Travel photos and journals from across Asia [1997-2025]
Day 7 Today would be our last full day with the van so we had to start heading back towards Tokyo. We woke to a cold ‘pea souper’ which for the non-Brits is a thick fog. A couple of coffees later and it had started to clear so we set off ignoring Google Maps to…
Day 6 Today’s adventure had been meticulously planned by Da who had been watching Thai YouTubers travelling in Japan. The Alpine Route as it is known is a very popular tourist attraction though a little hard to get to. Our first encounter at 06.30 was the car park attendant telling us we couldn’t park the…
Day 5 Today we headed for Matsumoto Castle, touted as one of Japan’s national treasures. Entry fees for attractions in Japan are much cheaper than in Thailand and there is no dual pricing which is a refreshing trait of a first-world country. It cost us 700 yen, or around 175 baht each to get in. …
It was time to hit the road and we had a three-hour drive north to Nagano and our first night at a Japanese road station. Campsites here are expensive as they charge for the vehicle and per person, and for electricity, all on top and all you really get is a parking space and toilet…
Prologue The first thing most people say when you tell them you’re going to Japan is, “wow, its expensive,” and they’re not wrong. Visiting Japan costs a pretty penny in normal times but with rampant inflation and price gouging across the globe, things have been amplified. In addition to that, everyone wants to go there…
The following guide has been compiled after spending a week on the road in Japan in a campervan/motorhome. We started in Tokyo before heading to Mt. Fuji, then north to the Nagano area and Japanese Alps taking in Kamikochi, the Alpine Route, and Matsumoto before heading east to Chichibu and returning to the capital. Toll…
The road south to our final destination two hours away beckoned, but it meant another hellish minivan journey. I would have much rather taken a slow boat, but there were none running this time of year. This van driver headed out of Kampong Cham on time and then stopped on a corner somewhere on the…
Kracheh The road south beckoned and the next day our police-arranged minivan turned up on time at the hotel. We must have made a good impression on these guys as we had the entire van to ourselves, the driver was professional, and nobody else or their household furniture was picked up on the two-hour journey….
It was time to get out of the tourist trap and onto the open road into the real Cambodia. However, the journey to our next destination up on the Laos border would be a five-hour slog in a minivan … or so we thought. Very few people travel from Siem Reap to Stung Treng and…
The last time I visited this epic religious site was in 1999 when it was very hard to get to so very few people made it there. Today, the place is Cambodia’s biggest tourist destination attracting more than 2,500 people per day. Instead of taking motorcycles, we’d opted for a tuk-tuk for the day for…
There is never a bad time to take a road trip, especially after almost three years of lockdowns. Three pals got together and decided to take a two-week trip to neighboring Cambodia to relieve the monotony of life in Bangsaphan. The plan was to avoid the Chinese casino town of Sihanoukville and venture off the…
Back in the northwest of England where things had brightened up a little again, we took a drive into the Peak District again to find some viewpoints around Kettleshulme and on to the very dry Errwood Reservoir. It had been one of the hottest and driest years on record for much of England. The landscape…
After a couple of days back on the farm catching up, we headed back to Stonehaven to visit Dunnottar Castle. The weather was great when we left but had turned into mist and fog by the time we reached the castle just a few miles up the road, such is the nature of things up…
Having exhausted many of the places to visit in the local vicinity, we wanted to venture further north so booked a hotel on Loch Ness. Getting there would be the good bit as it involved driving through the Cairngorms, the UK’s largest national park, to Inverness. There were other routes but the sun was forecast…
From here it was the long drive to Scotland and the new ‘Château de Jarvo’ in Aberdeenshire where we would be based for the next few weeks. Our rental shed had started to make some strange noises raising a few concerns but nobody wanted to answer the phone at the car company so we drove…