Sean Thomas

There are many reasons to like Kyrgyzstan. It has extraordinarily lovely women: some mad collision of Persian, Turkish, Russian, Mongol and Chinese genes makes for supermodels at every bus stop. It is safe, friendly, cheap. Its cities are commonly free of rubbish and graffiti (how does Central Asia do this, yet we cannot?). Despite these charms, it has few tourists. However, I can’t say anything positive about the cheese – because the cheese is dreck. Last night I went to the Globus supermarket here in downtown Bishkek and bought a sample of the local fromage. When I got it home, it was like chewing a rubber toy: tasteless, over-firm, banal. In the end I was reduced to smothering it in Sriracha to make it vaguely flavoursome.

In 1906, Sir Francis Galton observed a crowd at a country fair in Plymouth attempting to guess the weight of an ox. Nearly 800 people participated – from butchers and farmers to busy fishwives. Galton, ever the measurer of men and beasts, gathered the guesses and calculated their average. The result was startling: the crowd’s collective estimate came within one pound of the actual weight. This elegantly simple experiment is the founding parable of what we term the ‘wisdom of crowds’ – the idea that while individuals may be flawed, the collective judgment of a sufficiently diverse group is compellingly accurate. Galton’s experiment also became one of the great justifications for democracy.

Think how many times you’ve seen the ‘Mona Lisa’. You’ve seen her in movies, in books, in cartoons; you’ve seen her as icon of female beauty, as an emblem of feminine mystique, as a commentary on the male gaze, or an amusing face on which to paint a moustache. But in all that time I bet 94 per cent of you have never noticed: she hasn’t got any eyebrows. It is, however, true – go look again. La Gioconda is eyebrowless. Why? A few ‘Mona Lisa’ truthers claim the brows have gone awol, but the consensus is they were never there. She shaved them off, because that was the quirky beauty standard of the day.

I’ve been to a few underwhelming Unesco World Heritage Sites. Take the Struve Geodetic Arc, which curves almost invisibly across Eastern Europe. I visited without even realising. As for the Fray Bentos corned beef factory, in Uruguay, I’m writing this about 20 minutes from the Fray Bentos corned beef factory and I’m still reluctant to go and see. The same might be thought of Australia’s Lakes of Willandra, which I visited around 2014. Unesco itself describes them as ‘fossil remains of lakes and sand formations from the Pleistocene’, which is not exactly heart-racing. They are unhelpfully located in the south-west corner of New South Wales – lost in semi-desert, far from anywhere.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the London Book Fair has been gracing our nation’s capital this week, down in Earl’s Court. There, the publishers, agents and buyers of the literary globe (London is second only to Frankfurt in ‘book fair importance’) have been feverishly buying and selling the rights to hot new titles, hot new authors, maybe the odd lucky midlister, while identifying the trends, writers and genres that conceal the ultra-precious kernel of hotness to come. In today’s market it’s likely that buyers have been looking for visually rich comic books for children – enjoying a resurgence – and anything in a newish genre called ‘romantasy’ (think Fifty Shades of Grey meets Game of Thrones, with more vampires and less spanking).

It was when the peasant didn’t move for the second hour that I became suspicious. I was in an ultra-expensive hotel in southern Thailand. It was built to resemble a sequence of exquisite villas from some ancient Thai dynasty, arranged around tropical gardens and meadows. I was staying in my very own, beautiful, teak-and-mahogany mini-palace, which came with a grand piano and butler – all the usual things I’d come to expect as a luxury travel correspondent. Yawn. The only thing really unique about this five-star hotel (they tend to blur, eventually) was the fact my own villa, the best of the best, the jewel in the crown, came with its own paddy field. And in that paddy field was a singular peasant in a charming conical hat, next to an ox.

I can still remember it: probably the worst seafood dinner of my life. A slice of fish that was simultaneously cold, hot, dry, crumbly and rubbery, surrounded by overcooked vegetables and accompanied by a mysterious whiff of cigarette smoke. It was so repellent that even though I was famished, I summoned the waiter, returned the dish and retired to my room, there to endure a dinner of Pringles from the minibar. What made it worse was that I was in a celebrated fishing port. All I had to do was look out the window and I could see trawlers bringing in some of the world’s finest fish from some of the planet’s richest seas. It was dismaying, saddening, deflating and left me starving. What it was not, however, was surprising.

You can’t get a Pegu in Rangoon any more. That may not sound like a disaster for the ages – nothing, say, compared to the ongoing chancellorship of Rachel Reeves, MP for Blankstare-upon-Derr – but it is quite telling, once you know the background. To explain, the Pegu is a cocktail. Here’s the recipe, if you fancy making one: Take 2 oz of gin. Add ¾ oz of orange curaçao or triple sec. Squeeze ½ oz of fresh lime juice. Include 2 dashes of Angostura bitters. Add 1 dash of orange bitters. Fill a cocktail shaker with ice and combine all the ingredients. Shake vigorously for 15 to 20 seconds until well chilled. Strain into a chilled coupe or martini glass. Sounds nice, right?

There are multiple reasons to be fascinated by DeepSeek, the Chinese AI chatbot that debuted last week, knocking Donald Trump off the headlines and $1 trillion off the US stock market. For a start, it represents yet another remarkable leap forward in the race to artificial general intelligence – which looks likely to arrive this decade, maybe this year. Brace. A second reason to gaze with intrigue at DeepSeek is the mysterious way it arrived. Was it really made for a mere six million bucks, as they claim? Or did they cut corners and steal the IP of ChatGPT, as OpenAI is alleging? If they did, it is quite the irony, as OpenAI itself is right now in court for chewing up the entire internet, copyright be damned, to feed its own ravenous bot.

I'm in the tiny riverside town of Virpazar, in the little Balkan country of Montenegro; and under the white geisha face of a late summer moon I am warily ordering the celebrated local delicacy. It is carp — caught from the nearby, slivovitz-clear waters of Lake Skadar (biggest lake in the Balkans!). But what makes me wary is the preparation. The carp is apparently marinated, and served cold, with boiled potatoes and greens. Cold slimy fish with hot spuds and spinach? It sounds like some nightmare culinary “specialty” from the old communist bloc (of which Montenegro was once a part, within Yugoslavia). I’m veteran enough to remember a few of these. “Famous” flatbreads that came with rancid lard.

The homes of famous writers are disappointing. Often, you see the famous desk, and that’s about it. There are exceptions: for example, Pushkin’s home in St Petersburg is interesting because they have the blooded waistcoat he wore during his fateful duel. Hemingway’s house in Cuba is intriguing because it is so macho – pistol, rifles, leather everywhere – you conclude he must have been secretly gay. Sadly, I can report that the home of Gabriel García Márquez in remote little Aracataca, in Colombia, is predictably disappointing. They don’t even have the desk. They’ve got the bed where he soiled his nappy – allegedly his first childhood memory – and half a kitchen. A visit takes ten minutes, as does a tour of his tedious hometown. https://youtu.be/4oQeQR1DEjw?

It gets somewhat forgotten, Osaka. On the bamboo-and-tatami trail of Japanese sites, this ancient port, fort and conurbation at the very heart of Japan commonly misses out on foreign visitors: as everyone rushes from Tokyo to Kyoto, from sacred Mount Fuji to ancient Nara to haunted Hiroshima. For most overseas tourists, Osaka is just a fleeting stop on the Shinkansen high-speed trains – a glimpse of another sprawling Japanese city with bland, utilitarian housing. The edgiest place in Osaka is about as dangerous as the Cotswolds The Japanese themselves know otherwise. They flock to the city because they revere its pivotal history – Osaka was Japan’s archaic imperial capital, back in the 4th to 7th centuries – and they celebrate its epochal sites.