Visit Asia

Bandung is the capital of West Java Province in Indonesia. Lying on a river basin surrounded by volcanic mountains, the area is known for its cool mountain climate and hectares of tea plantations.

Based on what I’ve read, Bandung doesn’t have as strong a culinary identity. Most of their food is Sundanese in origin and they aren’t known for any particular dishes. With that said, they have become famous for giving dishes that originated in other parts of the country a unique Bandung twist.

As big as Jakarta is, it isn’t a major destination for international travelers. Like similarly large megacities in Southeast Asia, it functions more as a stopover to other destinations in the region like Bandung, Yogyakarta, Bali, and Lombok.

A popular pilgrimage site, Kandy is regarded as a holy city and is home to The Temple of the Tooth Relic (the sacred tooth of the Buddha), one of the most sacred places of worship in Buddhism. It’s a key religious site not just in Sri Lanka, but in the entire Buddhist world.

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.