(Part 2) Best asian travel guides according to redditors

Philosophy and Fucking in Vietnam

Philosophy and Fucking in Vietnam by Isaac Simpson.

Yes he does. https://www.amazon.com/BURNING-EDGE-TRAVELS-THROUGH-IRRADIATED-ebook/dp/B07C56KSV1/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=THE+BURNING+EDGE%3A+TRAVELS+THROUGH+IRRADIATED+BELARUS+%28English+Edition%29&qid=1565005122&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Alright, kid. You're 12. You like to read. Good work. It's useful for exploring new interests. A few recommendations for life in book form:
Yoga for Dummies
Chinese: Crash Course
A Series of Unfortunate Events
The Phantom Tollbooth
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
Case Closed, Vol. 1
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Those should get you started on an introspective teenagehood. If any of those strike your interests, let me know and I'll do a little digital dumpster diving.

The types of stories I'm reading in this book make it out to be more than culture, and more like a corrupt justice system.
Universal human rights deserve to have someone stand up for them, regardless of how:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MZG0TOO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

In real life my name is Ernest Whitman Piper IV, and I am a writer and editor. Most of my published writing has been travel-related. My first book was an "adventure guide" which teaches young uni graduates and gap year types how and where to travel long-term, and why it is worth doing. It's I think available still on amazon and smashwords still though it's wildly out of date at this point. My second book was a brief memoir about producing a musical in Istanbul, and it is available nowhere, because I wrote it for my friends. (Though I recently talked to my mom and she suggested stripmining the both of them for material and making one ur-memoir about all my time spent in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it's not a bad idea.) I am currently working on a novel about a murder mystery, also set in Istanbul, and that's all you're getting from me on that.

My travel writing has also appeared in the Stranger in Seattle, as well as in the Daily Sabah, an unabashed propaganda outlet for the curent government of Turkey. And while I really cannot stand the current government in Turkey, there was a brief window where they paid me to travel all around the Balkans and Turkey and write whatever I wanted, which was pretty cool.

In terms of poetry I've got...not much? I'm very shy about my poetry. I have not been published anywhere for a long long time, other than like...my uni's lit journal ages ago. I've published here on the sub mostly. I credit this community for getting me back into it.

I started out trying to write like slash have been deeply influenced by:
Mairead Byrne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rumi, Nazim Hikmet, Shakespeare, Ocean Vuong, John Ashbery, Shel Silverstein, Derek Mahon, Catullus, Allen Ginsberg, Mary Oliver...I have to stop now or this list is going to get very long indeed

The modern poet's in a strange boat on a foreign sea. I think the mission of any poet should be to map the connections between islands and currents we didn't know were nearby. Poets celebrate useless things and magnify the unseen. I agree with /u/gwrgwir in that a poem should ask that its readers use their brains -- like basically a poet's task these days phrased in practical terms is "why read or write a poem when I could just scroll through the internet for hours unreflectively?"

The most recent thing that inspired a poem was a particularly brutal hangover.

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.co.uk

amazon.ca

amazon.com.au

amazon.in

amazon.com.mx

amazon.de

amazon.it

amazon.es

amazon.com.br

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.

Ah, wish I'd seen this earlier. I've hitchhiked almost the entire country at this point. I had a working holiday visa last year and didn't bother working, instead just hitchhiked around.

I guess you already have tickets to Tokyo, but my number one advice would be to get the hell away from Tokyo. I'm actually surprised to here the other guy had an easyish time hitching around the Tokyo area because from what I've heard it sounds unreasonably difficult. I've personally never bothered because I just plain don't like that area much.

So yeah, number one tip is get out of that area, then everything becomes a million times easier. Hokkaido is a hitchhiker's paradise, but it's a bit far depending on how long you're here for. You can find flights up to there for about a hundred bucks, which isn't too bad. Or again, if you've got a decent amount of time, just hitchhike up towards Aomori and take the ferry.

Recently over Golden Week I hitchhiked from Aomori Prefecture, the northernmost prefecture on Honshuu, the main island, to Kanazawa in Ishikawa prefecture, which is about 850km away I would say. That was a really pretty route. I liked it a lot.

You mention the expressway, and I'm curious as to what you mean. Like, paid expressways? If that's the case, just know that getting on those in the first place is actually pretty difficult. I've done it a couple times, but only once was I able to actually hitchhike from in front of an interchange and onto the expressway. Hitchhiking on the expressway or too close to the on ramp to the expressway is illegal. Once on an expressway, hitchhiking from parking/service area to service area is very easy and fast, but is a very lousy way to see the country. The sound barriers completely remove the very beautiful scenery from the equation. That being said, on my way back from Ishikawa Prefecture during Golden Week, I covered about 1000km in one day coming back home to catch work the next day (there was a detour into Tohoku region, so 850km became closer to 1000km). But again, you see literally nothing and it's too fast to actually be interesting at all. I much more recommend taking the national highways because they're beautiful, often running by the sea, and people are a lot more willing to stop there than in front of a on-ramp (though I guess once you're already in a PA/SA, it's about even).

As for maps, use Google Maps. It doesn't get any better than that. As soon as you get here, go to a huge tech store like Yodobashi Camera and pick yourself up a prepaid sim for your phone (obviously phone has to be unlocked) and use maps. Alternatively you can get one of those portable wi-fi things but I never did because there's no such thing as a cheap one as far as I've seen.

If you have quite a bit of time to mentally prepare before the trip itself, I highly recommend reading Hitching Rides with the Buddha for stories:
http://www.amazon.com/Hitching-Rides-Buddha-Will-Ferguson/dp/1841957852/
And his practical how-to book Hitchhiker's Guide to Japan:
http://www.amazon.com/Hitchhikers-Guide-Japan-Will-Ferguson/dp/0804820686/
The guide is incredibly outdated in terms of destination information (worst was getting to an area with an amazing sounding hot water waterfall that led to a free open air mixed gender onsen, only to find a landslide closed the whole thing down like 8 years ago) but the route information is solid, granted it is more focused on Hokkaido, Tohoku region, Kyushu and Shikoku, with almost no focus on central Japan (Tokyo, Osaka, northern Kanto, etc.)

If you have any other questions about hitchhiking here in Japan let me know. I'm not an expert, but I do know a shit tons after a year of doing it.

I'm trying to remember where I read that...It may have been here, but I don't have it on me and when I look online I can't find anything. I know when I went there we were told not to walk past the stated limit, and that things sometimes didn't work out so well for people that ignored the advice.

That's a very appropriate username, by the way.

Edit: now I'm wondering if I just imagined the hiker fatalities...I could have sworn i heard it more than once. looking into it, it turns out volcanic gases are a real "thing". With most volcanos it probably wouldn't be a big deal, but sakurajima erupts with ash hundreds of times a year. So I guess on any given day it could happen, and if you were close enough when it came you really could get a bad lungful and mess yourself up.

This guide helped me during my first visit to Tokyo.Basically just learning to navigate the city is a gem. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DQLHEXU

Vietnam is a magnificent place to go for holidays. I've been there multiple times for traveling. One of my best experiences was when I did a tour from North to South in Vietnam. This was organised by the Vietnamese embassy from all over the world.

This trip took us 18 days and we traveled by Bus and Train. We visited numerous places such as Ha Long Bay, Nha Trang, Phu Cuoc, My Khe and many more.

One thing that I'd advise other people to do is to the North to South trip completely by bicycle. I haven't done this yet on my own, but it definitely is something I'd like to try.

If you need some tips about accommodation, transport, food to try and places to visit, I published a short book on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Vietnam-Travel-Guide-Through-ebook/dp/B00MMUHTSW

If you contact me personally, I can send you a PDF file through email for free. Just PM me with your email address :)

Both of those things are a way to weed out applicants, but it's not totally mandatory at least on the part of the government. That said, very few unis will hire you without a Masters degree, but it is really possible to get a job with a Masters but no uni experience.

Search on Amazon for my book, "How to Get a University Job in South Korea: the English Teaching Job of Your Dreams." You will probably find it helpful.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Get-University-South-Korea-ebook/dp/B00ORLRP2Y

https://www.amazon.com/Luxurious-Chiang-Mai-complete-honeymoon-ebook/dp/B01MD1HABX/

I recommend using anki.

But if you don't want to use that and you have an e-reader or a smart phone： https://www.amazon.com/1000-Japanese-Flash-Cards-E-Readers-ebook/dp/B01BTSQZNM/

Not France, but I have a buddy that spent 3 years in Japan for the JET Program. He wrote a short book about that I'd recommend giving a read. Might help in some way especially in regards to culture shock and language barriers

You seem to have a good grasp on things. It looks like some of the linked threads follow a similar path, and I'll probably be following a very similar path myself. Nice books, too. I have quite a few myself. I'm not quite sure which of these are good (since they all had great Amazon reviews). I have the following:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RTDPBA/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078G5P6Q4/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4789014401/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/478901441X/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4805312270/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1572229195/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GW5KTDK/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0976998122/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0658014900/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

(Although Genki I and the Genki workbook, plus the Kata/Hira quick guide looks good)

I can recommed the artist who goes by the name of Brother on fiverr.
Here are a couple of samples of his work done for me.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L7DRU02

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0128G8CPS

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CI6SZOQ

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H7CZWQ6