Forums > Travel Yunnan > Mouding Mushroom Festival As I said before, the festival is not in Shiping 'City', but in Longpeng on the 6th of August.
news.kunming.cn/yn-news/content/2012-07/06/content_3010186.htm
www.hh.cn/news_1/xw01/201207/t20120726_390255.html
I doubt that you can find an accurate programme online, but after a 'receiving guests' period there will be an opening ceremony where I assume they will drag out the Huayao Yi in their splendid costumes, followed by lunch (mushrooms?).
The main mystery is what 跳万人烟盒舞 the 10000 men cigarette dance will be.
Longpeng lies on the old road between Tonghai and Shiping. There is a bus about every hour on this road, Longpeng has a (small) number of hotels, which will either be booked out or heavily inflated for the event.
Forums > Travel Yunnan > Whats good in Gejiu? I have never lived in Gejiu, it is one of the few cities I have never even stayed in. However, a few thoughts.
Depending on the hours you will be working, I would consider actually living in Mengzi, now less than one hour away through the tunnel. Plenty of modern apartments and an overall much cleaner city: the honour of being the administrative center of Honghe was taken away from Gejiu a few years ago as the city had run out of space to expand.
Directly around Gejiu you have more a history of heavy industry with the population overwhelmingly Han Chinese. The immediate vicinity of Gejiu and indeed the city itself is still dominated by grimy mining operations with most likely effects on air and water pollution. Sitting in a very small depression where air gets easily trapped certainly does not help.
However, the situation changes completely once you cross the Red River, which is, by bus, only about an hour away. However, from a biking perspective this much further away: the direct route now goes through a long tunnel and then almost a mile down. Then it is another mile up to the more interesting minority areas. North of Gejiu is a succession of plains with the cities of Shiping, Jianshui and Mengzi, all more pleasant than Gejiu and easy to reach.
Transport: eventually the new expressway connecting Kaiyuan and Mile to Kunming will open, which will cut journey times from Gejiu to Kunming to about four hours. The railway from Mengzi to Yuxi was supposed to open this November, but there were still sections unfinished a few weeks ago. Again, once it opens, transport to Kunming will become more convenient.
Overall, I would say that Gejiu would not be in top 100 places to live in Yunnan.
Forums > Travel Yunnan > Chinese spraying chemicals at Lao border, what is that? Unlikely to be bugs, more something you might be having on your shoes or the bus on its tires. I do not know what it was, but I think it might be a livestock disease, maybe foot-and-mouth.
This would also explain the thorough bag searches: not looking for contraband, but meat products. Usually the bags just go through x-ray, but that would not pick up foodstuffs.
Forums > Travel Yunnan > Mouding Mushroom Festival Just a few links, the event seems to be held every year from July 20-26:
www.yn.chinanews.com/pub/2012/yunnan_0717/63417.html
en.kunming.cn/index/content/2012-07/17/content_3021442.htm
news.k618.cn/reporter/201207/t20120710_2261619.htm
Yimen is actually a pleasant town with good public parks and a nice nearby temple area built around a spring 龙泉寺, go up to the reservoir dam and follow the walkway around it, about 20min walk from the main square.
Forums > Living in Kunming > Where can i get a yellow fever vaccine? I am not a doctor, but I think in the UK they give you either Malarone (atovaquone/proguanil) or Doxycycline nowadays, which are also recommended on the page you mention. Either might be easier to find in China.
I took Lariam for a longer while some twenty years back and then bought some ten years ago over the counter in Bangkok which gave me some of the side-effects associated with Lariam in a really bad way. It stopped when I stopped taking the pills. So even if you have taken Lariam before it does not mean you will not suffer from the effects now. Searching for side effects of Lariam gives you pretty horrific stories, such as edition.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/05/19/lariam/. AFAIK, Roche has stopped marketing Lariam for malaria prevention.
The last Mongols of Yunnan
Posted byNadam is held every three years on December 13th, the next time actually this year: www.yunnanexplorer.com/festivals/nadam/
Like many festivals in the province, it is now a ticketed event with show, Mongolian feast and some riding/wrestling/singing competitions. Judging by the construction work of their show stage they are planning to make it even bigger this year.
Another Yunnan Mongolian festival is the Lubanjie 鲁班节, honouring the god of carpentry, sometimes held in 西城 village at the beginning of the fourth lunar month www.yunnanexplorer.com/festivals/lubanjie/. But when I once showed up for it, villagers were almost unaware that it was the day of a traditional ceremony.
New provincial museum nears completion
Posted byYes, that is it.
New provincial museum nears completion
Posted byI think it is on the southern side of Guangfu Road, just east of the intersection with Qianxing Road.
Rare snow dusts Kunming, causes problems
Posted byA bit of snow in Dali too, pictures here: www.yunnanexplorer.com/slideshows/dalisnow/
Yunnan: A Chinese Bridgehead to Asia
Posted byThis is the third time this very article is hitting my inbox in as many days as it is republished on various sites. It reads like a review one would do for money/exchange for reciprocal friendly review. Some might call it spam.
I guess I will never know if this book is actually worth reading or whether the author just seeks a lucrative consulting job as at over $100 it seems a bit pricey. No digital preview on Amazon either - what do they have to hide?