DeA Bangkok-based expat of more than a decade in Thailand has given his top tip for eating street food.

Incredibly, good quality food remains cheap in Thailand. You just need to be a little adventurous.

Akasha is a haven far from the hippy-dippy cult-like ashram I feared it might be.

Two things went through my mind when a friend rang to ask if I’d travel with her to a yoga retreat in Romania near Dracula’s Castle in Transylvania.

Swimming with great white sharks is becoming as much of a Cape Town “to do” as climbing Table Mountain or Lions Head.

It’s a popular spot year-round because seeing sharks is almost a certainty. The numbers are hard to count but it’s estimated that 800 to 1000 sharks are in the area, which is considered one of the largest aggregation sites in the world.

In one large square in front of Xi’an’s Great Wild Goose Pagoda on a hot Sunday night, several hundred people are out and about. It is after 9pm and around 33C, much cooler than the 43C in the middle of the day.

In one corner, a group of about 50 people, aged from young teens to well into in their 80s, is participating in local folk dancing with large fans, flags and streamers as a band plays music from various traditional instruments.

The new ‘doobie’ allowing Bangkok is a jarring sight.

Since marijuana was legalised in Thailand in June, 2022, dispensaries have popped up everywhere. They’re fighting for prime shop fronts across the country, alongside massage joints, restaurants and bars.

Huntington Beach, California, is to Santa Monica what Bondi is to Maroubra.

It’s jam packed with fun things to do but it is less self-conscious and more laid back. I’ve got nothing against Santa Monica, in fact I love it, but it is a different sort of holiday.

The incredible variety over the plains of the Mara is truly a spectacular sight.

Flying in on a small 12-seater Cessna aircraft, the landscape unravels like a scene from Out Of Africa, which not coincidentally was shot here.

There are no fences here keeping animals in … or out.

Like the rest of the world, there is no doubt that the Great Barrier Reef is under immense pressure.

The world is changing. Fact. The ongoing dialogue however that the reef is either dead or alive is simply not true.

At any other Disneyland, Minnie and Mickey Mouse are the biggest drawcards for photos. They’re popular in China, too, but the photographic favourite at Shanghai Disneyland is The Garden of the Twelve Friends.

It’s just one example of how the franchise has stayed true to the promise of delivering a theme park that is “authentically Disney, distinctly Chinese”.

Frequent traveller and entertainment writer Jonathon Moran checks into The Standard Bangkok and discovers a boutique hotel like no other.Description goes here

Watching a show on London’s West End or New York’s Broadway is bucket-list stuff.

It’s a truly magical thing, and so is going behind the scenes, as I discovered at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London.

What is black, white and red all over? A sunburnt panda.

What is the giant panda’s biggest dream? To take a colour photo because they are always black and white.

These are just some of the jokes locals share about China’s national animal in Chengdu – city of pandas.