Asia

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit Singapore, in One Sentence I’d planned for forty minutes in the airport and ended up staying three days. My connection was a long one, so I stepped out of Changi into a wall of warm, wet air, took the MRT to Marina Bay, and stood under the glowing Supertrees at Gardens by the Bay as a brief, theatrical downpour cleared to a sky-show of city lights. I rebooked the onward flight that night. I’ll tell you what the rain actually did to my plans further down, because it surprised me. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit South Korea, in One Sentence The first time I saw it, I was standing on a bridge over the Cheonggyecheon stream in central Seoul on a cold-bright October morning, coffee going lukewarm in my hand, watching the gingko trees along the water turn the kind of gold you usually only see in films. A month earlier I’d nearly booked April instead, chasing the cherry blossoms everyone photographs. I’m glad I didn’t, and I’ll tell you why further down. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit Sri Lanka, in One Sentence We almost cancelled. Three days before flying to Sri Lanka in July, a friend messaged a photo of Galle Fort under sheets of grey rain and asked why on earth we’d booked the monsoon. What he didn’t know was that we weren’t going west at all — we were heading to Arugam Bay on the east coast, where July is bone-dry, the surf is glassy, and the sun barely quits. That single quirk of geography is the most important thing to understand about this island. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit Vietnam, in One Sentence We were three days into Hoi An when the sky simply fell out of itself. Lanterns still glowing over the old town, and the street outside our guesthouse turned into a calf-deep brown river while a man paddled past on a plastic stool, grinning. It was late October, and I had booked the whole trip around the south being dry without once checking what the central coast does that month. The lesson cost us a soggy afternoon and a lifelong habit: in Vietnam you do not plan one season, you plan three. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit Bali, in One Sentence We almost cancelled. Three days before flying, my wife was reading me February rainfall charts off her phone — “over 300 millimetres, the wettest month of the year” — and asking, gently, whether we’d just booked two soggy weeks in a monsoon. We went anyway. And the morning we wandered the Tegallalang rice terraces with maybe four other people on them, the paddies glowing a green I didn’t know existed, I did the math on what the same villa would have cost in August. Triple. We’d stumbled into a secret, and I’m going to ruin the surprise for you below. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Why a Regional Plan Is the Best eSIM for Asia Travel Three countries, three weeks, one data plan I never touched after the first day. That was the deal my wife and I made with ourselves before flying into Chiang Mai, and the best eSIM for Asia travel is what made it possible: cheap data that switched on the second we landed, carried us overland into Vietnam, then on to Singapore, and never once made me queue at a SIM kiosk or open my carrier app in dread. You buy a plan online, install it in five minutes, and stay connected across the whole region. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Cheap Flights from London to Bangkok, Starting at £370 Return I almost booked the wrong ticket. There it was, glowing on my screen one drizzly September afternoon: a Xiamen Air return for £370, the cheapest London to Bangkok fare I’d ever seen. My thumb was over the button. Then I noticed the bag allowance and the layover, did the maths, and quietly closed the tab. I’ll tell you what I booked instead in a minute, because it taught me everything about this route. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit Japan on a Budget, in One Sentence We had the April flights in the cart. Then my wife refreshed the fares one more time and read the number out loud, and we both just sort of stared at the laptop. Cherry-blossom week to Tokyo cost almost double what the exact same route cost six months later. So we did something that felt slightly heretical at the time: we skipped the sakura and booked late November instead. I’ll tell you how that turned out lower down — and why the maples we got might have been the better deal anyway. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit Thailand, in One Sentence My wife nearly booked us onto a Gulf island in October. I remember her turning the laptop around in our kitchen, grinning at a half-price bungalow on Koh Samui, and me having to be the killjoy: that is the exact week the Gulf gets its heaviest rain of the year. We went two months later instead, in December, and stood on Railay Beach on the Andaman side under a sky that hadn’t seen a cloud in days, water like warm glass, paying high-season rates and not minding one bit. The lesson cost us nothing because we caught it in time. It’s the one almost everyone misses, and I’ll come back to it. ...