more because it is a realistic look at day to day life, with all the flashes of modern-day living, rather than a contrived “authentic” traditional affair. It is a popular tourist site, and has been for decades, and while some visit independently, I strongly recommend using a guide—if for no other reason but to explain what you are seeing.

My son though, does have a zoom lens. At Semenggoh Wildlife Centre. Photo: Will McDonald.

Semenggoh, I have significant reservations over. It is ostensibly a wildlife reserve, but it is also the single most popular “natural” tourist site in Sarawak, attracting almost 50,000 foreign tourists in 2019. On the day we visited, there were at least 100 people there for the feeding time, and to my (non-expert) mind, there were too many people, they were too close to the orangutans, and the guides were too invested in coaxing the animals out of the woods for a photo shoot. A visit is more akin to visiting an open zoo than anything putting animal welfare at the forefront.

It was also from Kuching that we began our cave odyssey, with a half day trip by scooter out to Fairy Cave. At the time, the cave blew us away, but a half dozen grander caves later, my son identified it as the “most boring,” something I’d be inclined to agree with. However, if you’re not going to either Niah or Mulu national parks, then it is worth the trip.

Sarawak is big

It was from Kuching, that we made the one major mistake of the trip, one of me not following my own advice. We’d originally planned on getting the boat from Kuching to Sibu and spending a couple of days there before pushing on to Miri, but the boat no longer runs, and as we spent so long in Kuching, our timeline tightened. The result, a 17-hour overnight bus from Kuching to Mulu. This was not fun, and while I’ve had far worse bus rides in my life, 17 hours is a long time to spend in anything. We should have shaved two days off Kuching, and broken the trip at Sibu regardless of there being a boat or not, and if we’d had another week, I’d have broken the trip again at Bintulu.

Most travellers fly, either Kuching to Miri or Kuching to Mulu, but, as I’ve written before, I’m no fan of domestic flights when ground transport exists. I’d say doing it overland is fine, but you need to allow enough time to break the trip at Sibu and/or Bintulu.

Miri

In many ways, Miri lacks the appeal of Kuching, though it also has excellent food. It was badly damaged by Allied bombing in World War 2 and what grew back is not particularly attractive to the eye. It also has a significant sketchy side—choose your massage joint with care (Lemongrass Family Reflexology & Spa on Jalan Permaisuri is a safe bet should you need your body put back together after a 17-hour bus trip).

The grand cavern at Niah is something else. Note the waterfall at right and the two people at centre for scale! Photo: Stuart McDonald.

From Miri, we hired a car and driver for the 100 km trip south to Niah National Park. One of the most important archeological sites in Southeast Asia, the digs are conveniently located within an absolutely enormous cave. When I say enormous, I mean Enormous. As with Bako, the state of the park’s infrastructure is a mess—it is embarrassing. The archeological sites are protected by wire fences that wouldn’t look out of place around a chicken coop.

Authorities are hoping for UNESCO heritage listing in the coming year or so, and while that will come with a bucket of dosh, for now the elevated walking trails are flat out dangerous. As we’ve written on Travelfish, Malaysian parks and UNESCO haven’t always worked out for the better. In the meantime, watch your step and please try not to break a leg. All this aside, is Niah worth a visit? Yes.

Mulu National Park

Almost all visitors fly from Miri (or Kuching) to Mulu National Park, but I was determined not to—I wanted to go by boat. I knew it was possible in the past, and it looked like a good trip. There’s a whole other post on this trip coming, so I’ll be brief here, well briefer than a five hour 4WD run and a two-hour boat trip, but for me it was a highlight of our time in Sarawak.

A rest-stop half way into the boat trip from Miri to Mulu. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

We engaged Veno, an experienced guide from Mulu, to sort out the trip and I was really impressed with his knowledge, and he really helped to broaden my understanding around some of the issues at play there. He is an extremely experienced guide and if you’re looking for a private guide for the park, he’s a solid choice. You can contact him by Whatsapp on +60128700275.

With Mulu, having spent an entire day getting there, we had two full days before returning to Miri for our flights back to Bali. This was enough time to see what the park refers to as its “show caves,” namely Deer and Langs caves the first afternoon and Clearwater and Wind caves the second morning. In between, we did the canopy walk and Treetop Tower (a treetop hide) and some other aimless wandering in the park. We booked a night walk, but skipped it when the weather went sideways. Overall, this was enough time, but an extra full day would have been welcome. We had no plans to do any of the one- or two- night treks such as the Pinnacles Walk, nor the adventure caving, but obviously if you wanted to do any of these, more time would be required.

Did someone call Batman two million times? Photo: Stuart McDonald.

In comparison to the other national parks we visited, Mulu is quite well run. The trails are fairly safe, with clear evidence of maintenance and care, but accidents do happen. The guides were good, if a bit perfunctory at times, but the group sizes on the other hand, with a maximum of twenty pax per guide, are too big. When we visited Deer and Langs caves there was something like 80 to 100 people in the cave complex—and even when taking their enormous size into consideration—it was simply too many people. Again, there’s a more detailed post on this coming.

The big question with Mulu is, is it worth the diversion? I’d say yes, but I’d argue if you have the time—and the money—doing at least one way there by boat and 4WD is time and money very well spent.

How long in Sarawak?

If I had to boil Sarawak down to a single aspect, it would be time and money. It is a very big moderately-sized region. It does take longer than you might expect to get around, and it will definitely cost you more than you expect—if you’re acclimatised to a more typical Southeast Asia budget.

Now that is a tree. Mulu National Park. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

If you’re planning on visiting for just a week, limit yourself to Kuching and surrounds. If you’ve got two, then add in Mulu, or explore further afield around Kuching, particularly into the hinterland and to the west.

Regardless of how long much time you have pencilled in, be it five days or five weeks, I’d suggest doubling your planned time there—it is that good.

Who is Sarawak great for?

If you’re a nature lover, then, as with

A quick word of introduction. My name is Stuart McDonald and this is Couchfish—the perfect tub of ice-cream for the traveller stranded on the couch. The newsletter has a paid edition which traces a fantasy itinerary through Southeast Asia, and a free edition that covers, well, everything else. You’re reading the latter here, but if you’d like to read the former, you can upgrade your subscription via the button below. Thanks!

Quite a few moons ago, while living in Bangkok, friends who were far more into “the scene” than me, said we should check out a new club. It had opened to a soft opening a few nights earlier, and my friends said now was the time to go.

I’m not a club kind of a person, but I went along, and as we walked straight in, I thought, wow this place is amazing. I’d been in Bangkok a few years, and I’d never seen anywhere like it. It wasn’t so much the place, I mean it was cool and all, but rather it was the people. I’d never come across such an interesting and diverse collection of souls—where did they all come from? We held up the bar till the early hours, and it was a great night.

This is not the club—but this bar was good too. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

By the time I returned a month later, the club was on everyone’s lips and it seemed half of Bangkok was in the queue to get in. The crowd, well, I don’t want to sound like a culture vulture, but yeah, lets just say nobody from my first visit was there. No doubt they’d already moved on to the next cool joint. I didn’t return again for years.

What am I doing writing about the one occasion where I managed to slip into a cool spot? The club and its all too rapid transition mimicked tourism. Southeast Asia is rich in destinations people say are “spoilt,” and that they plan not to return to. The reasons vary, but expect the usual suspects—too many people, pollution, crime, traffic, etcetera. Tourism has been playing out this way forever—I mean, you should have seen wherever back in 19-whatever. You’d think we’d have learned something by now, and yet...

With a supposed waning pandemic, top-tier regional destinations have seen their fortunes rise. Early on, pent up demand saw some spots deluged with tourists—the rain, I tell ya, was torrential. Local residents, accustomed—for better or worse—to tourist-free towns, saw the clock spun back to 2019 in record time. There was no slow boiling of frogs—rather, destinations got microwaved. Unlike cockroaches, who hop out of a microwave and wave thanks for the sauna, frogs don’t fare so well. They explode—or so I’ve heard anyway—no, please don’t go search Youtube for such videos.

It isn’t the English that is broken. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Wanting to avoid exploding frogs, destinations are reaching for the same old bandaids. There’s been no shortage of talk about a pivot to “quality tourists,” whatever that means. Quotas keep popping up, as does better law enforcement. Officials, who still talk of “hidden gems,” are grabbing for the same old wheelbarrow.

I’ve written at length on the whole “quality tourists” thing, so I’m not going to flog that dead horse again today. I will note though, that in some cases, the concepts around this are changing. Indonesia has made getting a two-month tourist visa pretty straightforward. This in turn will encourage a different sort of quality—those who stay longer, you know, backpackers. Other countries—hello Vietnam—risk being left behind.

With quotas, there are a few issues at play. For starters, thanks to social media, bad behaviour gets far more than its fair share of coverage. If, like me, you keep an eye on social media coverage of Bali, you could be excused for thinking every Russian was a frustrated nudist, mobster or licence plate fabricator. Of course, this is far off the money. The vast majority of Russian tourists keep—at least most of—their clothes on, don’t change their number plates, and are not mafioso. Despite this, I’m yet to see a social media post from any of the usual suspects proclaiming that 98% of Russian tourists had an enjoyable and uneventful holiday in Bali.

Nothing really to do with the story, just looks yummy. Mai Khao Beach, Phuket. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

So using bad behaviour to inform upon a nationality-based quota system is a bit of a fraught process. An immigration quota has nationwide repercussions, and for every heaving location there’s others waiting for any tourists to return. As individual destinations have no control over immigration policy, talk on this count is anyway a bit of a red herring.

Quotas are a dull hammer. Think of the club I started off writing about. When its popularity exploded, they set up a quota system—a queue. They figured out what was a capacity they were comfortable with, and didn’t let more in. People, myself included on my return trip, were waiting over an hour to enter. They also instilled a fashion angle to their quota—no flip flops or tank tops. This is akin to the limiting by nationality approach. A flip flopper might be an ace customer, but in turning them away at the door, the club never has the chance to find this out.

A need for a quota is an acknowledgement of a planning failure. It doesn’t matter if you’re a club or a tropical destination, if you’re talking about a need to limit people, what you’re saying is “we didn’t plan for this.” Don’t get me wrong, destinations often have plans—I’ve read quite a few—but there is no point having a plan if you ignore it. This sort of lack of evidence of planning is everywhere. Flying into Sydney and seeing immigration queues a mile long, I‘ve often wondered, did a dozen jumbos land unannounced? No. They’ve just decided not to plan for them in a way which boosts passenger satisfaction. Instead, they’re focused on the dosh—to your detriment.

Clearly I was ahead of the influencers. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

I don’t want to pick on any one Southeast Asian destination as you’ll find examples of this in every country. Destinations court bland bucket lists, but fail to plan for the impacts that follow. The tourists get stuck in endless traffic, but more importantly, the feelings and quality of life of residents is not a priority. There’s an implicit undercurrent that residents should be happy as tourists bring jobs. The benefits of these jobs and the money that come with them, as I’ve written before, are often overstated. Tour agencies, airlines and cruise companies are like the spice traders of yesteryear. Many pay as little as they can in destination—be it revenue from tourists or (cough splutter) local taxes—while making bank back home.

Local administrations often ignore their own regulations. Ill-considered developments that detract from why tourists come is “paving over paradise” in action. Vietnam’s Phu Quoc Island is the most head-exploding case on this front, but examples are dime a dozen.

Having a plan helps. Destinations must consider a little further over the horizon than tomorrow. What do they want their destination to look like a decade from now? Who is their priority—tourists or residents? Figure these out, then decide how best—and most equitably—to get there. If you assume, as I do, that for many places the current trajectory is far from ideal, a new wheelbarrow—with different bandaids—is in order. So what could destinations do?

Smarter promotion

Better dispersing tourists is a common refrain. Getting people to go to other than the main hotspots is a good starting point. Thailand has done some work trying to highlight second-tier spots—as we do on Travelfish—but they need to reach the right people. There’s little point marketing Khmer ruins and northeastern food to an Australian who is at home on Patong’s Bangla Road. Yeah, a generalisation, but you know what I mean.

Eastern Flores—and not a horizon pool in sight. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

In Indonesia, Flores is a fantastic destination, but the vast majority of the island is not geared up for mass tourism. Trying to change this, and reinvent it as another Bali, chasing high spending—and leaking—tourists, is a mistake. Instead, promote it on its strengths, focus on those seeking a more unadulterated experience. Destinations—and residents—shouldn’t have to put up with wholesale changes to attract tourists.

Ban new hotels

As this story from Ho Chi Minh City notes, the city is suffering from a mother-of-all hangovers related to hotel overbuilding. It is awash in empty cookie-cutter hotels that could be waiting years—if ever—to reopen. Elsewhere in the region, rice fields are paved and beaches stolen or disfigured at an unprecedented pace. Zoning regulations are often not lacking, but enforcement is—this should change. Ban new hotels unless they repurpose existing buildings. Aside from reinvigorating abandoned hotels, there’s embedded carbon upsides to this too.

Pay your dues

Legislate inbound companies to guarantee that over half of a guests’ spend stays in-country. This is an absolute no-brainer. As it stands, destinations wear 100% of the downside and see a fraction of the financial upside. Destinations should work to build linkages and plug leakages—and tourists should help them do so.

I’m not suggesting any of this will be easy. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Invest in and listen to local communities

If I never see another news story about a new public transport service for tourists, it will be too soon. Invest in public transport and public spaces that benefit local communities first. The tourists will follow. Consult with local communities about what they want out of tourism. Give local people the biggest seat at the table and respect their views.

Educate tourists

In today’s world it should be impossible for tourists to feign ignorance about norms. Help them to understand. This need not be in the form of threatening signs and so on. Try having a pledge—Palau-style. Prepare an online handbook for airlines to screen before any movie will run. Turn influencers into destination preservers and enhancers instead of exploiters.

Take a longer term view

Back to Phu Quoc, as it is such an obvious worst case example. Yes, an excruciating amount of development brought jobs by the truckload. This was a short term win, even if most senior jobs did not go to local people. Long term though, there’s landfill the size of a small country in the interior, and business is failing as tourists recoil. I remember squirming as I read news stories a decade ago—here’s a far more recent one—hawking the island as a “new Bali.” At the time, I didn’t realise they meant it literally. It didn’t need to be this way.

Quotas are not the answer, rather they’re little more than proof of what is really missing—a vision and a plan.

Couchfish is 100 per cent independent and reader-supported. If you’re not already a subscriber, and you’d like to show your support, become a paying subscriber today for just US$7 per month—you can find out more about Couchfish here—or simply share this story with a friend.

Don’t forget, you can find the free podcasts on Apple, Pocket Casts and Spotify as well as right here on Couchfish.

A quick word of introduction. My name is Stuart McDonald and this is Couchfish—the perfect tub of ice-cream for the traveller stranded on the couch. The newsletter has a paid edition which traces a fantasy itinerary through Southeast Asia, and a free edition that covers, well, everything else. You’re reading the latter here, but if you’d like to read the former, you can upgrade your subscription via the button below. Thanks!

It started with a single line email from a Travelfish reader. I knew they were somewhere out east, and we were trying to arrange a date and time to meet once they got to Bali. They wrote: “Will pencil in the 11th... found a place in Halerman, Alor, just delightful!”

Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of Alor. Indeed, it is home to one of my all time favourite places to stay in the country. Part of Indonesia’s Lesser Sunda Islands, roughly due north of the frontier with Timor Leste, it is best known for diving, but it is an all round fab locale. So when my friends mentioned Halerman, and a great place to stay, my mind whirled.

Travelfish researchers in training, that’s Pantar Island in the distance. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

It whirled, because as far as I knew, there was only one place to stay in the area. An on-again off-again back-to-basics joint—with the emphasis on back-to-basics. When we met up, it didn’t take us long to get around to their Halerman lodgings. Nor for me to start ranting: “Another fancy-pants unsustainable joint in a remote location. Charging top dollar and bringing with it the demands on non-existent infrastructure.” You know me...

“Oh no,” they said, “you’ve got it all wrong,” and the more we talked, the clearer it became how wrong I was. “You’ve got to talk to them,” they said, “they’re doing great things.” So not long after, I did just that and after a couple of emails, picked up the phone.

Savu South Alor sits at close to the westernmost point of Alor. It has seven rooms—five set back off the beach to one side of the restaurant, and two villas perched on the other. The former share a pool while the latter each have a plunge affair. Prices are high, ranging from US$290 to $360 a night—and there I was thinking all Travelfish readers were on a budget!

Blue Whale passing by the Suva South Alor house reef. Photo: Savu South Alor.

Founders Johannes and Liliane have about 20 years in Indonesia between them—most of it in diving. With sustainability and a bunch of questions on my mind, we spend an hour chatting by phone, and we start with the obvious—how does one reconcile sustainability with attracting long haul guests to a remote area? Johannes is frank, but sees an upside:

“We’re far from perfect and I don’t think we ever will be. Many of our guests fly from Europe, the USA or Australia to get here. They come to the resort by speedboat. Whilst carbon offsetting can merely provide an absolution in a medieval sense, we’re actively looking for a trustworthy partner so we can offer this option to our guests; ultimately we are intending to implement a project for such cause directly here on Alor in our neighbourhood. None of this is ideal and is one of the reasons why we don’t call ourself an eco-resort.”

But then, there’s the upside, those guests who fly from afar, are an opportunity:

“We’re very passionate about the marine environment and her inhabitants and our goal is to share this with others while running this place under sustainable principles. I see guests as a sort of ambassador, and when they see what we’re doing and how we do it, we have the ambitious goal to turn our guests into ambassadors of the ocean and thereby support our cause.”

This is a popular view, but there’s little research that clearly supports it. In the case of Antarctica (one of the few places that has seen research on the topic) the evidence is varied and often not compelling. That said, I fell in love with Alor when I got there, so who knows, they might be on to something.

Typical Alor beach scenes. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

So there’s the pros and cons of guests from afar, but what about the place itself? To my mind there’s a need to not only to consider the guests’ impact, but the initial build as well. I mention my idea of a “carbon mortgage,” and the need to consider the build as well as running costs.

“Our block of land is around 7.5 hectares and we could have put far more rooms on it than we did. This links to another reason for not calling our place an eco-resort—the impact of our construction. Due to the remote location of our property, logistics were a big factor. We tried to source as much construction material as possible locally, but still had to ship in a lot, first from Surabaya to Kalabahi, and then from there down to our location. It’ll take us still a long time to offset all this, if we can at all.”

Another challenge is power—after all, the hum of a genset out back is as bad for guests as the planet. In Savu’s case, 100 solar panels means that they’re renewable-powered to 65-70% occupancy. As with many aspects of sustainability, there’s an economic impetus as well, says Johannes:

“There’s no grid to be on here, and no road to truck in fuel for the genset. If we’d wanted to be generator-powered, we’d have needed to transport fuel down by 35 litre jerry cans from Kalabahi [the capital, an hour away by small boat] which would have made no sense from either an environmental nor economic sense.”

Solar doesn’t come cheap—its costs represent around 20 to 25% of the total investment. They hope to recoup the investment within five years—an effort he hopes the location will aid with, quipping:

“Luckily, Alor has plenty of sunshine.”

Of course, remove the swimming pools, and the resort could get that much closer to never needing a genset. This is where the balance comes in—were there not swimming pools, would guests still come? Alor has glorious beaches and swimming, but also treacherous currents. At my above-mentioned fave joint, when the tide is running one way, guests are told, unequivocally: “do not get in the ocean.” It is around these sort of issues that sustainability surveys run by the likes of Booking.com could be explicit. Ask people if they prefer sustainable travel, but also ask would they feel the same way if it meant no horizon pools—or air-con.

Savu’s solar array, located at the centre of its permaculture garden—another plus for sustainability. Photo: Savu South Alor.

While they’re soaking up their power from afar, for labour they looked closer to home. Of their 30 staff, 20 are from local villages on Alor, the dive master is from Manado, the crew from Saparua near Ambon, and five others came via the Sumba Hospitality Foundation founded by Ibu Inge, and which offers vocational training in hospitality for local people. In the longer term this may put a cork in foreigners—or, as is often the case, Balinese—hoovering up remote management gigs. Savu is a case of this in action, and credit where due to the efforts of the Sumba Hospitality Foundation.

Much to the same mindset, Savu works with organisations focused on marine preservation. This topic is close to the founders’ hearts—one of their stated values is “pure oceanic passion”. It’s nice to have goals, but, as with many marine environments, the needs of tourism and fisheries don’t always overlap. Johannes is realistic—change will need to involve many, and will take time.

“There are problems with dynamite and cyanide fishing, neither of which are sustainable fishing methods. There is more work to be done, but it needs to involve all the stakeholders, from the marine authorities and tourism businesses through to the local fishers.”

Aside from liaising with umpteen stakeholders, simply having tourists present can help. As with discussions I’ve had repeatedly in Komodo and recently in Raja Ampat, a dive boat’s presence can act as a deterrent to activities not in the long term interests of all. But then, dive boats themselves—particularly liveaboards—can bring their own not-so-hot impacts. For this to work, having a long term view, shared across diverse interest groups, is essential.

So many blues. Photo: Savu South Alor.

On the far broader sustainability strokes, their view is a common one—at least among those who walk the talk. Often referred to as “green hushing,” it’s where places don’t make a big deal about what they’re doing. The reasoning varies—for some it might be the risk of not living up to their claims, for others, like Savu, it’s something else. Says Johannes:

“Terms like ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘eco resort’ have been so heavily abused, that we don’t want to be associated with them. For us it comes naturally that we’re as sustainable as possible.”

As I’ve written before, these terms are over-used and often applied in cases when they shouldn’t be. As with An Villa in Hoi An in the second part of my “Sustainable Vietnam” series, Savu do what they do because they feel it is the right way. Every place that Booking.com falsely lists as being on “100% Renewable energy” devalues the efforts of places like Savu.

We finish with me asking if there are plans for some budget shacks so that I can afford to visit. They’re not on their horizon, but next time I’m in Alor I’ll make my way down, even if only for an ice lemon tea overlooking the Savu Sea. If it does fall into your budget, I’ll refer you to what the Travelfish readers told me:

“Just delightful!”

Couchfish is 100 per cent independent and reader-supported. If you’re not already a subscriber, and you’d like to show your support, become a paying subscriber today for just US$7 per month—you can find out more about Couchfish here—or simply share this story with a friend.

Don’t forget, you can find the free podcasts on Apple, Pocket Casts and Spotify as well as right here on Couchfish.

A quick word of introduction—particularly to the five hundred odd new subscribers I seem to have picked up over the last week—thanks Substack Notes. My name is Stuart McDonald and this is Couchfish—the perfect tub of ice-cream for the traveller stranded on the couch. The newsletter has a paid edition which traces a fantasy itinerary through Southeast Asia, and a free edition that covers, well, everything else. You’re reading the latter here, but if you’d like to read the former, you can upgrade your subscription via the button below. Thanks!

Earlier this year I spent a few weeks in Vietnam travelling it tail to top. I wanted to see how things were picking up in these waning pandemic times, but I also had sustainable travel on my mind—was it possible in Vietnam? In this, the second part of a three-part series, I’m in the middle of the country thinking about hotels, hospitality and the environment. You can read the first part here.

Sorry for the radio silence over the last week—I came down with Covid.

Huế: Sustainability’s Many Hues

When it comes to beauty, there’s only one way to approach Vietnam’s once imperial capital—by train from the south. Leaving Đà Nẵng’s crass glass and brass towers behind, we crawl along one of Southeast Asia’s most beautiful stretches of railway. As the towers fade to the horizon, steep cliffs plunge into the sea by lonely crescents of sand. I lose phone coverage so there’s nothing to do but gaze, and the mostly local passengers step out of their couchettes to gaze beside me.

Even through a blurry train window you can tell the trip is pretty. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

My Huế hotel, Maison Vu Tri Vien is set down a back alley within the walled old city and when I finally find it, I wonder if it’s even open. The gate locked and nobody home, I’m on my phone double checking when a young boy lets me in … to the family home. Later, I’m chatting to owner Đức who gives me a potted history of the house. He tells me he was born inside, and it dates to 1969, a date I confirm three times as building a house within a year of the Battle of Huế would have been an interesting time to have been laying brick.

The house has nine rooms and while he closed for a stretch during the pandemic, he re-opened soon after Vietnam did. The mostly European clientele arrive courtesy of Booking and AirBnb and while Đức’s French is more polished than his English, he’s comfortable chatting with me as he sneaks a furtive cigarette out front. Business is good and he’s full for almost the entirety of my stay.

I’m in Huế for a conference, and on the final day, Nguyễn Văn Phúc, the Director of Hue Tourism gives a presentation. He discusses Huế developing itself as a “wellness destination,” something I’d never considered tying to the city. This is the second presentation along this theme, with Hylton Lipkin, the then GM of Alba Wellness, on a similar tack. The Director talks about the lucrative niche wellness represents, and of exploiting more of the hinterland’s springs. He’s focused of more—more resorts, more facilities, more tourists, more money—all the while dovetailing the surrounds’ natural beauty with Huế’s food and traditional medicines.

The kind of wellness I go to Huế for. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

To my mind, he’s missing the forest for the trees. As I wrote earlier, Huế’s strength is on its doorstep, its food and the old city. With little money and effort, that could be used to pry a day off of Hội An to see people spend another in Huế, putting money in the hands of small local-owned businesses. When the Director asks for questions, while I have many, I ask about this, but the answer is non-committal—he’s very much for building stuff—lots of stuff. Later, in a telephone conversation with Lipkin, we talk about Alba.

Lipkin is, in his own words, “obsessed” with the environment. He sees himself as a crusader but from the educative school rather than its sword-wielding cousin. He tells me about his efforts—and successes—in raising the awareness of his staff around sustainable practices. This isn’t just about tree planting, he tells me, rather it can be expressed through all facets of the business’ operations. He understands that running a resort the size of Alba along sustainable principles will save them money, but quips “It’s not about the price—it’s about saving the planet.”

When I say I’ve seen precious little in the way of sustainable behaviour at properties, and rail against tokenism like bamboo straws, Lipkin concurs. He notes that Vietnam—and Alba—has a ways to go. The resort has plans for solar, but they’re not there yet, and on tokenism, he compares sustainability to smoking, meaning as awareness grows, putting up “no smoking signs” becomes superfluous as people already know they can’t. So it should be with plastic straws, high energy lightbulbs and so on. The vast majority of guests at Alba are domestic and a typical stay is two to three days but if he can hook them into wellness packages, then that stay blows out to four or five days—that’s a win for slow travel.

Who doesn’t go to Huế for a Japanese-themed onsen? Photo: Stuart McDonald.

To my mind if you’re taking a sustainability view of travel, simple steps that could see people staying longer in Huế, and staying at small, locally-owned hotels is a win win. Hooking up your cart to a plan that calls for new developments in areas that are—for now—wilderness, not so much. With cautious eyes affixed to development driven disasters elsewhere in the country, you’d think there’d be some rethinking, yet for many in Vietnam, tourism remains a byproduct of property speculation. To look more into what development is bringing, I jump back on the train for a few hours and head south, to Đà Nẵng for Hội An.

Hội An: False Gold

Arguably Vietnam’s single most popular destination, Hội An is not my kind of place. I spend half a day out on its beach strip which only serves to cement my views—they’re an unadulterated mess. Back in town, the UNESCO Heritage listing protects its central “District 1” area, but thirty years of exploding tourism has wrought similar results as in Laos’ Luang Prabang. The town’s pretty lanterns and attractive shopfront architecture, daubed in its “colonial yellow” is photogenic, but the vibe is Disneyland. Tailors, cafes, restaurants, travel agents and bars line the heritage district—residences relegated to back lanes. Step out of District 1, and you’re back in Vietnam, with its life, street food, and incessant racket. Retreat the same twenty metres and you’re battling tour groups of thirty plus. It’s jarring, and not in a good way.

Some come for the lanterns. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

I came to Hội An in part to see a dog (long story), but thanks to Tết, the doggo is in Europe, so I’ve a couple of slack days. My digs are on the right track, but at the trailhead rather than the summit, and the track is lined with more hotels under construction—building is everywhere. In my room, there’s refillable water but the coffee is all disposables. What the manager describes to me as “sauna heated” water takes so long to arrive I give up. There’s also an instagram prop pretending to be a swimming pool. Staff on the other hand are excellent and the receptionist rains accolades upon management for how they handled staff through the pandemic. Like the town itself, on the sustainability front, the hotel is a mixed bag.

One morning I meet a tourism insider for a coffee at Espresso Station—the coffee shop pretty much everyone I speak to suggests we meet at. It’s set down a lane off Trần Hưng Đạo, which is to say it’s in Vietnam rather than UNESCO-land. What is supposed to be a thirty minute chat turns into two hours. We talk about the challenges Hội An faces—the building, the crowds, the rubbish—but more than anything we talk about Bà Nà Hills. If you were looking for a Central Vietnam version of sustainability hell-scape Phú Quốc, it qualifies—though the local administration prefers to invoke another mess of over-development, nominating it as “the Đà Lạt of Đà Nẵng province.”

Bà Nà’s heritage dates back to the French colonial period, when it was popularised as a highland getaway to escape the warmer coastal climate. Once the colonialists were booted out, their hillside hideout fell into disrepair and, for a short spell following the “reopening” of the country, it held appeal for exploring the ruins of French folly. That wasn’t though to last. In Vietnam, nature can always be improved, particularly if there is scope for a cable car.

Woman in blue: “What the hell am I doing here?” Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Gargantuan developer Sun World took a shine to the hills and reinvented it to the point the company’s name is now affixed to it. No doubt you’ve seen photos of the “Golden Hands” a 150 metre long viewpoint bridge held up by enormous hands. They’re at Bà Nà, sorry, I mean Sunworld Bà Nà, as is a Disneylandesque smorgasbord of contrived tourist-traps. When not submerged in mist, the viewpoint offers up indeed golden views (I’m being generous here in assuming the golden refers to the view and not the income it earns Sun World), but the views—from what was national park land—didn’t come for free from all involved.

In a great piece on Vietnam’s seeming addiction to cable cars, journalist Govi Snell quotes “concerned citizen,” Bùi Huyền Trang on who really paid the ultimate price for the development:

“More than 60 hectares [148 acres] of forest were flattened,” she stated. “In the past, Nui Chua was very poetic, stretching forests and diverse birds and animals, especially the famous indigenous langur. But after the forests were tragically cut down, the animals’ habitats were reduced and gradually they no longer appeared.”

The Golden Hands feature in just about every Insta-whatever list for Vietnam, but good luck trying to find stories about their environmental impact. While Sun World doesn’t even bother pretending that anything to do with Bà Nà is sustainable, you routinely see it profiled in both domestic and international pieces purporting to suggest it somehow is. It isn’t.

Hội An: Real Gold

There’s a divergence between what I think “eco” means and what Vietnam does. In Vietnam sinh thái—which roughly translates as “ecological”—is often affixed to resorts that are in a natural setting. This, in turn often gets translated into “ecolodge” or “eco resort” in English, which, well, means something a bit different. Exploring this, and looking to find a “new Hội An,” I hire a local guide and a motorbike and hit the road.

The path to the ancient house be slippery. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

An hour or so inland from Hội An lie three districts, Hiệp Đức, Tiên Phước, and below them, Phú Ninh, with Hồ Phú Ninh, an artificial lake that is a supposed eco-zone, at its centre. The plan is to visit some “historical houses” in the first two areas then visit the lake. I discuss the plan with my guide Tran, who harks from the area. He’s optimistic—despite the filthy weather.

We stick to back roads and it doesn’t take long to leave Hội An behind us. This is the scenery and vibe that has made the country such a great one for motorbike touring, the scenery ratcheting up as the roads narrow. What I’m hoping for is to find enough to fill a couple of days in order to give people a reason to strike further afield than Hội An. As things pan out though, the planned two days folds back into one.

Some of the houses are closed, another we can’t find, a third, according to an old woman by the side of the road, washed away in a storm. Signposting is limited, and when we do reach an open house—approached by the slipperiest goddam footpath in the country—it only heightens the disappointment in the others being closed. Surviving the footpath, we interrupt a resident busying himself on a laptop at Huỳnh Thúc Kháng and he packs up to get out of sight. Much like the historic houses in Hội An it is pretty and interesting, and unlike its better known relatives, it feels more living than a museum. As we leave, the laptop guy empties a flooded flower pot onto the footpath covering its slime with a new coating. I don’t think it was personal.

Vietnam: Honest food and honest smiles. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

We cut our losses on the old house front and keen to see the eco-tourism lake, we bike down to Hồ Phú Ninh. Much of the lakeside forest we ride through is working forest, eucalypt, making for a scene that is more striking and sterile than pretty. We reach a pre-lunch stop and relaxing in plastic chairs by the water’s edge is well pretty—the menu though is

Earlier this year I spent a few weeks in Vietnam travelling it tail to top. I wanted to see how things were picking up in these waning pandemic times, but I also had sustainable travel on my mind—was it possible in Vietnam? In this, the first of a three-part series, I’m in the south and look at plastic, people and power.

The Journey

Night has fallen by the time, ears popping, my VietJet flight begins its descent to Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport. Snoozing with an end-of-the-world podcast filtering into my subconscious, the crackling pilot’s voice jerks me awake. My taxi, an Airbus A321 Neo, is one of the most efficient on the planet according to my plane-spotting son. At less than two years old, and jammed with holidaymakers, flying doesn’t get much more efficient than this.

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Vũng Tàu slides by, then we track east, looping below Mỹ Tho, before a right puts us on final to Hồ Chí Minh City, a metropolis of almost nine million people. Throughout our dog-leg approach, a sea of bright lights flickers against cobalt below. From the air, the lights seem far brighter than in my home of Indonesia—something I put down to the cheaper power. As the flaps drop and the undercarriage clunks into place I make out the xe ôm crammed streets, the tall yet narrow housing, the flight announcements crackle through the cabin—why the hell is the sound quality always so bad?! Outside and below, neon is everywhere. “How do you make this sustainable?” I ask myself.

Are we there yet? Almost. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

I’m in Vietnam for my first “real trip” since fleeing Kuala Lumpur for Bali as the pandemic’s heavy curtain fell across the region. In the intervening period, seeing the heavy toll tourism’s retreat inflicted on the island, I turn hard against a pastime I’ve written on for over 20 years. Looking to understand more, I go back to school. I start a Masters in Responsible Tourism Management at Leeds Beckett University. With a year and a half of academic theory done and dusted, I want to see how practical it is to put the theory I’m still learning into action. I also need to think about how I’m going to change my business, Travelfish, to reflect my changing view of the world.

Vietnam, one of the first countries I ever visited in Southeast Asia, way back when in 1994, seems like a good spot to start.

Hồ Chí Minh City: Plastic And People

My first bed of the trip isn’t great. It is a small hotel of 26 rooms, with much fawning press coverage pre-pandemic. Today its story is a common one—under-maintained, it is scruffy and feels like poor value, even at the knock-off rates I pay through an OTA. Built cheap and not to last, across the region, hotels like this litter the landscape. At least at one time my hotel tried to stand out—unlike the thousands of cookie cutter mini-hotels in the city. Trade may pick up once China is back on stream, but, at least in this case, the hotel’s past glory days seem unattainable.

A shellfish for each property. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

According to Agoda, Hồ Chí Minh City has 12,238 rentals and hotels*—one for every 800 residents. By means of comparison, Singapore has 1,095 (again according to Agoda*)—one for around every 5,000 people. Competition must be considerable, how does one stand out from the crowd? For all its flaws in a marketing sense, sustainability could offer a pathway.

In the case of my hotel, single use plastic is everywhere. There’s two plastic water bottles, throw away shampoo, toothbrushes etcetera. At capacity, that’s 130 plastic bottles a day—almost 50,000 per year. Extrapolate that across the 12,000+ properties and you have well over half a billion plastic bottles a year. So where does the plastic go? I take the first baby step in trying to find out.

Suffice to say Hồ Chí Minh City has an absolutely ridiculous amount of cafés and within 24 hours I’ve convinced myself it has the highest number of cafés per square kilometre of any city on Earth. So when I head to My Life Coffee in the heart of District 1 to meet Miquel Àngel, I’m already onto about coffee 32.

Harking from Catalonia, but long-time in Vietnam, Miquel has his fingers in many a sustainability pie. He lectures students on it, helps tourism businesses better practice it, and posts about it frequently on LinkedIn. As we sit, sipping our drink-in iced coffees in plastic cups with plastic lids and plastic straws, we talk about—you guessed it—plastic.

There’s a café every fifty metres. Seriously. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

One of the ventures he is involved in encapsulates where Vietnam, a country awash in plastic, is in all this. Hotels hand over their plastic for recycling and the coasters, coat hangers, and chairs that the plastic is recycled into are sold back to hotels at lower prices than what they’d otherwise pay. In essence, they’re buying their garbage back, but the plastic stays out of landfill—and the ocean—and money is both made and saved. This is the circular economy in action. In an ideal world, the city wouldn’t be going through half a billion bottles a year, but in the meantime, this approach makes sense.

Our conversation drifts to the island of Phú Quốc, a destination only rivalled by Sa Pa in the far north on the unmitigated-tourism-disaster-area scale. The island is home to some of the most egregious cases of environmental destruction in the name of tourism, ravages often driven by development firms possessing deep relationships with officialdom, and as I talk to tourism professionals across the country, when Phú Quốc comes up so does the request to be off the record. As one (not Miquel) says:

“Soon you’ll be able to see Phú Quốc’s landfills from space.”

Stick that on a few Vietnam tourism brochures and see how it flies.

Miquel tells me a story of a local entrepreneur who collects plastic bottles on the island by the truck load. They’re shipped back to the mainland and sold to cement factories, who burn them as fuel. Plastic, you see, is cheaper than coal. I later learn this is a common approach, and not only in Vietnam. This Reuters story details the practice, noting that even in the EU few can agree on the pros and cons. In Vietnam, which lacks the EU’s regulatory framework, it is grounds for concern. Around the cement factory, villages sit, the inhabitants inhaling the fumes day in day out. The irony of Phú Quốc’s plastic contributing to the cement paving over of the island is not lost on me. For the sake of being even-handed, I should note that Tom of Vietnam Coracle (who I also drank a thousand coffees with) maintains the island isn’t a complete write off.

The next evening I’m out with Huỳnh Phương, a guide for street food walking tour outfit Street Food Man. To my mind, there’s three vital ingredients to a food tour—the guide, the food and the people who prepare the food. Phương is nailing the first of these—and a couple of weeks after our walk, she wins the Top Guide Of The Year from her employer. She has her rapport with the vendors in that perfect spot where it doesn’t come across as practiced nor tired, and at one point, an elderly couple cook up bột chiên (fried rice flour cakes) from their food stall, and they banter, mother-to-daughter-like, as she patiently translates my questions. It sounds like a simple thing, but as anyone who has done any guiding will know, this is a hard thing to get right. Phương nails it.

“Excuse me while I find the answer to your latest stupid question.” Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Later in the evening, Vinny, Street Food Man’s founder, joins us for a chat. He’s a young guy, I’d guess early 30s, with no shortage of grand ideas—and the energy he’ll need to carry them out. After the lean pandemic years, his business bounces back, thanks in no small part to his top ranking on TripAdvisor (side note: I found the company through a recommendation—not TripAdvisor!). Foreign-owned platforms like TripAdvisor, AirBnb and GetYourGuide deliver the vast majority of his business, taking a cut on every customer that books through them—those leakage things are everywhere I tell ya. To my mind the warning klaxons are blaring, eggs in baskets and all that, but to Vinny it is a business reality. A comfortable reality when you’re on top I guess.

Early on, I don’t remember how it comes up, Vinny reveals that one of his aunts is Kim Phúc. Immortalised by photographer Nick Ut’s “Napalm Girl” photo, Vinny pulls his phone out and shows me the picture. Taken on June 8, 1972, Vinny points to Kim, then two or three uncles who are also in the shot. Next come some photos of Trảng Bàng village—where Ut took the photo—and where Vinny still has family.

Vinny’s sojourn into the war era takes me by surprise, and while I’m digesting what he’s telling me (along with the food), he asks how much time I have. He says he can take me there, to visit his family, the site of the photo, and the pagoda they fled to afterwards.

Hungry? Call Vinny. Photo: Huỳnh Phương.

At first I think he’s joking, but he’s serious—he’s taken other guests there—two days, three days—he says. I’m leaving the next day though, so need to decline, but looking at the pics of the other guests he’s taken there, I’m filled with regret. For almost all visitors, myself included, Tây Ninh province, where Trảng Bàng lies, is but a thirty minute stop on the minibus to see the famous Cao Đài temple there. Thanks to Vietnam’s short tourist visa—and/or unrealistic travel plans—one never seems to have enough time here.

Phan Rang: Tilting At Windmills

Talk to any traveller who hits Southeast Asia’s shores and chances are they’ll comment on the weather. Where the climate is best summed up as hot and wet or hot and dry, the sun shines—a lot. Nowhere does it seem to shine quite as much as Vietnam’s Sunshine Coast—from Qui Nhon in the north to Phan Thiết in the south. Wanting a look at Vietnam’s solar and wind battery, I hedge my bets, and catch a train to the middle—to the twin towns of Phan Rang–Tháp Chàm.

Yes, it rains almost the entire time I am there.

Take me to your leader. Fancy windmills, Phan Rang. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Looking to fuel investment, in the 2010s Vietnam Electricity offer 20-year contracts to buy renewable power. By regional standards the rates are high—some might say inflated—and as hoped, solar and wind boom. Today, lacking the downsides some offshore farms in the Mekong Delta have experienced, the Sunshine Coast is purported to be a showcase of the nation’s future-facing sustainable energy efforts. As I ride the interior, dozens upon dozens spin silently in the steady wind that makes this coastal strip a favourite with kite-surfers. Looking to shed some light on the benefits of the steady breeze, I talk to Mike Tatarski, the Vietnam-based journalist behind Vietnam Weekly. 

“Solar in particular was wildly popular—way more successful than anyone anticipated, least of all the government,” he tells me on a call.

Sounds good, there is though, a major problem—or rather, a miss-match. In a way this mirrors Vietnam’s resoundingly young population and the older dudes who run the joint. The boom delivers solar panels and turbines

Over the last two weeks I’ve been somewhat distracted in Raja Ampat. How distracted? Distracted enough to forget that as I was sliding into the water a couple of weeks ago, Couchfish turned three. With that in mind, I thought I’d revisit a few of my favourite posts from the last three years. Favourite because they were fun to write, experience or sometimes even both. I’ve purposefully concentrated on the “travel as an act” pieces rather than the more industry-focused material.

By the water, Prachuap Khiri Khan. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

I’ve made all the following free to read, as some are from the paid-for itinerary posts. To my readers, thank you for your support over the years—I hope you’ve enjoyed my missives as much as I’ve (mostly!) enjoyed writing them.

If you’re on the free list, and enjoy the stories below, please consider becoming a paid Couchfish subscriber. A subscription costs US$7 per month and gives you access to the full archives, which includes over 350 itinerary pieces—you can upgrade your account via the prompt below. You can see most of the itinerary posts marked up on a map here (though it is a little out of date, as I’m now in Solo on Java). If you’re fine with a free subscription, thanks for reading along.

Always get off the boat

This was the second part in a two-part series on the joys of the unplanned. Travelling in eastern Indonesia, my boat turned out to not be going where I planned, and while that was not ideal, local hospitality replaced a prompt arrival time. You can also read the first part here.

On the joys of getting lost

In a world where some people plan their trips to the point where they resemble a military expedition, sometimes it pays to throw it all out the window. In this, the only “fictional” piece on Couchfish, I write about the pleasures of exploring the unknown. Get off the train at the wrong station, catch the wrong bus—on purpose, or just walk in the opposite direction. For all the talk of Southeast Asia being overrun, most of the region is anything but.

Getting all pensive at Candi Dasa. Photo: Start McDonald.

Where do we put our head down?

Oh boy, where to start when it comes to hotels. Aside from the below-mentioned haunted one, here is one of the weirdest, one of the least-considered, and one of my favourites.

You said you wanted what nobody sees

My good friend Chris often tells me a better title for Couchfish is “How am I still alive.” He says this on account of the number of less than ideal situations I manage to insert myself into—mostly through my own stupidity. In this piece though, I describe an experience that, well, I don’t think anyone could have planned for.

The people you meet

This piece, on “single serving friends” followed on from a piece on an unusual tattoo I saw in Vietnam’s Rạch Giá. A reader had got in touch asking what I meant by the term, and this was the result. Please, if you’re confused about anything I write, let me know as it will, more often than not, give me something else to write about!

Shifting focus. Wasps and painted boards in Pailin. Photo: Nicky Sullivan.

The people you don’t meet

I’ve written a few times on the people I’ve met over my thirty years of travelling around in circles in Southeast Asia. Sometimes though, the story is about who I haven’t met—in this case, a war criminal. A friend though, did.

The people you wish you never met

Competitive and/or whining travellers are one of my favourite bugbears, and these—one from Laos and one from Thailand—are two of my favourite pieces on the topic. Then, of course, there is the fabulist, the long-con man, the unhinged, ... the list be long and messy.

The stuff you can see and smell

While on the road, travellers so often fixate on what they see—fewer though on what they can smell. On what you see, Southeast Asia does colour rather well.

One man, one boat. Gili Pudu, Sumbawa. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

The stuff you cannot

Southeast Asia turned me into a believer when it comes to ghosts, and I write about them a lot. Some of my favourites include the haunted hotel in Sekong, and, well, near anything to do with Bali—particularly if it concerns balians or things that go bang in the night.

Why do we do what we do?

This piece on asking why people travel generated more emails than any other—and it is also one of my favourites. It’s easy to turn your nose up at “tourist hordes” but people travel for all manner of reasons, and sometimes it takes a while to get to the bottom of why.

Couchfish readers are everywhere. In Makassar, Sulawesi a few days ago. Photo: I have no idea.

And that’s a wrap—thanks for reading along, and if you do have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. If you’ve got a personal favourite from the archives, do feel free to share your faves in the comments below.

Good travels!

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Don’t forget, you can find the free podcasts on Apple, Pocket Casts and Spotify as well as right here on Couchfish.

Just a quick note, I’ve written a four-part series of sustainable travel and travel writing for Talking Travel Writing, and the first piece came out last week. If you’ve an interest in travel writing, the Talking Travel Writing Newsletter absolutely belongs on your subscribe list. You can find out more here.

An entrepreneur, a photographer, a kitchen hand and a travel writer walk into a bar ... it might sound like another of “those” jokes, but it’s what I’ve been living for the last seven days—with seven more to come. And while much of the last week has been underwater, admiring Raja Ampat’s incredible coral reefs, much of the in-between time has been by the table.

I’ve written before of the self-imposed doom travel writers face. A doom of seeing everything but experiencing nothing, of never having time to linger. Of finding a place where all one wants to do is put their bag down, but the bus leaves at 8pm. Of meeting like-minded souls, but for the most fleeting of moments. So when a generous friend invites me on a trip that promises the opposite to all the above, I jump at it.

One last Sorong sunset before Raja Ampat. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

1. I’ve been undulating between 18 and 22 metres along Fam Wall for about 35 minutes. Save the occasional half kick to help me over a fan coral, I’m weightless in a near-to-nothing current. Below me, the wall plunges, blurring into a hard-to-describe blue tinted with purple. Behind me, the blue is deeper, richer, yet when I reach into it, I grasp at nothing—it is there, but it is nothing.

I let the current catch my fins and turn me like a second hand on a watch, till, with my head at six, a royal wave of my hand spins me to face the wall. I continue to drift, inverted. The colours, and the minuscule critters—what the photographer called “macro”—go about their business, oblivious to me.

A thought crosses my mind. Describing what you see when diving is like trying to describe a dream you’ve just woken from.

Today in awful. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

2. The four of us are the resort’s token Antipodeans, with Europeans making up the rest of the guest roster. Like the tide, we wash in and out of the common areas, lingering, chatting. As is the norm, there’s plenty of dive chat—the fish was this big and all that. Dive sites from around the world roll off tongues—Zanzibar, Mozambique, Australia, Thailand, even Denmark. But, like listening to another recounting their dreams, the sites’ magnitudes can be hard to grasp.

Conversations splinter, coursing and radiating out like the fan corals we admire beneath. How does one get from discussing a boat running aground a little down the island from where we sit, to having a gun held to one’s chin in Guatemala. I don’t know—but we manage it. Daily.

Don’t get me wrong—this isn’t a competitive traveller scene, something divers in particular can be prone to. More, it’s a scenic road from here to there, and there’s many a stop along the way—especially when the WiFi is down.

Swimming with this mob was fun. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

3. Our goal is a little deep, between 35 and 39 metres if I recall right, so we won’t have all that long down below. We glide down, as my ears pop and pop again, I look up through my bubbles as the translucent surface fades into more blue. The P-47 wreck emerges from the dark faster than I expect, at first I think it’s an outcrop, but then it sharpens. The propeller comes first, clear as a bell it stands, each blade wrapped in a living glove. Behind it the cowling, then the wings, leading edges not quite as smooth as when it rolled off the factory floor.

Out of fuel in 1944, the pilots ditched into the sea off the coast of an idyllic tropical island. This, the better preserved of two wrecks, is the stuff of schoolboy dreams. The P-47 is upside down, and the photographers busy themselves at the cockpit, but it’s too tricky for me. Instead, I glide atop the midsection, watching their air bubbles dash to the leading edge, then balloon past me. Tiny fast-moving streams escape through corroded sections of the wing and fuselage. They form a near unbroken rising in front of my eyes, like diamond strings, they hypnotise. I pause my breathing, watching, in near silence as they rise. Then my dive computer beeps—my time is up.

At Fam Wall. Everything on the whiteboard I’ve forgotten by the time I’m wet. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

4. One day, hiking up to the region’s most famous viewpoint, I’m chatting with our dive master. Like our entire dive team, he’s Indonesian, in his case, born in Sorong, with a Javanese mother and Floresian father. He’s been diving for a decade, before that, boat driver, before that, unclear. He’s a funny guy, with a quick smile and a faster laugh—he gets my (bad) jokes. In him I find that ease of falling into familiarity so common in the archipelago. He’s also great underwater—which, to be honest, matters more than the familiarity stuff. Together though, it’s a winning combination.

Guests rotate in on a weekly basis, so there’s nothing in the way of single serving friends. A chat from Monday picks up again on Wednesday, then more on Friday. We hear about the births, deaths and marriages, the wins and the loses. Fuller pictures form, more tangible than what lies beneath the waters’ surface. I learn of the quirks of faraway lands through the lens of the person across the table from me.

Mandatory Nemo shot. Thank you Raymond for the pic!

5. Back at Fam Wall, the others lag behind me as a white scorpion fish gets the catwalk treatment. Perhaps twenty metres ahead of my guide, I spy a magic wand. No, this isn’t some narcosis slipping in, rather a piece of wood—what else does a wand begin as?

It’s about thirty centimetres long, the diameter of my finger, standing on end in a crevice. From head to toe it is encased in some kind of a near-smooth white coral. At its base, the finest tendrils of gold reach up from the wall, they fold and wrap around the end to form a solid ball, holding it fast. A few run up towards the tip, gold strands wrapping around it, between them a sprinkling of reds and purples. Harry Potter would have been proud.

I gesture to my guide that I’ve found something, and he floats towards me. I point at the wand, but he can’t tell what I’m pointing at. As I don’t know the diving hand signal for magic wand, we’re stuck. We move on. Maybe it is the narcosis after all.

Raja Ampat’s most famous viewpoint. Not too shabby. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

7. One night the photographer gives a presentation. They’re one of the cream of the crop our planet has grown, illustrated early on by a photo of their gear—and that’s just half of it, they quip. Think life story told through photography—the photos as spectacular as the diving. There’s a story behind each and they pause now and then to tell the tale. There’s joy, horror and all between, the practiced stories delivered with a verve from the heart, but it’s the images that do the heavy lifting.

The solemn face of a trafficked mountain gorilla, a single bead of sweat dropping from the chin of a palace guard, the magnificence of an Antarctic shelf. At one stage they play an audio track of the haunting call of a Weddell Seal that lives under the ice. Listening to it, time stands still.

Slow down and grab a paddle. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Later, after dinner, one of the other guests is talking about diving in iced-over lakes in the Netherlands. I ask if you can see through the ice and they say if it hasn’t snowed you can, but if it has you can see nothing. I sit there thinking about the seal, swimming under enormous ice sheets, its call in my mind.

I realise I’ve been all the while wrong. For the travel writer to see everything and experience nothing is a choice. Time to slow down.

Couchfish is 100 per cent independent and reader-supported. If you’re not already a subscriber, and you’d like to show your support, become a paying subscriber today for just US$7 per month—you can find out more about Couchfish here—or simply share this story with a friend.

Don’t forget, you can find the free podcasts on Apple, Pocket Casts and Spotify as well as right here on Couchfish.

When I reviewed The Last Tourist one bit that stood out was an inference that destinations are at risk of becoming “dumb pipes.” At one point, G Adventures founder Bruce Poon Tip says “Travel has taken a turn and the destination is no longer relevant.” When you pull that apart, what does it mean? What are the risks for destinations when the destination itself is no longer relevant?

When the Laotian Times reported that the southern hub of Pakse plans to introduce a “walking street night market,” Poon Tip’s words came to mind. A few days later, the same publication noted Savannakhet is to hold a monkey feeding festival. There’s nothing wrong with these initiatives I guess, but ...

Time to pack the bags for Savannakhet. Macaques at Lopburi, Thailand. Photo: David Luekens.

There’s a difference between what I’d term an organic walking street night market and one contrived for tourists. The former builds out of something that serves local people. It grows out of an existing night market that overflows, and examples exist across the region. In other cases, they evolve out of there being a heavy concentration of people. Bangkok’s Khao San Road—at least the old version—is an example of the latter.

The more contrived affair probably got its first shot in the arm in Chiang Mai. The city already had a “Night Bazaar,” but the night walking street, in the old city, brought more to the table. It was, and continues to be, a huge success. Luang Prabang replicated it, likewise with success, as did others. Today—or should I say tonight—some kind of a “night walking whatever” is a staple of the tourism diet.

Always check where this sorta stuff is made—you might be surprised at some of the answers. At Chiang Mai walking street. Photo: Mark Ord.

I’m not sure how often they play enough of a part in tourists’ hit-lists that such a thing brings on a longer stay, but looser wallets do result. This is a good thing—as long as you’re buying local fare and handicrafts—not cheap imported tat or a Starbucks.

And yet, taking Pakse as the example, there is far more on offer. It’s a hub for motorbiking, for visiting waterfalls and coffee plantations, or a beautiful small island. Any of these would bring on longer stays, and, more importantly, they’re pretty much unique to Pakse and the Bolaven Plateau.

Wandering Ban Saphai, near Pakse. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Midway through the pandemic, a friend attended a travel conference in Europe. It was at the stage where concerns about Covid—at least in some parts of the world—were easing. In Southeast Asia though, nations remained pretty much closed to recreational visits. My friend recounted a conversation between the exasperated representative of a very large international tour operator and that of a destination in Southeast Asia. I’m paraphrasing here to keep it family-friendly:

“You tell your boss to open up your bloody country, or we’ll take our pax to the Caribbean. They have beaches too you know.”

There’s much to unpack from the above, but more than anything—aside from the tour rep being a complete dick—this is the risk of being nothing more than a dumb pipe.

I was X years old when beach clubs were a novelty. Ku De Ta, Bali. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Many years ago, I was at a bar in Bali and met a guy whose business was buying up hotel rooms and reselling them. I guess you’d call him a consolidator. At the time Bangkok’s airport shutdowns were hammering tourism and he was in Indonesia to sort out a buffer. He said:

“The only thing you can do in Thailand that you can’t do in Bali is hill-tribe trekking.”

It sounds ridiculous, but it isn’t far off the money.

I was talking to some tourists the other day here in Bali. They love it here and have been visiting for decades. Depending on the prices of flights—and connections—they holiday either here or Phuket. When I raised my eyebrows at Phuket, they said there’s little different between the two. Now I’d have more than a slight quibble with that, but when I consider where they stay—Kuta in Bali or Patong in Phuket—they’re not far off.

I have thoughts on always giving tourists what they want. Patong, Phuket. Photo: Lana Willocks.

The Kutas and Patongs of the world are so similar that you could argue they are dumb pipes. As such, they become subject to not only tourists’ whims but that of aspects out of their control. Flights, tour itineraries, tour prices. If they had maintained the considerable differences that once existed, would that still be the case?

Back in the 1990s, when I spent too long bouncing around islands, I saw the morphing in real time. Same same but different became same same but pretty much the same. The beaches might be different, but the infrastructure and tourist services, became a dull background. As a guesthouse operator recently said to me, we need German beer if we want German guests.

Writing the last few entries for paid-for Couchfish on Jakarta, I’ve thought about how, over the years, it has become so much more like Bangkok. Bangkok in turn, like Singapore, Singapore, like Sydney. They’re not identical of course, but there’s a same sameness to them that wasn’t the case before. Does it make them any less worth visiting? Of course not. Does it make them more interchangeable? Yes.

Celebrate the different. Street food, Jakarta. Photo: Sally Arnold.

This is globalisation at work, Rising living standards bring the malls, fast food, mass-transit and so on. These are all driven by local desires—yes perhaps framed by a preponderance of Western media, but I’m not going down that wormhole. Tourism likewise, has gentrified entire destinations. Wealth continues to grow at uneven rates and where a martini-flanked beachside horizon pool was once newsworthy, today it is the norm. If you can get to your $5 martini in Phuket easier and cheaper than your Bali one, that’s a problem for the latter.

Destinations would be well advised to work on doubling down on their differences. Stop gazing over the fence ($) and replicating what the Joneses next door are doing.

Be yourself.

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