For a change, work took me eastward-ho to Asia last week, to Taiwan. The jetlag still has me reeling - I spent 50 hours in planes and airports, and barely 70 hours actually in Taipei - but fuelled by duty-free Absolut, i'll blog instead of passing out on a couch and drooling.

Split into two posts cos I have no clue how to upload loads of images into one.

Look at this view out of my hotel window. Okay so I was staying in some farflung suburb called Chung Ho City, but doesn't this look like Bombay? Only less smoggy, and cleaner, and not noisy.. right, not so much like Bombay then.

In central Taipei however there's no contest. It's one of the cleanest cities I've seen yet, with wide roads and all the buildings looking pretty new. The latter is also a bit of a downside however, because I love wandering through tatty old city sections; culture and flavour and all that. Maybe I didn't visit the right parts but there was a smidgen of sterility to it. (But yes, at the end of the day, I'd rather live on Marine Drive than Mohd Ali Road, if you know what I mean..)

And this here is Taipei 101, at 1,666 feet above ground, presently the world's tallest inhabited building. It's absolutely colossal - you have to tilt your head painfully to see it fully. Unfortunately a combination of bad planning and being uninformed meant I couldn't make the time to go up to the observatory.. there was a 30-minute queue for tickets and I had 45 minutes to spare before I had to head off for the freakishly-far-away airport and leave. Bah. (contd..)