Most visits to the Hakone area of Kanagawa Prefecture begin at the heavily touristed town itself, from where numerous well-trodden routes head off through the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park of which it is the official center. All the comforts of the Meiji Era at the ...

“No one is born in the Camargue, and no one dies in the Camargue.” — Rhone Delta saying The flooded paddies, I soon discovered, gingerly following the mud embankments that divided each field, were home not only to edible frogs and exotic snakes with ...

T he “course Camarguese,” held in local village bull rings throughout the spring and summer, are events unlikely to upset even animal-rights groups. Unlike the Spanish bullfight, or the brand of “mise a mort” practiced not far away in the arenas of Ni^mes and ...

Pilgrimages provide an extra dimension to the Camargue and a chance to see and participate in some of its surviving spectacles. Many of these events are more popular than religious in character, as the number of tourists attending them testifies. Christian, pagan and secular ...

China’s former communist radicals and today’s capitalist developers appear, in some respects, to have much in common. During the Cultural Revolution, with its almost visceral hatred of tradition, Red Guards were instructed to destroy anything “bourgeois,” or tainted by the past. A decade earlier, ...

Call it nostalgia or call it a self-awakening, but Asians are rediscovering the value of their architectural heritage. From ancient police courts in Shanxi, China to forest temples in Thailand, from colonial quays in Singapore to the brick kilns and iron smithies of Mao ...

By the time the lunch gong sounded in the great hall of the Heng Yang monastery, I had already placed generous votive offerings at a shrine in the Temple of the Goddess of Mercy, watched a flour-doll and knot maker at work, witnessed minor ...

The Japanese tourist, unlike the overseas visitor, may be only mildly astonished to find himself transported to the upper part of a castle donjon by means of a newly installed elevator. Convenience, the Western visitor notes with some bemusement, does not seem to detract ...

Two centuries of ice, rain, summer heat and a civil war have reduced the ramparts of Suwon, a city just an hour’s drive south of Seoul, to heaps of twisted rubble. A South Korean man watches intently as a tightrope walker performs at the ...

KYONAN, Chiba Pref. — Finding the perfect, companionable Buddha can become an obsession. Foreigners living in Asia are often struck by this calm, enlightened face; its features contrast sharply with the figures of Western religious art and their often contrived depictions of the ecstasy ...

NICHINAN, Miyazaki Pref. — There can be very few places of historical or cultural interest in Japan that remain positively underexploited for their tourist potential. Obi, a one-hour ride on the delightful, two-carriage Nichinan Line train from Miyazaki, is one such rarity. Obi’s obscurity ...

“In the year Sakalat 185, year of the Horse, the Thai came to tattoo all the inhabitants of the Lao cities.” — Oden Meeker, “The Little World of Laos” The Lao government doesn’t like tattooing. It doesn’t like Laos’ illegal yet flourishing spirit cults ...