A good read, interesting and entertaining. I guess it only gets 5 stars because I didn't really feel any empathy with him as a person to start with, although I warmed to him a bit as the year progressed.

As a travel book/commentary on SE Asia it is excellent. The benefits of slow travel are there to be seen in the pages. His personal development through the year is interesting, although he never fully loses his journalistic cynicism. Sometimes this is merited - some of the fortune tellers he tries are obvious fakes - but he does seem to exist in a bit of a western bubble of privilege. That might be an unfair comment as it is hard to see how he could be what he was without that.