When the initial dazzle with Singapore’s modernity, its cleanliness, and its style subsides, the uncomfortable questions start creeping up.

You are tempted to ask: how is the country so clean if its main ethnic groups – Malay, Chinese and Indian – aren’t exactly famous for their urban tidiness?

You may also wonder: why are there so many Indian men with Chinese women, but not vice-versa?

And those are just the contrasts you see on the surface.

Hoi An is a mandatory stop in Vietnam’s tourist trail. Secondly, because it’s a historic city, a UNESCO heritage site with lantern-lit cobblestone streets and centenarian homes that survived multiple wars.

But firstly because of fashion. There are an estimated 500 tailor and cobbler shops that make any – I mean ANY – custom-fit clothes. All this is a town of barely 120,000.

Learn from our mistakes and see a photo gallery in this post.

A benefit of traveling off the beaten track is that when you finally visit a well-trodden place, it’s a pleasant surprise.

The annoyances of tourism – hustlers, touts, tons of restaurants and bars catering for tourists, loud drunken backpakcers – become a cultural attraction, no longer a burden.

Around 2 pm – shortly after breakfast – the first flyers are delivered by pretty Finnish girls with hangover sunglasses. Tonight’s specials are the same as last night’s: 25-cent beers from 9:00 to 10:00, then free vodka “buckets” from 10:00 to 10:30.

It’s monsoon season, so the many bars in Sihanoukville have to compete for few customers. If one is feeling bold, it will begin its free drinking period 10 minutes before the other one.

If you want a real mind screw, visit Phnom Penh’s killing field and its glitziest night club on the same day.

On one you will see what a genocidal nightmare Cambodia once was. You will be greeted with a tower containing hundreds of skulls arranged by gender and age. You will walk past mass graves and step on bone fragments that emerge from the ground with each passing rain.

There’s some debate online on which East Java city time-crunched travelers should pick, Malang or Solo. For their benefit, here’s a side-by-side comparison.

Sydney reminds me of a beautiful country girl who moved to the big city and is still unaware aware of her incredible power.

It’s a world-class city with all the adornments, the trimmings, the taut features, the parts it keeps hidden and that surface at short lapses in poise. It wears beautiful colonial buildings, stately homes, sculpted parks, bustling harbours. It has scraggly bourgeois corners, artsy bistros, steamy pubs.

And yet, it lacks that pointed haughtiness of cities that have long ago joined the league of global burgs, or of urban belles who receive daily reminders on being lusted.

Walking from Wellington’s Botanical Garden to the city centre you see: gorgeous flowers, pensive gravestones, loopy street sculptures, funky people, and slightly disturbed art galleries all in the span of two hours.

… a generic downtown that looks like any other.

… a pleasant harbour with sleek architecture and lovely sunsets.

… a temperate climate where the temperature swings wildly between sun and shade.

… tons of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Turkish fast food joints.

… a liquor store on just about every city block.

According to some important-sounding economists you should know about, the leading cities of the future will those with the most creative populations. The measure of an economy’s importance is shifting from knowledge and information to inventiveness. The innovators, the dreamers, the right brainers will win.

Governments are listening and tinkering with their economies to foster creative industries like design, architecture, software, video games, and film. The benefits, those important-sounding economists say, are multiple: urban regeneration, higher wages as jobs upgrade from service and manufacturing, flourishing cultural scenes that attract tourism, modernized educational programs that generate talent… the list goes on.