Dr Tom Sykes (revjugular@hotmail.com) has been a travel writer and editor since co-compiling an anthology of hitchhiking tales, No Such Thing as a Free Ride? (Cassell Illustrated, 2005). Since his first visit to Ivory Coast in 2013, he has published articles on everything from the persecution of Ivorian Rastafarians to the 2015 presidential election for The Scotsman, African Courier, New Statesman, New Internationalist and New African. Now Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, these days he has to do most of his travelling during the summer holidays. He is the author of The Realm of the Punisher (2018), a 'political travelogue' of the Philippines, and the upcoming academic monograph A Cultural History of Manila: Literature, Empire and Orientalism in the Philippines. He is also a co-editor of the Nesta-funded hyperlocal news project www.starandcrescent.org.uk.