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.
Nobel laureate Mo Yan's Yunnan connection
Posted byApology accepted, sometimes in the heat of the moment we do things that we know are not right and regret later.
However, there is a different aspect to this story, which prompted my original comment. Certain countries try to erase unwelcome people from their collective memory. For writers this means: their books never published, their plays not performed, their names not mentioned. In the case of Gao Xingjian the official Chinese response was to deny that he is Chinese and he has become one of those unmentionables: so for the Chinese media, Mo Yan is the first Chinese to receive the Nobel prize for Literature.
I can accept that GoKM tries to avoid anything that is even remotely controversial (even though that is a marked change from the previous owners and GoKM appears to be more Catholic than the pope by even not mentioning Kunming events that are widely reported in the Chinese media, the most recent involving a Fujian official and a Kunming newspaper). But I do draw the line where this policy turns not just into statements that are not true, but that collude in the practice of erasing dissidents from collective memory.
There has been another Chinese writer receiving a major literary award with two more than tenuous connections to Yunnan. Searching for 'Friedenspreis 2012' will give you a few more details.
@Liumingke1234
thank you for accepting the apology on my behalf. I did not know I had an impostor on GoKM.
Nobel laureate Mo Yan's Yunnan connection
Posted byCorrection: your original page said he is the 'Mo is the first Chinese person to win the Nobel Prize for literature'.
Double checked with the Google cache:
See webcache.googleusercontent.com/[...]
Shame on you, Patrick, for changing the article and pretending you did not.
Nobel laureate Mo Yan's Yunnan connection
Posted by... 'as it clearly states in the article's final paragraph'...that you changed after I posted my comment.
The previous version said 'Mo is the first Chinese to win...', no mention of the cop-out 'citizen' in your initial version.
A mistake is one thing, a stupid mistake is another thing, not having the integrity to own up to it is three steps down from that. Shame on you.
Gao Xingjian was born in China, wrote in Chinese, got his book published in Taiwan, wrote about his life in China and everybody understood the award as criticism of contemporary China/Chinese literature.
The guy is French, obviously.
Nobel laureate Mo Yan's Yunnan connection
Posted byGao Xingjian was the first Chinese person to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. China was not pleased about it and tried to ignore it happened.
Is this already too controversial for the new GoKM?
Golden Week: Planes, trains and especially automobiles
Posted byThanks for providing another sanitized view of Yunnan that bears little resemblance to what people say about their 'holidays'. It is also good to 'know' that Yunnan has one of the best road safety records in the world, with (if one would extrapolate) just 150 people dying in traffic accidents over a year in a population of over 40 million.
Most articles by you seem to be just sloppy copy and paste jobs from the internet - essentially collations of unchecked numbers. Sometimes I wonder if you actually live here.