Author: melmalinowski

Singapore has long been one of my favorite cities. Clean, lush and green, with lots of good Asian food, parks, ample buses and subways. I think it perhaps the best run large city in the world. I never tire of visiting Singapore. Judy and I would often make ‘mileage runs’ from San Francisco to Singapore,…

Continuing to explore Thailand, we headed west from Bangkok to the Kanchanaburi area, home to several big national parks. We went to visit a major tourist attraction, famous because of the book and movie of that name. We learned that the book and movie are 90% inaccurate, a fantasy, but that there was a major…

Phuket Island in the south of Thailand has become a very popular beach destination. It is as beautiful as always, but the number of tourists is a bit much for us, so we’re only overnighting on the way in, and then driving to the north. So, we drove about 2 hours north to Khao Lak…

Penang is an island off the coast of Malaysia, adjoining the Malacca Strait. Beginning in the late 1700s, it was a major trans-shipping port under British colonial rule. After WWII, it became part of the Malaysian union. It recently has been dubbed the “Silicon Valley of the East”. Singapore, Taiwan and Korea might think the…

I’m now traveling around Thailand by car. As my internet connections are often slow in rural Thailand, and I’m busy all day, I’m mostly putting up pictures with a few terse labels. I’m not going to try to make this a Thailand travel guide, but just share the atmosphere. You get a lot for your…