Perspectives by James Bayly

Zhangjiajie at dawn looks like a place the gods forgot to finish - stone pillars punching through cloud, a forest frozen in the mist, something surreal.

This is my favourite moment, entering in the early morning as the entrance gate first opens, long strides on wet steps, and the air fresh and quiet. Then, from a desolate perch away from the incoming crowds, I can unfold the small grey machine.

You arrive in a Chinese city and the first thing you notice isn’t the skyline. It’s the momentum. The place feels like it’s growing - cranes everywhere, concrete curing, rebar like bamboo shoots. Whole districts under active assembly.

Back home, we treat building like a morality play. First we ask: Can we build it? Engineers run the numbers, architects sketch the dream, someone produces a glossy PDF full of hopeful arrows. We prove it’s possible.

I’m standing amidst a turbulent sea of humanity - 60,000 people shuffling forward in a hot, sticky procession. Faces glistening with sweat, phone cameras raised like flags, the air thick with sunscreen and anticipation. We are all here, marching willingly toward a place built by hands now long turned to dust.

Golden hour is roll time. As the sky yellows, people pour out of rental shops in borrowed history and converge in the same photogenic spots. The real attractions aren't the temples or gates, they're just backgrounds. The moon gate, the span of an old bridge, the red wall that makes skin tones pop - this is where the action occurs.

There are few performances in life as impressive and captivating as the relentless, cheeky flirtations from Filipino men. These island Casanovas seem to possess an inexhaustible energy for playfully audacious remarks to the fairer sex. Their efforts to woo and charm are unrelenting, delivered with a mix of humour, boldness, and a twinkle in the eye that makes it hard to know whether to laugh, roll your eyes, or perhaps blush just a little.

Up high, at Lipton’s Seat, the highlands wake slowly. Mist rises from the ribs of the mountains, and the morning cold flees from the brutal tropical sun. It’s easy to be seduced by the green geometry here, lines carving contours. But this isn’t just scenery; it’s an insatiable appetite made visible: a landscape arranged to meet the demands of humanity’s mornings.

I tumble out of the plane in Kathmandu with sleep-crusted eyes and a slight hangover from the past night in Bangkok. Tribhuvan International is half-airstrip, half-busted parking lot and a place I spent 48 sleepless hours in just over a decade ago. But before I can light a cigarette or finish the first of a hundred tiny cups of chai, the subcontinent issues its greeting: a thousand angry horn blasts, an attack of touts, a peculiar smell, and a lot of physical contact.

The sun hangs low over George Town, throwing shadows that stretch across the mosaic of colonial facades and weathered shutters. The five-foot ways, these sheltered corridors beneath the classic shophouses, come alive as the heat of the day dissipates. They support life in this city, and many others like it, pulsating with life, history, and the echoes of countless footsteps.

It begins the night before, thumb grazing a cracked phone screen from a hostel bunk that still smells of last week's bug spray. Photo after photo: bananas offered to grinning trunks, tourists in cheap disposable elephant pants, all smiling Instagram influencers. You open five tabs, close three, reopen two, and end up no closer to booking - or not booking - than when you started.

The highway north from Chiang Mai unspools like magnetic tape through rice fields and military checkpoints. You start to feel like you’re approaching the end of the road here, the end of “safe civilisation”. Here, Thailand bleeds into Laos and Myanmar with nothing more dramatic than a muddy bend of river, but every map-maker since colonial times has circled the spot in red: the Golden Triangle.

The hour is late. Or early. The distinction blurs in the concrete canyons of Shinjuku, doesn't it?

In Tokyo, the subways are always on time - at least until the clock hits 12am. Just as many cities are coming alive, Tokyo grinds to a halt. Miss the last train and you’ll find yourself locked out, staring at the gates as the overhead lights blink out like eyelids.

Japan doesn’t endure chaos, it embraces it. Earthquakes, typhoons, sieges, fire - this is a land that knows natural disasters like an old friend, one who keeps you sharp. And nowhere does that relationship show more than in its castles.

Forget Europe’s crumbling stone fortresses. Think Himeji: a white heron poised to take flight. Think Osaka’s hulking rebirth, all concrete and defiance. Think Hiroshima—a phoenix risen from atomic ash. These places aren’t static monuments. They’re living lessons in antifragility, carved in wood, plaster, and sheer stubbornness.

There's something about Japan that makes you want to burn every goddamn photo you've ever taken anywhere else.

It’s not just the temples, all serene wood and meticulously raked gravel, looking like they were art-directed by some Zen master with an Ansel Adams fetish. Or the neon-drenched canyons of Shinjuku, where every sign, every epileptic screen, feels deliberately placed for maximum visual impact. No, it’s the people - this entire country is a masterclass in aesthetics.

It starts with a suggestion, "just go, I ended up staying there for weeks". Next thing you know, you’re on a minivan climbing the switchbacks to Pai. Or you’re barefoot on a ferry bound for Gili Trawangan, your hair dusted in sand and regret.

Once you’ve been around a few hostels in Asia you’ll start hearing the names: Pai, Gili T, Siquijor, Pushkar, Vang Vieng—a constellation of places orbiting in your daydreams. Out here, deadlines mean the next visa run. Job titles mean nothing. Everyone is five years younger than they claim or ten years older than they look, clothed in a patchwork of stretched singlets and accesorised in hemp.

Okay, grab a Singha, ice cold if you can get it. Because we need to talk about maps. Not the paper kind, the ones in our heads. This particular brand of bullshit they drew for us in school.

Civilisation™ – the officially licensed version – kicks off somewhere sandy near the Nile. Pyramids, pharaohs. Then Greece, philosophers in robes, inventing democracy and art. Next stop, Rome. Roads, legions, aqueducts, conquering everything. Then darkness, maybe some knights, and boom, suddenly we're talking Florence and London. Neat, tidy, centred.

From the restaurant of the 5 star hotel I’ve got 3 nights in as part of my heavily subsidised stopover of this former flyover state, I drink tea wishing there was a cold beer on the menu. Outside, and across the bay, the city's skyscrapers twist toward heaven in impossible shapes—glass-and-steel monuments to what money can command when freed from the constraints of reason or restraint.

The sky turns a hazy crimson I wander the cobblestone streets of "Sunset Town," a grotesque simulacrum of an Italian village improbably planted on the southern shores of Phu Quoc, and island in south Vietnam.

I'm surrounded by perfect terracotta facades under a towering clocktower, but there is a profound emptiness that echoes between the walls. There's something almost post-apocalyptic about it - as if all the Italians were raptured to heaven, leaving behind only their architectural blessings and a smattering of bewildered Asian tourists clutching selfie sticks.

There’s no better way to escape the world than to hike above it. No news, no emails, no noise—just the clean, thin air of the mountains and the crunch of grass or gravel. Escaping to the outdoors has always been my sanctuary, the one thing that strips life down to its essentials. By foot or pedal, up and over ridgelines, across rivers that run clear and fast, through valleys carved by glaciers long gone but never forgotten.

There was a time when Hong Kong was the brightest light in Asia, perhaps the world. A neon jungle with streets paved with ambition. The clang of the trams, wail of distant ferries, and hustle of millions of entrepreneurs harmonised into that hum of a city that never slept. You could smell it - the scent of roasted duck, the salt of the South China Sea, the sweat of a thousand bankers and hustlers trying to carve out their piece of paradise. It was a city that made you believe in opportunity, in capitalism, in the idea that tomorrow you two could live the dream.

There’s a moment, somewhere on the winding roads of Hi Van Pass, where the engine hums beneath, the hairpin curve ahead is blind, and you’re inches from a sheer drop off a cliff into the sea below. You should slow down, play it safe. Instead, you lean in.

Riding motorbikes in Southeast Asia is the ultimate trade-off—one part liberation, one part mortal danger. It’s the closest thing to flying without wings, an open invitation to the road where you call the shots. But to many of my friends back home, it’s lunacy. A death wish on two wheels. “Are you crazy!?” they ask, horrified. I’ve seen the statistics, the numbers aren’t pretty - Thailand has one of the highest motorcycle fatality rates in the world and accidents involving tourists are a big part of it. Vietnam and Bali aren’t much better, with thousands of deaths a year, many of them foreigners who thought a rented scooter was as harmless as a bicycle.

The first thing that sticks to you in Bangkok isn’t the heat, though that comes soon enough - it’s the sheer contrast between the haves and have-nots. A Lamborghini purrs to a stop outside of ICONSiam, its driver stepping out in that latest designer outfits that cost more than the street vendor makes in a year. A few steps away, an old woman crouches beside a makeshift cart, selling mango sticky rice for a handful of baht. Over on the road, a tuk tuk driver beckons to any tourist that will look to him to offer a ride across the city for $4. The city lives in both worlds at once, without hesitation or apology.

Sukhumvit Road stretches like an artery through Bangkok’s restless heart, pumping life, commerce, and vice through its endless sprawl. Past gilding shopping malls, alongside through some of the best value for money business hotels, carved out under one of the busiest BTS lines.

It sells everything. With enough baht in your pocket you can feast like a king on street food or 5 start French restaurants. You can buy fake Rolexes, fake Ray-Bans, fake friendships. From late afternoon street vendors will display illegal vapes and sex toys for sale - including an intriguing number of strap on appendages.

I'm enjoying a premature retirement to travel the world with my camera (or at least till money runs out).

Instead of writing in an old diary to be shunned away and and forgotten, I'm doing a stupid thing and publishing my thoughts and recollections from on the road for you to read or express bewilderment at.