Tag Archives: environmental portraits The remote, mountainous corners of northern and western Thailand – and neighbouring Laos and Myanmar – are home to countless small villages of “mountain folk” (ชาวเขา), or ethnic “Hill Tribes”. These Hilltribes/Hill Tribes are not a unitary group. In Thailand alone, there are six major distinct ethnic minority groups – the Akha, Karen, Meo or Hmong, Yao, Lahu, and Lisu, plus a few […]  Oh, Saigon! It was a name familiar to those of us who grew up in the West: first as an exotic part of France’s colonial empire, until – as Saïgon – it achieved a hard-won independence in 1955, and then as a component of the evening news for its pivotal role in the Vietnam War; the city now known as Ho Chi Minh (HCM) has been at a […]  One of the many joys of Byron Bay Bluesfest, that annual Easter long-weekend festival of blues, roots, and just about every other kind of music, is – for me – the very range of styles packed into five days, and the depth of talent offered up on the five+ stages. Although Americans tended to dominate […]  With the radio cranked loud, I spent most of last week driving down New South Wales backroads, trying to not tap the beat too hard on the accelerator. The annual Easter-weekend Bluesfest music festival in Byron Bay had finished late Monday night, and I was on the way home with songs in my head and music in my heart. I love […]  Family. A word that entered into English in the early 1400s, meaning “servants of a household,” from the Latin familia “family servants, domestics collectively, the servants in a household.” The original definition includes the estate, the property; the staff, and any relatives. How things change! When I was growing up, “family” generally meant a nuclear family of two […] |
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