Travelfish #335: 2018 in review + Alive and kicking ... just

Everywhere is on the way to somewhere Hi all, So where did that year go? Just the other day I heard Christmas music in a Canggu cafe for the first time this year and thought, wow is it that time already? My thoughts go out to everyone in Australia who has probably been hearing carols in the supermarket since early September... This will be our last newsletter for 2018. Thank you for reading us throughout the year. We hope you have found some interesting snippets about Southeast Asia to read and we hope you'll still be reading come the new year. While we’re on thank yous, a grand “bravo” to our hard-working researchers. Without them there would be no Travelfish. Thank you. We hope you fit some good travel in over the break, even if it's just a rejuvenating walk around the block to get away from the crazy Christmas dinner uncle—we aim to be back in your email inboxes in the second week of January. Happy silly season from Sam, Stuart and the Travelfish team. PS: If you’re in a last-minute rush for a gift for a friend (or yourself!) we’d like to point you to our three favourite must-reads on South East Asia. Dari Mulut ke Mulut Erin Cook’s essential email digest on what is going off in the region is the one email newsletter we read every issue. If you don’t speak Australian you may need to use Google Translate at times to figure our just what she means. Veering at times towards the irreverent and the hysterical, Dari Mulut ke Mulut is near always on the money and it is absolutely worth your money. [Subscriptions start at $5 per month or $50 per year. (There is also a free version).]( Mekong Review Spending so much time glued to a shiny screen I look forward to the quarterly delivery of Mekong Review. Never heard of it? Think literary journal with reviews, interviews and fiction from and about the region. [Print subscriptions start at US$56 per year.]( New Naratif We’ve watched this site grow through the year and it has been terrific to see them continually surfacing really interesting and thought-provoking stories on issues that don’t really get the coverage they deserve. [Memberships start at US$5 per month or US$52 per year.]( Support Travelfish! If you'd like to chip in (if you haven’t already) for using the site, we'd love you to sign up for a year-long subscription for just A$35. [See more here](. A year in review The newsletter this week is a look back over the most popular stories we covered each month during the year. It's a second chance to read them if you missed them, and most are easily worth a re-read—preferably in a hammock with a light sea breeze and an icy cold drink. JANUARY: Ghosts of My Lai ‘When I asked about her daughter, Le, who had maintained her composure up till that point, [covered her face with her hands and broke down in tears](. She told me that Thu was killed along with 104 people at the trail but didn’t die right away. When it was safe to move, Le found Thu sitting and holding her grandmother, who was already dead. “Mom, I’m bleeding a lot,” Le remembers her daughter saying. “I have to leave you.” ’ FEBRUARY: The prepared traveller “On a near-month's trip through Java in early 2018 I was taken aback by the size of my travel companion Sally’s backpack and daypack. Hers were almost splitting at the seams; my pack and daypack were each less than half full. At a train station weigh in, Sally’s gear totalled 24 kilograms while mine came in at nine. Why? [It turned out Sally was a prepared traveller]( while I was far from this.” MARCH: Ko Kut ”Extraordinary beaches ring deep wilderness and mangrove-draped rivers on Ko Kut, one of the most beautiful islands we’ve seen in more than two decades of travel in Thailand. When calm, the crystal-clear sea meets soft coral sand [in settings that could be mistaken for the Maldives]( APRIL: This Cambodian city is turning into a Chinese enclave, and not everyone is happy “The Cambodian government has allowed extraordinary levels of Chinese investment: Thirty casinos have already been built, and [70 more are under construction]( MAY: When good fences made bad neighbors in Hanoi “To really be a part of all the family, neighborhood, and professional networks that foreigners marvel at, you must actively manage your node. That means people constantly coming and going, advice being asked, suggestions being made, introductions offered. You can’t afford to just let other people take care of their own affairs [because they are inextricably your affairs as well]( JUNE: On Toba [A ghastly accident]( on the waters of Lake Toba. More [details on the tragedy here](. JULY: Tech tips for budget travellers “Want to make the most of your technology when you travel, but don’t have a bunch of cash or loads of time to sort it all out? You’re in luck. We’ve put together ten of our best simple, low-cost tips [to help you get the most out of your next trip]( AUGUST: In Thailand, ‘Obesity in our monks is a ticking time bomb’ “[Monks are at the forefront of the problem](. Nearly half are obese, according to a study conducted by Chulalongkorn University. More than 40 percent have high cholesterol, nearly 25 percent have high blood pressure and one in 10 are diabetic, the study found.” SEPTEMBER: Massacre in Myanmar “The killings in the coastal village of Inn Din marked another bloody episode in the ethnic violence sweeping northern Rakhine state, on Myanmar’s western fringe. Nearly 690,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled their villages and crossed the border into Bangladesh since August. [None of Inn Din’s 6,000 Rohingya remained in the village as of October]( OCTOBER: The peddler girl from Sa Pa who made it big “There was once a time when she was just a dirty peddler on the street and a foreign couple let her into their hotel room to clean up and then join them to eat in a restaurant. A meal in a restaurant [was something a poor H’Mong girl could not dream of]( NOVEMBER: On Phu Quoc “Phu Quoc is Vietnam’s largest island, and [fast becoming the country’s premier beach destination](. There are dozens of excellent beaches on Phu Quoc Island, and this guide covers them all, including my tips for accommodation on each one. ” DECEMBER: Traveller gifts that will actually get used – from $10 to $160 “Here are useful travel gifts to consider, things that will actually be received with gratitude and used on the road. Just make sure your recipient doesn’t have what you’re thinking of getting already: [most are tried and true staples that you don’t need two of]( Soapbox Alive and kicking ... just Still alive and kicking, barely, is pretty much how closing out 2018 feels here at Travelfish HQ. It has, without doubt, been our most challenging year business-wise, and 2019 is also looking pretty brutal—what is life if not interesting? As with the news wrap above, for the final soap box of the year I thought I’d touch on a few of the challenges we face keeping the ball rolling, and some thoughts on how you can help, if you feel so inclined. Getting eyeballs onto the site gets harder every year I stopped using Google years ago (try [DuckDuckGo]( if you’d like something different), but the fact remains that the vast majority of travellers use Google as their first stop in finding travel information. As Google continues to shovel more ads up top, along with links into their own “Google Travel” thing, we’ve seen a significant drop in traffic over the year. How significant? Try 50% off. Ouch. If you’re a fan of our site and you find our material helpful for your trip planning, please add us to your bookmarks or desktop and visit us without needing to navigate Google to find us. If you have your own website, please consider adding a link to us, as that, in theory (!) helps. Likewise if you’re a journalist looking for a quote or soundbite, please drop me a line for a quote. Humblebrag: [I was quoted in the New York Times last week](. Competing against Aunt Nancy’s travel advice is hard Early this year we completely rewrote our coverage to Indonesia’s Java. There were a number of reasons for this, but one of them was we wanted to encourage people to travel to somewhere less travelled—somewhere perhaps they hadn’t considered. This is hard. Very hard. On the site, we get more readers to two posts about buying secondhand clothes in Bangkok than we do to the entirety of our Central and East Java material. Please consider travelling to somewhere new you've never heard of, and when you do, use Travelfish! If you are interested in Java, start with our itinerary pieces to [West]( [Central]( and [East]( Java—they’ll lead you down to the in-depth material—yes you will need to review you leave application! We are truly lousy at promotion Yes, it is true. There is not a single marketing bone in my body. We got stickers done last month and our entire supply was hoovered up in under a week (yes we did print more then 10). So we will be doing more on this front this coming year. Perhaps even a tote bag! While we may well be lousy at it, please do tell your friends, family and even complete strangers in the immigration queue (thanks Rich!) about Travelfish. We are trying to do things a bit differently We work hard (and at considerable expense) to protect Travelfish reader privacy and we don’t share information about you with other sites and advertisers (with or without your knowledge). Likewise for the entirety of the time we have been in business, we have refused all freebies and discounts. We pay our own way, always, No exceptions. Very, very few travel publishers can honestly say this. We realise that this is not important to all readers, but if it is to you, please keep that in mind when you are choosing which travel planning website to use. We will continue to try new things We’ve been one of the first travel publishers to launch a paid membership programme and we are slowly paywalling some parts of the site. This will continue through 2019 as we try to get to a firmer financial footing (hopefully not by just selling Travelfish tote bags.) If you have suggestions on how things could be better for you as a reader, please let us know—all input is much appreciated and some of the best, most useful parts of the site were suggested by Travelfish members. That’s a wrap on 2018. We’ll be taking a few days off and then back to work in sunny Cambodia in early January. I wish you the best of travel for 2019 and I hope this year has been a great year of travel for you too. Good travels Stuart Premium members only: Book a round the world with [roundtheworldflights.com]( (must travel from the UK via Asia, Australia, New Zealand AND the Americas) and get £30pp off your trip. Offer valid for departures to December 2018. Log in to the Member Centre on Travelfish now for your coupon code and [start designing your own round the world trip »]( Till next year! [Sam and Stuart.] That’s it from us for now. As usual, enjoy the site’s new additions and drop us a line if there’s something in particular you’d like us to cover in Southeast Asia. Travel light! Stuart, Sam & the Travelfish team [( You're receiving the Travelfish newsletter because you signed up at Travelfish.org. Not interested anymore? [Unsubscribe Instantly](. Make sure you're getting our emails! If you're a Gmail user and would prefer your Travelfish newsletter in your Primary in-box rather than Promotions, just drag this email from the Promotions tab to the Primary tab, and click "yes" when it asks if you want to do that for all of our emails. Better still, [read this newsletter online.]( [Disclosure]( | [Privacy]( | [Unsubscribe]( We want travellers to love Southeast Asia as much as we do. 9 robinson close, hornsby heights, nsw 2077, AUSTRALIA [Unsubscribe]( | [Change Subscriber Options](