Anyone else prefer Chinese tonight? [View Full Entry]

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Notice anything... ummmm... unusual here? [View Full Entry]

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Big city, dense traffic, dirty, polluted and stinking. Night hides the grime, giving it a false charm. But you can feel tremendous energy in the air here, floating above its grimy sidewalks. Checked into a youth hostel in Silom district, into an unbelievably small room. I could not have swung even half a cat. Jail cells are bigger than this. A bed fills almost all of it and the bed is little more than a cradle. A fan mounted on the wall. A high window that gives onto a hallway. Checked out the following morning and into a much better place [View Full Entry]

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Took a narrow longboat, tippy as a racing shell and not much wider, across the river to Thailand, then bus to Chiang Mai. Some people speak highly of this place but I didn't find anything remarkable about it. It has a nicely walled old city surrounded by a kind of moat that has fountains in it, so it's pleasant enough to look at. The traffic is fast and dense here, so you have to skip quickly to get across some streets. They have a good night market and not everything that's for sale is junky or trashy. I enjoyed walking amidst [View Full Entry]

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The Gibbon Experience Waited at the Chinese/Laotian border until it opened at 08h30 and enjoyed a brief changing of the guard: marching, saluting, whistling and barking orders, there may have been three different branches of government in on the action. But this is a tiny border town, not Beijing, and I could see that it all could have been done a little more crisply. At last I left China and entered Laos, which is quite a bit poorer, shabbier and rougher around the edges. I hired a minibus to take me to Houaxay (pronounce way-sigh). The trip was three hours through [View Full Entry]

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Kicked around here for a day or two, but didn't find it to be a particularly interesting place. Met a few people and one evening three of us went to have the local specialty, Over-The-Bridge Noodles. It's noodle soup with a bit of chicken and vegetables, so-named because the wife of the man who ate it had to carry it over a bridge in Kunming daily to where he worked. In the restaurant we me a local girl who showed us how to put the various elements together, then sat with us and chatted throughout the meal. She's a pharmacist working [View Full Entry]

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It’s an hour bus ride from Guilin to Longsheng, then another 30 or 40 minutes up to Longji Scenic area and a 10 minute climb up to Pingan village. You come here to visit the rice terraces called “Dragon’s Backbone” and they’re amazing. The morning after I arrived I ate a large bowl of noodle soup containing chicken pieces and tomatoes for breakfast, then set off, destination Dazhai village on the other side of the hills. The trail was good, flat paving stones of light-coloured rock and at first it went up a bit steeply to Scenic Lookout No. 1 on [View Full Entry]

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Sign standing outside a restaurant in Yangshuo. Mmmmmm...tasty. [View Full Entry]

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Caught a cruiseboat down the Li River as a way to get to the next place. Extraordinary landscape of Karst formations like a crowd of sentinels standing guard over forbidden territory. They were so densely covered in vegetation it looked like green fur. One poet describes this as a river ribbon winding through jade hairpins. Peak behind valley, peak after peak, all several hundred metres high. Steep, with occasional yellow-black cliffs at river’s edge. Narrow, round shapes, conical ones. Some looking like a group of head watching us from the distance where they became blue and indistinct. [View Full Entry]

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Went out to the airport to fly standby into the southwestern part of China. They began by asking for full fare - fair enough - but I asked for the discount price. They dropped the price by 40 percent, but this is China and you negotiate everything here, so I offered less than half. The stern woman behind the counter replied with a harsh No. I prodded gently a little, but she wouldn’t move, so I finally agreed to her price. She barked Passport! at me, then Luggage! One-word orders from a small-time tyrant in a company uniform. Maybe I should [View Full Entry]

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