Travelling to Bangkok, Thailand

Curiosity, experimentation, unguarded feeling:
all may be virtues in jazz, but on holiday in
Bangkok they’ll only get you in trouble.

Bangkok may be the City of Angels, but the devil is in the details.

As I sit in a wheelchair (not my usual mode of transport), in extreme pain, in a China Eastern departure lounge at Bangkok International, awaiting my return flight to Vancouver, a thought has occurred to me: Bangkok is a great place to make mistakes. Or, if not to make mistakes, perhaps to nurture the state of mind that precedes them. Curiosity, experimentation, unguarded feeling: all may be virtues in jazz, but on holiday in the original City of Angels they’ll only get you in trouble. My downfall took shape in a three-week romantic intrigue. I know, original. More on that in a second. 


Bangkok got its name from King Buddha Yodfa Chulaloke (posthumously Rama I) in the late 18th century, and the full version of it translates to English as The city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarma. In Thai it takes as long to say as an alphabet and three supercalafragalistics, though most of Bangkok’s nine million citizens call their global mecca of exoticism Krung Thep.


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Travelling to Kona, Hawaii

Kick back in Kona for a real Hawaiian island experience.

If you’re not a fan of frat-boy-filled Waikiki, 
may we suggest laid-back Kona, Hawaii?

I strongly dislike Honolulu. On a visit one year ago, it felt like America’s answer to spring-break-style Cancun, and I suspect little has changed. What was supposed to be a week spent sunbathing in Waikiki turned into one spent avoiding the throngs of lobster-red, loudmouthed tourists sucking back sugary cocktails. Sure, a day trip to the North Shore was my saving grace (and helped justify the airfare), but I nevertheless concluded that Oahu was not the Hawaiian island for me.


So given another opportunity to visit the state, I decide to head to the Big Island. The numbers alone show stark differences: where Oahu is home to more than 900,000 residents, the population of the Big Island is only 175,000, despite being more than six times the size. And while Maui is often described as the most beautiful of the eight major islands comprising the Hawaiian archipelago, I’d been promised that the Big Island too had picturesque beaches, but also volcanoes and villages begging to be visited.


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B.C. Expats Living Abroad

Where in the world do British Columbians live, love, work, volunteer, commute, shop, fall off bicycles, and purchase over-the-counter medication?

British Columbians are spread across the globe. Some leave home for work, some to chase love, some to indulge an inexplicable wanderlust. While away, they inevitably make discoveries about themselves, their host cultures, and even, this, their home province, too.

• Map: BCBusiness Guide to World Travel

Each month in BCBusiness, we publish one of their stories. Navigate the map below – you can zoom in and out, slide left and right – and click on a location to read a Q&A with the expat living there.

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BCBusiness Guide to World Travel

Who doesn't love a good travel yarn? No one. And at BCBusiness, our correspondents are flung far and wide, from the swelter of Old Havana to the chaotic streets of Kathmandu.

The world has many places, and those places have their stories. "Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go," wrote Jack Kerouac, in 1951. "But no matter, the road is life.”

• Map: Q&As with B.C. Expats Abroad

Each month in BCBusiness, we publish a letter home from a writer in a distant place. Navigate the map below – you can zoom in and out, slide left and right – and click on a location to read the story.

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Travelling to Zurich, Switzerland

The Freitag Shop will soon be the tallest
in Zurich, Switzerland.

When you're travelling to Switzerland, it pays to go beyond the good looks 
of old-town Zurich
.

Zigzagging around a turreted old-town area that feels like a film-set version of a medieval hamlet, I’ve fallen for Zurich faster than a cuckoo clock marks the hours. 
But while Switzerland’s largest city also offers crenellated Alpine vistas, charming trundling trams and a dangerous surfeit of chocolate shops, I can’t help feeling there must be more to this place than well-preserved good looks. 


Fortunately, the other side of the tracks isn’t far away. Zurich West – a former industrial quarter where everything from boats to beer was once busily manufactured – has abandoned its gritty past to become the city’s new cool-ville. And while not every derelict factory is now a swanky bar, the presence of young, Macbook-wielding locals echoes Vancouver’s hipster-hugging SoMa area.


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Travelling to Montevideo, Uruguay

Travelling to Montevideo: Where other cities flaunt their charms, Montevideo insists you search hers out.

A little sibling rivalry would seem inevitable in Montevideo. The diminutive Uruguayan capital lies just a hundred or so miles across the muddy shallows of the Rio de la Plata from big sister Buenos Aires. The family resemblance is unmistakable. Both cities tango. Both share the same predilection for big steaks and bold wines. Both feel more southern European than South American. But while Buenos Aires has long basked in the international limelight, Montevideo has quietly carried on in the shadows – the quiet, bespectacled sister who, in her own way, is irresistible.

I’m pushing deeper down a cobblestone side street near the old part of the city, squeezing through the masses gathered for Sunday morning’s market. Wares here have little rhyme or reason. Aquarium fish give way to stalls of vegetables, then dusty records, then old doorknobs. On either side loom the mouldering facades of Montevideo’s Art Deco past, fancy balconies and flourishes evoking a long-gone era of prosperity. I comb block after block, digging deep into the assembled flotsam of the city – rusted tools, old photographs, yellowed magazines – finding nothing of ostensible value.

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Travelling to Ibiza, Spain

Travelling to Ibiza, Spain: There are zero undiscovered gems left, but Ibiza still has a handful of relatively underdeveloped sandy coves.

As environmentally unsound and cattle-car unpleasant as budget short-haul flights can be, their billboards for cheap round trips to Mediterranean oases become awfully attractive when you’re stuck in a sweltering metropolis mid-heat wave. Those ads work, I confirmed one evening, when my wife and I booked a quick flight out of town to the cheapest beach destination we could find: Ibiza.

Twenty or 30 years ago that might have been chic of us. Ibiza was once an unspoiled getaway for informed hippies and tasteful hedonists, but in the late ’80s and ’90s the island’s reputation as an Ecstasy-fuelled hot spot exploded. Package tours full of young Brits searching out cheap alcohol, expensive drugs and mediocre house music swamped the place, sending its reputation into a K-hole from which it has yet to recover. Nonetheless, we booked a hotel in the quieter northern part of the island and hoped for the best.

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Travelling to Buenos Aires, Argentina

Travelling to Buenos Aires, Argentina: Living boldly in the here and now.

It’s a cliché to say a city is “a study in contrasts” – a clash of old and new, rich and poor, conservative and radical – as it sets up a far-too-convenient narrative for lazy writers. And yes, Buenos Aires is all of those things and more.

But what’s most remarkable about the southern hemisphere’s most populous city – this May celebrating the 200th anniversary of its independence from Spain – is how good it is at projecting an aura of serene confidence, despite some remarkable hardships over the past two centuries, including brutal military dictatorships and a debilitating currency crisis. It is a city neither obsessed with its past nor fretting about its future, living boldly instead in the here and now.

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Travelling to Paris, France

Travelling to Paris, France: It's a city built for the solitary wanderer and ponderer.

My first visit to Paris was a disaster, one of those trips with friends that starts unravelling almost immediately and ends with everyone avoiding each other for months afterward. But there was benefit to the discord: I ended up discovering my own version of the place. It’s the City of Love, according to cliché, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it solo and discover that there’s more to the place than reheated Left Bank tropes and copping a feel on the Pont Neuf.


In fact, for most of its 2,500-odd years of existence, Paris wasn’t much known for amour at all. It was the City of Blood, a disease-ridden warren famed for its tendency to produce rampaging mobs, giant sewer rats and intermittent sectarian massacres. The French Revolution was just one of the more successful periodic eruptions of Parisian civil disobedience. And it certainly wasn’t the last. Every prominent corner and public square in Paris has been soaked in blood one way or another. 


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Travelling to Lanai, Hawaii

Travelling to Lanai: Lanai is an island that seduces you, a fresh reminder of how it feels to fall in love.

I have a friend who won’t go to Hawaii. She made a girlhood pledge that it would remain virgin territory until her honeymoon, so at 40 she’s travelled the world and is still waiting to get lei’d. Having been to nearly all the Hawaiian islands, I have two pieces of advice: Go to Lanai, now. And go with somebody you adore, because there’s almost nothing to do but love the one you’re with.


The 360-square-kilometre, privately owned Lanai was bought by U.S. industrialist James Dole in 1922 and became the planet’s biggest pineapple plantation. When Dole’s new parent company Castle & Cook started growing real estate values instead of spiky bromeliads about 20 years ago, it built a beachside resort and a cosy hill-country lodge, turning Lanai’s white-sand crescents from best-kept Maui day-trip secret to global jet-set destination. 


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