Travel Newsletter: 14 October 2022
Where I’m At: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Latest Post: International train services in Southeast Asia. New Project: Japan Rail News, and all the travel reads of the week.
I’m back from my trip to Hanoi and I have spent the week catching up with friends and putting a dent in my work pile. I know I’m in non-travel mode when I realise I haven’t bothered with Instagram lately. I’ve been Instagramming daily for years, so I wonder if my Instagram habit is broken or has the Insta algo broken me?
I saw some odd queues this week around town. Vehicles have been queueing for petrol due to the vagaries of pricing in this country. Queues beget queues, so the sight of people queueing tends to make people join the queue. I also saw this in Laos recently during their fuel crisis, which limited what I was able to do on that trip. The electric bike revolution can’t come soon enough.
Queueing for hamburgers was the other big queue I saw this week. I saw an advertisement that In-N-Out burgers were running a pop-up shop for a day. Vietnam only got McDonald’s in 2014, so not all of the chains you see around the world are here yet, especially niche burger chains such as In-N-Out.
I figured I would get there at 11 am to beat the midday rush, but I arrived to find a queue down the street. By my calculation, it looked like a 2-hour wait. I love hamburgers, but not that much, so I left. The line was so long that it made the local news. I’ve actually never been to In-N-Out, and I always thought that my first time should be at the LAX branch, served with a side of plane spotting. I should stick to that plan.
Latest posts at Nomadic Notes
International train services in Southeast Asia
A few months ago I got the train from Johor Bahru in Malaysia to Woodlands in Singapore. This short train trip got me wondering about how many international train services there are in Southeast Asia, so here is the answer.
Nomadic Notes around the web
Last week I did an interview with Gary Bowerman from The South East Asia Travel Show (a great niche for a podcast!) We talked about future transport in Southeast Asia, and you can check it out here:
Ep 152: ASEAN's new era of travel infrastructure, with James Clark, Future South East Asia
New Project: Japan Rail News
I’m starting another rail project this week: Japan Rail News.
I’m setting this up for two reasons. First of all, I already have a news curation system for railways in Asia. I have been bookmarking Japan rail news to see if there are enough articles of interest for a travel audience, and there are indeed enough.
Secondly, I’m doing this for my own personal satisfaction to read about a functional railway system in a country I love visiting. My main work covers future railways in Southeast Asia, and - let’s be realistic - there are some projects that are going to take decades, if at all to get done. I may never see a Shinkansen-style Bangkok-Chiang Mai or Hanoi-HCMC high-speed railway, so I may as well go straight to the source.
I’m not sure where this newsletter will go, whether it becomes a full site or if I sell it to another site. I just know that if I have an idea I should go with it and see where it leads me. It also passes my project metric of writing about what I am interested in and publishing (most of the time) things that aren’t already being covered.
Japan Rail News will be monthly at this point, you can unsubscribe anytime, and your email is not sold or used by third parties, etc. The first post will go out next week. Subscribe here.
By the way, I still have the Europe Rail News site if you are interested in that.
Travel reads
• Speaking of, Japan reopened to tourists on the 11th of October. As much as I want to go, I have the rest of the year booked out, so I look forward to seeing where to fit Japan into my 2023 calendar.
• The 51 coolest neighbourhoods in the world
Timeout is back with their neighbourhood listicle, and once again it is an interesting insight into how cities are changing around the world.
• Five of the best mountain biking routes in Asia, from Bali to Kathmandu
• Tusheti: A wild and remote region on the edge of Europe
• Scotland's forgotten ancient capital
• Is it okay for hotels to photoshop pictures?
• Ten tourist attractions which no longer exist
Travel quiz: WhereTaken
• A new travel quiz has dropped: WhereTaken
🚆Train travel
• How to try Spain’s free train scheme as a tourist
✈️ Air travel
• Don’t freak out about that tape on your plane’s wing
The Nomadic Notes Travel Newsletter is a weekly newsletter of the best travel reads and interesting travel news from around the web, and random ramblings by the editor.
- James Clark