One can go trekking in the jungle from Luang Namtha, visit 'hill tribes' etc., but I don't go there to see or do anything - it's just a nice laid-back place to be, and the pho in the morning market is good.
Alex, I have had this pulled on me at the West Bus Station, as well as at the train station. I usually don't need a taxi at either place, just take the bus, but occasionally have wanted one and have just tried another cab, possibly after walking a block or so. It worked, total wasted time about 3 minutes.
Note that the next meeting will be at The Park. Everybody welcome who has read the book and/or has a book to propose for the following meeting.
@Tiger: Note that there are no railroads in Laos.
Raina's description is a good one, although I'd rather look out the window of the bus than listen to a book on tape - the countryside is beautiful. I also like some of the Lao music that is blared on the buses, and I suggest that you try to avoid the buses on which the passengers are 90% western foreigners.
What Raina says about not being rushed in Laos is key - I ran into a couple of traveling Americans there once who expected things to happen 'on time', and they were repeatedly getting near-apoplectic when they didn't. Sitting and just watching the rive flow is, for me, a major attraction.
As for airhead post-'traveler'-era backpackers in Laos: yeah, there are a lot of them.
Note that this is the rainy season, and in Laos it is more serious than in Kunming, even as it is in Kunming this particularly wet year. It's just getting cranked up now.
Luang Prabang is a real gem, although it's small and is way overinfested with tourists and commercialized tourism.
Suggest you go by land, it's a good trip, and you don't get bribed for the visa available to most nationalities at the border.
Another thing, really pleasant if you don't fight it: don't expect things to happen on any tight schedule.
Vang Vieng is a waste of time to stay in, full of dopey folks who think they are backpackers sitting around doing drugs & watching old US TV shows - although it's a beautiful area.
I like Luang Namtha, just over the border from China (called Nanta in Chinese - direct buses from Jinghong).
If you get way down south, go to Khone Island & the Falls area on the Mekong just north of the Cambodian border.
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Not quite what you'd call a jumping place, but not bad at all for rather standard US-type meals, not overly expensive, and with a really good salad bar that's cheap, or free with most dinner dishes after 5:30PM. You can get a bottle of beer or even wine if you really want to, but I've never seen anybody do it - maybe that's just to take out. Chinese Christian run, and they hire people with physical disadvantages, who are pleasant and helpful. Frequented by foreign (mostly North American) Christians and Chinese Christians - was started by a Canadian couple associated with Bless China (previously, Project Grace), who are no longer here, but no religious pressure or any of that. Steaks are nothing special, and I avoid the Korean dishes, which I've had a few times but which did not impress me.
As a shop and bakery, it's very good bread at reasonable prices, of various kinds (Y18 for a good multigrain loaf that certainly weighs well over a pound. Other stuff too, like granola and oatmeal that is local, as well as imported things, including American cornflakes and so forth, which some people seem to require.
Large portions, seriously so with the pizza, which is Brooklyn/American style, I guess. Convivial, conversational, good place to drink with good folks on both sides of the bar, especially after about 9PM.
Too bourgeois.
Really good pizza and steaks. The wine machine fuddles me when I'm a bit fuddled, & seems unnecessary. Good folks on both sides of the bar.
Ain't no flies on Salvador's.
China, US discuss human rights in Kunming
发布者I think what these governments are most interested in is not human rights, but how not to be accused of violating them.
Inside Kunming's 'dwarf empire'
发布者Tell it to Steven Hawking. A person's physical stature does not limit his/her potential for work that does not rely on his/her physical stature (e.g., English teaching, as well as physics). The cultural attitude that those who are discriminated against because they do not fit the culturally desired norm should be outcast or should be provided for by special environments that can be sold as entertainment venues to those who will not deal with their own prejudices is a cultural attitude that perpetuates discrimination against all who are 'different'. The problem here, as elsewhere, is a matter of dehumanizing those who are 'different' - prejudicial culture that regiments anything that deviates from its standards, rather than dealing with the prejudice itself. Why not have a theme park within which 'foreigners', with all their funny habits, can be kept, so that they do not disturb the 'normality' of cultural prejudices? Actually, there could be many: one for 'black people', one for Tibetans, one for Japanese, one for gay people, one for Han Chinese people who have given up their 'traditional' clothing for 'western-style' clothing (e.g., the great majority of Chinese, over the past century or so) - in fact we could subdivide and subdivide until nothing was left but mutual nonrecognition. All these would help to maintain the narrow identities of 'normality' that can be relied upon to advance support the cultural attitudes that promote the continuing inability of people to recognize each other as human, and to celebrate and accept their differences - not as entertainment items, no matter how 'cute', but as full human beings. How different is all this from apartheid?
This effort to maintain prejudice can, of course, be profitable to those who invest in it, and convenient for social engineers and political elites who want to maintain an elite power status by reliance on it.
The place is an insult to our common humanity and a spotlight on cultural attitudes of exclusion. Those who find that they enjoy such displays should take a good look at the nature of the culture that has formed them so narrowly. Cultures change; cultures have always changed; cultures are presently changing and will continue to do so; there is nothing sacred about cultural attitudes. Our common humanity is an ongoing project, and those who imagine they are not part of such a project are simply contributing their own blindness to it, and limiting themselves in the process. It's not the 'dwarves' who are the problem, its the people who will not accept them as within the boundaries of 'us'.
Around Town: Southwestern Associated University Museum
发布者See John Israel's EXCELLENT book on the history of the university:
Israel, John. Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998
Books about universities do not normally strike me as exciting, but this one is.
John has lived in Kunming for several months per year over the past 10 years or more.
Chinese climbers among those murdered in Pakistan
发布者Modern nationalism is a manipulative ideology to manage global capital, and nationalist blindness to actual human beings leads to the punishment of innocents. China is not a communist country. People who murder in Pakistan cannot be extradited to China to be judged for murders of people in Pakistan, even if they're Chinese.
Chinese climbers among those murdered in Pakistan
发布者Which regions are 'these regions'?