What It Is

Dry Market Asia Project

Dispatches and field notes on travels across Southeast Asia, the people I meet along the way, and the things they make. Filed from my home base in the Philippines > Manila > Makati > Poblacion. 

The beat covers the Malay Archipelago (East Indies, if you tilt old school). It’s the world's largest group of islands by area. I also cover Indochina, mainland Southeast Asia. Foraging and prowling: Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Timor-Leste, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar.

I walk, talk, dive, camp, convey in planes, trains, and buses, stalk temples, and investigate culture high, low, and popular, and profane. Lost and found: epiphanies, face plants, artifacts, happy accidents, the kindness of strangers, and new friends. 

Who’s Doing This?

Me. I’m a working expat based in the Philippines. I started here circa 2002 with the second wave of call center growth and the Business Process Outsourcing industry exploded. 

Resume: U.S. Army Cavalry Scout, blueberry farm hand, University of Florida, Carnegie Mellon, digital art curation project for SIGGRAPH, studio director at a Miami Ad agency, college instructor, e-learning company founder, Philippines call center recruiting iconoclast, AI-pilled boutique BPO founder and operator. 

I'm sixty-one, American, 7th-gen Floridian, traveling on a Falstaffian appetite for what’s just around the bend and what's behind the curtain. I roll Economy Plus with benefits. Spend for impact and value: no checked bags, upgrade for leg room, public transport when possible, always find the gym, eat like a Viking, meet new people, go where the night takes you, buy a round for the bartender.

Stay Tuned In

The dispatches go out as a newsletter. No schedule, no filler — they arrive when they do. Subscribers get them in the inbox, first word on any object that ships, and a reliable read on Southeast Asia from boots on the ground.