My name is not Michael Caine but I may well be the next best thing. Namely, a person who has stayed in the same hostel in Hoi An as Michael Caine did during the filming of The Quiet American. Very Chinese, dark wood walls, floors and ceilings. Very nice, and how’s your father. ‘Allo. Thankfully…

Ho Chi Minh City contains over 3 million motorbikes and boy, does that make crossing the road an adventure! Like a scene from futuristic movie Tron, bikes come at you from all angles, like packets of unsprawled information at breakneck speed. The trick, they say, is to simply step into this seething mass of metal…

Ho Chi Minh City. Where the air is hot and sticky like freshly cut pineapples. As in the scene from LA Story where Steve Martin goes to the ATM only to hand over his withdrawal to a mugger, we couldn’t resist the chance to get ripped off by a ciclo driver at the earliest opportunity.…

Here we are in Ikebukuro, one of the sleaziest parts of Tokyo, killing time before we catch the train to the airport and head off for Vietnam on the second part of our Truly Asia tour, in search of Yam Yam and his/her Pangs. Tokyo is very exhausting, but if you can figure out the…

We just had the most extreme yakitori experience in Ikebukuro, pole position next to the master of his domain, a chef whose power animal must be either a small agile bear or a racoon (actually, I’d rather liken him to a crouching tiger). Japanese restaurants break so many OHS and union regulations, it is a…

Okay, here I am in the real Sprawl, aka Japan. Woah. Haiku conference went well, tho I have to admit to slight fatigue – too many people cross the line between haiku and spirituality for my liking. They are only poems people. Only wrote about four haiku in three days. Went to Kyoto which is…

Yam Yam Pang refers to the strange habit of some designers of placing odd English words together and placing them on bags, t-shirts and the like, leading to a weird po-mo kind of garble intelligible to no one. Hi from Japan, home of the Pang. Presently in Shinjuku, 10pm, wishing I was wearing sunglasses. Neon…

Now that the embargo has ended on mentioning UQP’s Best Australian Poetry of 2003, I can breathe a sigh of relief and inform you, in all openness, that I am in it. Or at least, a poem of mine is in it. “In A Dim Sea Nation” was first published in papertiger #2 last year.…

I’ll just continue on tinkering away here, in self-imposed exile, on the deck of my careening schooner. Some people grow gardenias. Others derive simple pleasure from a McDonalds brown paper bag, stuffing themselves with shit on public transport, gloating. Maybe a cultural studies academic could write a brief, but explosive diatribe on the issue. The…

Sorry not to have written before now, it’s a long story but before I tell it, I just wanted to say i miss you, but I know you’re having a really incredible time. Soweto sounds like just the kind of place every person in the western world needs to see, at least once. How incredibly…