I now know how many kilos of rice are grown in a Vietnamese rice terrace per year, how tall the crops are when they are harvested and how many crops per year are grown. What use is any of this?

It had been a while since I spent hours locked up in a train, so it was with some joy that I folded myself into the short bed of an overnight train to the Chinese border the other day. The compartment was fan cooled, which meant no glass in the windows between the sleepers and

Minsk motorbikes are a bunch of arse. They were designed by (blind) Russians before WWII, and are revered locally as a testament to simplicity and reliability. ‘They can be fixed by anyone, anywhere in Vietnam.’ What they mean is that they are decaying, never worked very well in the first place, and are neglected by