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.
Chinese student apologizes after Maryland graduation speech sparks firestorm
发布者@Tom: My point is that it's all promoted in the name of nationalism, which is the smokescreen, and a necessary one, to cover the kind of unacceptable truth that you discuss.
As for conservative opposition in Europe, and the 'patriotic freedom loving revolutionary spirit' in the US (what might these words actually relate to - the US Democratic Party? Or the Republicans? I think they're all Republicrats), which seem pretty much the same to me, I pretty much see people, or at the very least, their governments, as operating behind the smokescreen too, although there are perhaps more people in Europe who can see a least a little bit through it.
The student who made the speech is deep behind the smokescreen as well. Obviously, no?
China to harmonize English nationwide
发布者@Haali, I think that's weird too. Note that the English on the sign in the toilets of trains states: "Please flush closet pot" - train cars built & designed many years ago, yet nobody bothered to offer 100rmb or so to some average wandering native-English speaker before they put these signs in virtually every toilet in train car on one of the world's largest RR networks - wtf?
Same syndrome everywhere in China - yet, although I can read and write Chinese, I seriously doubt that I'd design any sign in Chinese characters for exhibition in another country without bothering to find a native Chinese speaker to advise me.
Self-reliance is wonderful.
China to harmonize English nationwide
发布者No particular historical justice that everybody's got to learn English these days, but that's the international language we have, and that's why foreigners can get teaching jobs here, as well as in so many other places.
Chinese student apologizes after Maryland graduation speech sparks firestorm
发布者@Peter: All respects to Orwell. However, if you want to jump on somebody for not telling the truth, or what they believe to be the truth, there's no point in concentrating on universities when our entire media environment, from the advertising industry to government spin-PR to other, numerous types of insidious media, the goals of all of which are to bend what is believed to be truth when it is not a straightforward matter of lying, I think the universities come off well - in most places, for that matter - relative to the media environment around them, which is fueled primarily by the desire to gain or maintain wealth and/or power - and yes, academics are subject to this too, but most do not put themselves into the serious acquire-wealth/power professions, where deceit becomes not-yet-quite universal. Competitive-rational arguments in universities are more likely, I think, to expose deceit than asking questions at press conferences or complaining to people engaged heavily in economic competition.
But hey! no guarantees.
Chinese student apologizes after Maryland graduation speech sparks firestorm
发布者My comment above is on my previous comment, not on Peter's.