Faithful to herself. Champassak remains one of the few destinations in Laos that doesn’t seem to be at war with her own destiny. She possesses that motionless, almost aristocratic class that requires no artifice. Every time I return, I feel as though I’m visiting an old aunt with faded, courtly manners—her makeup peeling under the…

Cao Bang. Three syllables that crack like three machete swings in the mist. At the far reaches of a North-Eastern Vietnam carved by the billhook, this province—ravaged by landscape torments—imposes itself with brute force to remind you that the earth has teeth. And what a jaw it is! You aren’t looking at a landscape; you…

Hue under the sun is almost too clean. The Imperial City gleams too hard, the tombs posture like aging aristocrats, and the whole place starts looking like a carefully arranged film set. But when the sky closes in—low clouds, fine drizzle, sickly light, that’s when it finally exhales. The stone drinks. The walls weep. Hue…

Going to Sa Dec is like giving a peck on the cheek to an old lady who’s seen a lot. She’s watched them all pass through: colonials in crisp white uniforms with neatly groomed mustaches, Chinese traders, nuns in winged cornets, the heavy Mekong barges, ceremonious Caodaists… and even Marguerite Duras, dragging her dreams through…

Savannakhet is Sleeping Beauty waking up with a hangover. The forgotten, the rebel, the sublime outcast. This is precisely where her genius lies: Savannakhet isn’t in the shop window; she’s the hushed back-office, where the real treasures are kept under a fine layer of dust to keep the rumors at bay. This is a city…

North of Hue, the ancient imperial capital of the Nguyen lords, the fighting reached a maddening intensity during the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1975. This area sat in the immediate shadow of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), that fragile and highly strategic demarcation line separating the communist North Vietnam from the American-backed South. In this…

The Khe Sanh US Combat Base As I head back out, the crushing tranquility of Truong Son clings to my skin. The lightness of the ride collides with the weight of the ten thousand lives resting behind me. Many of them flickered out during the famous siege of Khe Sanh in 1968, my next stop…

Four weeks on Moroccan roads: an entire month flickering between mountains and mirages, swallowing asphalt and dirt tracks, scalding tea and horizons too vast for a single helmet. A motorized vagrancy, collecting gorges, ksours, and fleeting encounters… along with that quiet feeling of finally being exactly where one ought to be: somewhere between the wind,…

Ouarzazate, High Atlas, and Taroudant I ride into a city frozen in time. Ouarzazate is holding its breath, waiting for sunset to start living again. I do the same before going on a hunt for beer. But during Ramadan, the very few shops selling alcohol are shuttered. I retreat to a hotel bar with thick…

Taliouine – Fint Oasis – Ouzoud Falls – Ifrane I leave the gorges of Aït Mansour with real reluctance — and dear Abdou along with them — and set off onto a road twisting through arid valleys and plateaus dotted with tiny Berber villages whose earthen houses dissolve into the mountainside. The landscape is fiercely…