Ken Pearce travels to the hills of Khao Yai to savour the wine and scenic beauty of Village Farm Winery Photos by Kevin Pearce It all seems slightly surreal. I’m being driven out of Bangkok. The traffic is surprisingly light, perhaps because it’s a February holiday weekend. We speed along a well maintained highway 304. I’m heading for a vineyard and a winery. A vineyard? A winery! I have to pinch myself. Can that be right? Was I sober when I accepted an invitation from some friends the previous evening to visit “Chateau Des Brumes” less than three hours drive from Bangkok? Surely I am being taken for a ride in more senses than one! No, that’s absolutely right I’m heading for Chateau des Brumes. …. I remember my ...

Songkram Jutjarat has a love of dogs, he takes them off the streets and away from the danger of landing on plates in Thai and Vietnamese eateries - he tells Traversing the Orient it’s a tough battle. Amid loud growling and gnashing teeth, dog catchers round up the homeless hounds in Thailand’s Lopburi and sell them to the butcher’s knife in Vietnam. Any­where from 40 to 80 dogs at a time are crammed into trucks, their destiny priced at around US$10 a portion, unless the trucks cross paths with the Thai police first. A legal spot fine of a mere US$60 per truckload sees the thieves release the stolen dogs, only to return another day or move on to another territory. Songkram Jutjarat – nickname Golf - is from Lopburi, for the last ten years he has co-run/owned a small restaurant called Mali in Bangkok’s Sathorn Soi 1 district. Three years ago ...

Tom Cockrem explores a religious festival that blends icons of Catholicism with the ancient tribal traditions of the Ati-Ati people History in the Philippines is never far removed from the people’s daily lives. It’s intrinsic in their artworks, reli­gion, cinema, and especially their festivals. It is doubtful that any country in the world puts as many days aside for celebratory events as do the Filipinos. And they do it in grand style, with an energy and passion that can leave the visiting observer literally breathless with excitement and with awe; as I discovered in Iloilo on the central Visayan island of Panay. This was my second visit to Iloilo. The first time I came to do the city plazas and their churches – grand old Spanish colonial survivors. This time I had one of those festivals in mind – the Dinagyang. ...

Hounded in Germany, philosopher-inexile Friedrich Haller escapes the leash in Thailand. The German philosopher Friedrich Haller’s latest philosophical work, “Science and State in the Western World as Late Forms of Theological Madness” (2008) is currently being translated into English and is due for publication later this year. In this article he outlines what prompts him to spend most of the year in Thailand and other Asian countries, in self-imposed exile from his native Germany. In his book “It’s a Doggy-dog World” Douglas Michaels refers to the story, “Dogs”, by Steve Hands (TTO issue July 09), as follows: “It’s about a Philippine fisherman who cooks his dogs in front of an idealistic foreigner when she tries to save them, and it ends with him telling her, ‘Back off bitch. These are my dogs. My dogs.’ What he really means is ‘It’s my country,’ ...