Keith Austin takes in the purified air in Japan and gets a buzz.

Fifty bucks doesn't seem costly, as indulgences go, but the cynic in me initially baulked at paying cash money to breathe air. Still, if it's good enough for David Beckham, it's good enough for me. The advertisement for the oxygen capsule first caught my eye in the foyer of the plush JR Tower Hotel Nikko in Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island. The words were all, um, Japanese to me, but the picture of the gleaming "O2 capsule" proved irresistible.

Say your prayers

Yangon, or Rangoon as it was known in British colonial days, hovers somewhere between a mini-Bangkok and the emerging Ho Chi Minh City of 15 years ago. Typically Southeast Asian, it displays leprose colonial façades beside high-rises; lush vegetation next to potholed pavements; and enticing food markets alongside street kitchens dishing up fantastic fare. And, of course, there are rickshaws, weaving in and out of the windowless 1940s Chevrolet trucks which masquerade as buses with passengers dangling off the back. Then things change: the mobile phone network reaches no further than the border, and the internet - even Hotmail - is censored. Something is up.

REPORTER’S HEADLINE SLINGS RAFFLES INTO HISTORY

david ellis

WHEN he was given his drinking orders on a steamy Singapore day some 100 years ago, barman Ngiam Tong Boon took the task before him with all the enthusiasm of an alchemist working on the Elixir of Life.

Laos Opens Wartime 'Cave City' to Visitors

VIENGXAY, LAOS, March 6, 2007/eTN  -- A collection of dramatic caves that provided shelter to 23,000 Laotians during nine years of aerial bombardment in the Indochina War, has now been opened to the public.