Occasional thoughts

Sometimes the gods are with you and it's good, sometimes they are and it's not. Whether by calendrical coincidence or celestial guidance, we ended up in Bali for a festival that combines elements of Halloween, Bonfire Night, New Year, a county fair and a nice quiet day off. These are all good things. Turns out that the Balinese New Year (today, folks) is marked by a Hindu ceremonial day called Nyepi. As with most cultures, the old year is kicked out of the door with a party, but here it's a party with a difference. Under the last dusk of the year, the locals gather in a public place - in Ubud it's the football field, fringed by the usual globally-recognisable concession stalls selling balloons and illuminated plastic tat - and are joined by their demons. The ogoh-ogoh are fantastical effigies, some so sizeable (up to about 20ft) that they require pole-bearing harbingers to walk before them lifting the power lines that cross the streets. Representing the frequently n

A city's architecture can often be determined by how much money is swishing around at the time of expansion; its aesthetic legacy can be determined by how well-regarded the architectural movements of those busy times. Ask Sheffield, ambitiously redesigned to be the last word in futuristic concrete Sixties regeneration; it worked, in that few people said those words again without a curled lip. As Rangoon, Yangon's centre benefited from Victorian pride - think of South Kensington's museum sector but writ smaller and more often - and then again in the Thirties. The result is pleasing. There's a solidity to its downtown buildings that is resisting any temptation to reboot. There is some delapidation; the ravages of time, climate and neglectful regimes like the junta only recently dissolved have left some beautiful old piles seeming to be held up mostly by plant-life. But as the country awakens from self-imposed commercial exile and rides the tiger of the booming Asian e

If it's Monday, must be Myanmar. So in we flew to the former Burma, landing at a recently remodelled airport in Yangon, formerly Rangoon. The old military junta changed plenty of things, including names and the capital, moving the administrative centre from this thriving city to newbuild Nyipitaw. On Dec 6 1970 they also changed from driving on the left to driving on the right, but the vast majority of (new) cars are still right-hand drive. So there you go. After a dawn chorus of 6am bells followed at 6.30am by an on-street religious rock festival - hotel receptionist: "it's a local tradition" - and a breakfast which tried more than it achieved, we hit the road to see some sights. And Yangon has plenty. Some aren't on any itinerary but still caught my eye. Under the flyover, piles of bricks at tell-tale intervals: goalposts for an urban kickabout. Do they dream of being Yan Aung Kyaw, star midfielder for Yangon United and captain of Myanmar? Or Cristiano Ronal

Tuol Sleng was a high school until 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia and turned it into a factory of torture and death. It's fatuous to rank dictatorships but from the off, these murderous revolutionaries had the whiff of the genuinely insane. They evacuated Phnom Penh and other major cities, forcing the population to farm the land in pursuit of unachievable food-production targets. Talk about being bombed back to the Stone Age; these idiotic ideologues marched their people at gunpoint back through the industrial revolution and enlightenment to the agricultural age. They were dogmatically anti-educational: anyone with glasses or soft hands was deemed an intellectual, eligible for torturing into admissions of things they hadn't done. Much of that torture took place at Tuol Sleng, which they renamed Security Prison 21. Rather less artlessly, the few locals left in the capital city called it "the place people go into but don't come out of." No

To Cambodia. Phnom Penh used to be known as the Pearl of Asia. War, revolution and genocide tend to tarnish a reputation, but it's certainly got grit; to Western eyes, this seems like classic urban Asia. Flowing cheerily haphazardly along its grid pattern and numbered streets - even communism can't deny every American shibboleth - the traffic is a mobile moped soup. Compared to Bangkok, Phnom Penh has many more mopeds, or maybe that's to say Bangkok has many more cars (greater average income, longer average drive time). It's an endless parade of chirpy humanity, bumping along and getting on with its business. One bloke gets a backie while carrying stepladders. Another moped has a cot swinging on the back. Tuktuks are fashioned from removable trailers, which detach to set the moped rider free. Tacked on to mudflaps, CDs become safety reflectors. As with the POWs creating an illicit radio from a razor blade and a safety pin, necessity is the mother of invention but en

Crap hotel wifi doesn't make Thailand any less of a fascinating country. As seems to be the way with my recent travels, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the historical hardships of others, and this one's close to home: during WWII my dad's dad was a Japanese PoW put to forced labour building railways in horrific conditions amid disease, death and desperation. He survived: very, very many did not. It adds a piquancy to the tourist selfies at the Bridge on the River Kwai to know that the building of the track cost something like 100,000 lives. Brits, Aussies, Americans, Dutch, various enslaved Asians: all manner of nationalities manacled into a murderous logistics operation. Jonathan Meades has a line about how a railway snaking into a German wood will forever signify horror; here, the railway was not the deliverer unto death, but the deliverer *of* death.