Asian Geographic Magazines

The Philippine Archipelago offers its visitors numerous extreme sports in the air, sea and on land: hang-gliding and skydiving, scuba diving and sail boating, sandboarding and dirt bike rides. But the most popular activity in the country is hiking on various levels, promising spectacular scenery and exciting meetings with the local culture.

The arid conditions thieve from a salt lake until all that is left is an alien landscape, a lifeless plain punctuated with saturated puddles. Workers toting baskets wade into the shallows. They are collecting salt, essential to the human diet, to medicine and even to the production of fertilisers and explosives.

Heavy rainfall and hail shortly before the harvesting season this year have worsened an epidemic that has claimed more than 300,000 lives in India since liberalisation of its agriculture: the mass suicide of farmers.

The winners of the Images of Asia Photo Competition 2015

While the Philippines is one of the most energy dependent nations in Asia, it is now finding solutions and embracing some of the most advanced solar technology available.

In the early years, there was much work to be done in this fledgling democracy. One diminutive lady was at the centre of the much-needed social reform, ensuring that the welfare of the island’s women and children was thrust to the very top of the agenda – her name was Che Zahara binte Noor Mohamed.

Singapore’s efforts to build a “city in a garden” have ensured that many rare and endangered species of flora and fauna can still be found in the green areas that punctuate the island nation’s concrete skyline.

When the government created the city-state’s first hawker centre in 1971, resettling disparate food vendors into a single, well-managed facility, no one could have predicted the peculiarly Singaporean obsession that would ensue.