The distances were enormous, and the landscape was so large it had to be studied in parts, like a mural seen by a child. The travel writer Paul Theroux made that observation while crossing Vietnam for his 1976 classic, The Great Railway Bazaar. He could just as well have been writing about Asia as a whole. The place is so vast and diverse that it must be studied up close, in bits, to be properly understood.
Journalists sometimes forget that.
We tend to go for the big picture, the macro-developments in politics and economics. But to know what's really happening, it pays to hit the road, get out into the countryside and talk to ordinary people. This summer, a team of TIME journalists and photographers went about as far as you can go in Asia in a single journey without getting on a plane. They traveled mostly by van, sometimes by train, occasionally by ferry. They set out from the Japanese city of Sapporo and ended up 45 days later in the Indonesian city of Surabaya.