Helga’s Folly is a hotel / acid trip located in the mountains surrounding Kandy, Sri Lanka. It’s owned by Helga De Silva Blow Perera, a Sri Lankan socialite and eccentric who started painting on the walls of the hotel as a form of therapy after going through a traumatic divorce.
Mumbai is home to some of the world’s grandest Victorian Gothic architecture and an equally impressive Art Deco heritage. I never expected this, but Mumbai has the second largest collection of Art Deco buildings in the world, behind only Miami.
Dharavi is a settlement in Mumbai, India. It’s the third largest slum in the world by population, housing an estimated one million people living in an area of around 1.75 square kilometers. By those estimates, Dharavi is one of the most densely populated slums in the world.
There were three things I really wanted to do on my first-ever trip to Mumbai – visit Dhobi Ghat, see the dabawwalas in action, and go on a tour of Dharavi Slum. With just two full days in the city, I needed to be efficient with my time so I had to find a tour that covered as many of these places as possible. Thankfully, I found this one.
If Jakarta is Java’s political and financial capital, then Yogyakarta is its cultural soul. It’s home to Indonesia’s most important archaeological sites – Borobudur and Prambanan – and is the only province in the country still ruled by a sultan.
Locavore is a modern European-Indonesian restaurant located in Ubud, Bali. As its name suggests, they’re all about using local products. About 95% of their ingredients are sourced from within the country, from the Balinese Kintamani coffee and hand-crafted sea salt to the pickled seaweed from Lombok to the beef short ribs from Malang, Java.
Nationalistic in his cooking approach, Chef Navarra is known for his playful and inventive takes on classic Filipino dishes like lugaw (rice porridge), relyenong pusit (stuffed squid), and pork bbq. His presentation may be contemporary but the dishes themselves – and ingredients used – are staunchly Filipino.
In spite of its facade of steel and glass, Singapore retains much of the ethnic and cultural diversity that earned it its nickname – “the melting pot of Asia”. Iconic structures like Marina Bay Sands and Supertree Grove are impressive but equally of note are the ethnic pockets within the city that preserve each culture’s unique heritage and traditions.
Singapore may be small, but it isn’t lacking in great food. Inch for inch, it’s one of the most delicious destinations we’ve been to so far. It’s defined by a wide spectrum of food choices ranging from cheap but legendary hawker stall meals to trendy envelope-pushing dining concepts.
An izakaya is a type of informal Japanese pub. They’re typically small and casual spaces where Japanese salarymen would get a drink and unwind after work. Jovial and relaxed in atmosphere, you can think of them as the Japanese equivalent to American taverns or Irish pubs, maybe even Spanish tapas bars.