As I contemplate going back to a place I love, or perhaps a place I’m purely drawn to for personal reasons (pic from where my Dad was during the war and we visited on last year’s visit… we will remember them), I’m feeling a little excited. But it’s a different excitement from what I normally feel when I head back ‘home’.

I’m going to do some writing. Everyone knows I write, but it is a rare occasion that I have written while on a trip because I focus too much on what everyone else wants to do and not so much on myself. But this time it’s going to be a little different.

I’ve spent so much time in this part of the world, and the path I tread will be one I have done many times. So I’m going to take a little bit of a different focus this time, and calling it the ‘awaken the senses’ tour.

I’m going to focus each day on a different sense, and really absorb what is happening around me. I think most of us are so lucky that we sometimes get a little distracted and miss so much of what goes on around us – me included.

So I’m going to reawaken my senses – sight, sound, taste, touch and smell are going to take on a whole new meaning in crazy Asia. Some of those senses are already being irritated and I can quite honestly do without – durian, fish sauce and that musty urine stench after fresh rain (I know should have stopped there).

So you’ll be hearing about what I see, what I taste, what I hear, what I smell, what I touch - I’ll awaken your senses through culinary flavours, images of the bikes of burden that circle Ben Thanh, the hands of the Sunrise children as they receive the 30kg of gifts I have for them and the sounds of the Delta as it wakens from its slumber in the wee hours of the morning.

Enjoy being awakened. Asia has a way of making one feel alive. I’m just going to try and experience it in a whole new way. What better way than one sense at a time.

Enjoy the journey.