August 24th 2008, the day after my 29th birthday, my mind was tattooed with an image. It was the closing ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Beijing and I had spent the past 30 days guiding a family all over China, intermixed with gold medal event tickets for the two weeks of the games. It […]

I have a list of three things which, perhaps due to a repressive part of my psyche or some masochistic Protestant lean, I have denied myself until I felt I could no longer continue without them; reading the entire Faulkner cannon, going on a surf/bike road trip through California, and learning how to make my […]

Eight years ago I got a call from friends who were thinking of moving back to Asia from the UK, with their family of 3 little ones in tow.  The discussion was whether Bangkok or Hong Kong would be a  better place to live. At the time Bangkok was under a protest and safety was […]

At the end of the Himalaya, where the booming roof of the world slows down and turns to hills, just past Kunming, merging with the tea fields and the mountain passes where the flying tigers once flew and the monkey man journeyed west to bring back buddhism, the Pearl River pebbles together its first few […]

Special is hard to do in Hong Kong, where understatement can be confused with dullness. However, there are sometimes things you come upon which are undoubtedly special. You recognize them when you see them, and you savour them. Lok Man Rare Books is such a place. This small antiquarian bookstore is nestled on a discrete […]