I was in Kandy Sri Lanka and I was chatting to the girl at the reservation desk at the Queens hotel. We stayed there often, and she had even invited me to her wedding. Anyway, I was asking her where she had her nose pierced and she gave me directions to this little jewelery shop up the street and around the corner. Or so I thought....

I wandered around town for a while, looking, but not finding the shop my friend had directed me to. So I walk in to a few other shops randomly to see if they'd pierce my nose.

GET BEST RATES FOR KANDY HOTELS

The back seat of a small car speeding down a winding, precipitous Bhutanese road is a fine place for worry.   In the wee tiny moments between waves of nausea and fear of a flaming free-fall into a wooded abyss, other anxieties still poke their way to consciousness.  

"I am having bargain diamonds. You are wishing to see?" With hepatic yellow eyes and last week's turban sagging about his skull, the man who sidled up next to me at the Calcutta post office seemed liked a Bengali version of Old Man Steptoe.

The Hidden Paradise of Borneo

When the fast-disintegrating remnants of Ferdinand Magellan's fleet finally reached the shores of Borneo in 1521, the famous Italian author and voyager, Antonio Pigafetta, described the undiscovered land and its people with wonder.

The history of Borneo extends way beyond these earliest European annals, some 40,000 years beyond, when nomadic tribes from Asia ventured south along the land bridge and settled in the various regions of the world's third largest island.

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