While travelling in Southeast Asia, I was in awe of the open-air kitchens of street restaurants. Just by wheeling out a few carefully stocked trolleys and some prepared ingredients, one person was able to run a bustling street-side restaurant serving a score of customers delicious, fresh-cooked food each night. It's a remarkable feat of ingenuity and efficiency.

Some of the attributes I noticed about the best ones:

Menus with prices visible from a distance

We made some of the decision about whether a place looked good as we approached a stand. A clear menu with large prices you can see as you walk up is a simple way to slow down the right customers before they've walked past.

Seeing the fresh ingredients at the front of the stall builds trust in what you're about to eat and whets the appetite.

Pre-chopped ingredients and giant rice cooker

Having boxes of pre-chopped ingredients to throw in makes cooking super speedy, and as so many dishes were served with rice, a single giant rice cooker enabled preparing meals in moments.

Trolleys on wheels and everything within reach

Having everything on wheels allows quick and easy deployment and packing up, and a chef can adjust each unit to have everything in easy reach.

A single high-powered gas stove with a large wok cooks nearly all the dishes

Trolleys stacked with plates, bowls, cups and utensils

A waste bin handles scraps and excess liquids

A multi-use towel wipes surfaces and hands

We had a delicious meal from an old lady in Vietnam who'd just carried her entire restaurant on a bamboo pole over her shoulder, with two large baskets at either end. The pole held everything necessary to cook, including several small stools to sit and eat on.

It helps to have the right kind of weather. A warm and generally dry climate means you don't need to rent indoor space, heat it or cover it. This enables so much creativity with food, reducing prices and barriers to entry and increasing selection. Alas, I'm in the UK for this one.

It also suits food that is quick and simple to cook, often using pre-prepared, flavourful sauces and fresh ingredients that cook quickly, as opposed to dishes that require long preparation, ovens, or simmering times. Thai and Vietnamese food, in general, lend themselves well to this.

It's remarkable how these simple yet effective setups can spin up a restaurant at the side of the street, turning a few trolleys, some carefully chosen gear and a talented chef into a culinary treat.

Arrange kitchen storage to minimise excess travel

And all sorts of other food and drink sketches

The open-air kitchen

Here's a helpful technique when you want to freshen-up some clothing at a hotel and need it to dry quickly. It's useful when you've packed one day short or need an extra day's wear out of something.

Wash the item in the sink/shower. Rinse out as much as you can directly with a squeeze.

Lay a towel flat and place the item on top.

Roll the towel up tight, making multiple layers of clothing, towel, clothing, towel.

Wring the towel well, working your way up and down. A lot of the water will transfer from the clothes to the towel. Repeat as necessary, perhaps placing the item in a different, drier patch of the towel.

Leave the item to dry that last bit overnight while you sleep.

With any luck, your underwear will be wearable again in the morning. And if it's not quite there, there's often a hair dryer to help finish off.

Of course, the technique works anywhere, but it's convenient in hotels where you don't have to worry about drying the towel afterwards.

This tip was discovered by my wife—like many of my most handy lifehacks—in this case while backpacking together in Central America.

Also see: Hotel HQ; Enjoy your hotel room more

Hotel Drying Technique

Stay organised in your hotel room with this one weird tip. When arriving at a hotel room clear the desk and fold a bathroom towel or flannel to make a little square space and use it as a store for all your useful stuff.

OK, so it actually does seem a little unusual, but having tested it on all hotel stays over the last few years I can say that it genuinely helps me not lose key things, like room keys, around my hotel room. It also reduces the chances that I'll leave without something important like a passport. Maybe give it a try.

This tip I learned from Dan Pink's Pinkcast episode where he calls it his hotel inbox — the place to leave everything when he walks into the room.

Hotel HQ

We all know that racing drivers overtake on the inside — it's the shorter, faster route. It was only relatively recently that I found how useful it can be on a long drive, too, not for racing but for using the bend on a multilane road for easier, safer overtaking.

Perhaps this scenario will resonate: after cruising at a steady speed for miles of a long journey you slowly catch up with a car traveling just a few miles an hour slower. You're not driving fast enough to zip by them, but the difference is enough to slow your steady progress on a long journey, and if you're driving near the speed limit anyway you probably don't want to accelerate much to overtake.

On a multi-lane road like a motorway or freeway — not a single lane road where you'd be overtaking with reduced visibility on the corner in the opposing lane — timing your overtaking so you're on the inside of a bend and the slower car is on the outside allows you to get round the slower driver in a shorter time and without needing to travel nearly as fast.

And the converse is also true: if you've timed your overtaking when approaching a bend where you'll be on the outside you'll find that you'll have to go a lot faster to get round or perhaps that your intended overtaking is actually not getting you past at all.

Passing on an inside bend

An average car, sat idling, can produce exhaust emissions to fill 150 balloons. That's a lot of balloons to imagine puffing away out of the cars idling outside a school for a pickup, say. Other tests have found (pdf) that for any time over 10s fuel use and emissions are always greater when idling than turning off the engine and restarting. Spread the word.

Of course, if you have an electric car this won't apply.

I did draw 150 balloons, but a few of them didn't fit on the page.

Idling

“Just remember that finishing lines are good, but their most important role is to get you over the start line in the first place.”

This little piece of wisdom is from Stevie Smith (not the poet). Stevie embarked on a human-powered journey around the world—Expedition 360—and reached Hawaii under pedal power*. I learned about him from a little chapter in One Man and His Bike by Mike Carter. As soon as I finished the chapter where he speaks with Stevie I immediately reread it.

Mike also shared this deeper and more poetic version of the same insight:

“Happiness is the acceptance of the journey as it is now, not the promise of the other shore”

*Stevie’s companion Jason Lewis completed the circumnavigation of the world 13 years after they began.

This quote, modified to a lovely two-page spread, features with a number of others in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures.

You can also listen to us discuss this sketch with the brilliant Brendan Leonard in the Sketchplanations podcast episode on Finishing lines

Finishing lines

I first had a santo libre in Belize and, given how popular cuba libres are, I was surprised I’d never heard of it. Basically, it’s rum + Sprite or lemonade + a little lime juice. I am hereby spreading the word of this excellent drink.

Santo libre, cuba libre

I think it would be interesting if we could see the real shape of your favourite crossing marked on the road. It’d probably help more people cross and traffic get stopped less. And, hopefully, no casualties.

Our senses are built to take in information at human pace

The real shape of a crossing

Swimrun is basically navigating from start to finish through water and over land carrying only the gear you need. What you start with you have to finish with. You will run in your wetsuit and swim in your running shoes. The world championship courses are run by Ötillö. Ötillö means island-to-island in Swedish after the original course created from a drunken bet.

A beautiful aspect of it is that it's a team sport, both run and swum in pairs. Many choose to tether together which dramatically on the swims and keeps you both close.

In 2016 I teamed up with Rob Bell and took part in Ötillö’s UK swimrun in the Isles of Scilly. The Scilly event was a swimrun paradise. Check out the course, and the amazing event photos. The place is gorgeous, go visit sometime. And get into swimrun it’s awesome!

Swimrun

Sadly it turns out that there is not reliable evidence for this derivation of the word POSH, but it’s so nice I’d finished the sketchplanation before I knew it. The story went that if you were travelling by boat from Western Europe to India and the Far East by boat back in the day the rich people naturally took the best cabins. And the best cabins on the way Out, were on the Port side so you got a great view of the coast all the way around Africa. And on the way back on the Starboard site to enjoy the view once more. Et voila POSH as a synonym for rich. After much digging I had to conclude that the story was apocryphal, but it’s nice nonetheless.

POSH: Port Out Starboard Home (apocryphal)

Learning and using kind words first when traveling will take you further than others. Before I enter a country with a new language, I write a list of these words and find out how to say them. It has served me well.

Learn kind words first in new countries

One of the best things we did when on a significant traveling trip was to make our journal as a mindmap. There are all sorts of reasons why we found it better and more enjoyable to do at the time and better and more enjoyable once returned. Get a better idea than this sketchplanation by flicking through our mindmap travel journal

Try a mindmap travel journal

Best travel choices in London

Sure the big city is worse than the country. But the reality is back streets in a big city are significantly better than the busy streets in a big city, and air pollution changes massively even for small children down at the height of exhausts versus adults standing higher.

So if you’re not about to move to the country you could help yourself a lot nonetheless by taking the back streets (I read this premise in Focus magazine, but can’t find an online link to reference).

Pollution is highly localized: take the back streets

I believe I first heard this on a Radiolab episode, but I can’t remember for sure. Since hearing it, I’ve reflected on it many times and can’t help but think there’s some truth in it.

For me it’s kind of why we’re just not that good at processing the scenery whizzing by from a car or train, and why cycling and walking are just about the best ways of getting around.

Alain de Botton, in The Art of Travel, has some great observations about why trains are so great for thinking, which I think has a lot to do with this - we have time to think, with a helpful intermission of the semi-connected landscape and houses passing by that we can only process for so long before we turn back to our thoughts. I love trains.

Spent many battles with the London bikes before learning this simple trick.

Release Boris Bikes with ease by pulling up on the saddle

Having been on the other side of this countless times, those small moments of generosity and openness from locals can literally transform your perceptions of the world. We are all ambassadors.

Be nice to tourists

My technique, for when you really have to get somewhere and are starting to feel tired: Pull over, neck coffee, 15 min shut-eye, cruise on. I have read that this is called a nappuccino.

There’s some science behind this: the half-life of caffeine.

Tiredness can kill. Take a break

Enjoy your hotel room more by making the most of it:

Enjoy your hotel room more

Sometimes see the good in what you have come to resent.

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Category: travel