User profile: walter

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Forums > Living in Kunming > Kunming hotels near green lake park with 24 hour r

I highly recommend E-Wang Hotel on the corner of Xichang Lu and Kunshi Lu (昆明鹰王E捷酒店云南省昆明市昆师路2 / +86-871-63957000). No need to book ahead. Currently 179 @ VIP rate (ask!), circa 200 otherwise. 24 hours. Very good location with 3 minute walk to Green Lake but not affected by the annoying one-way street traffic problem around it. At the quiet end of a major night time barbeque street food market, great for meeting people and practising your Chinese. Very easy to get taxis about town and in walking distance to major foreign restaurants and nightlife locations. Nice rooms with aircon. Two free bottles of water per day - ideal for alcoholics.

I had a very bad experience with Lost Garden and would strongly recommend avoiding it. I used to run a hotel reservation network across China and having signed contracts with over 3000 hotels around the country feel it's fair to say that in general hostels are not useful in China unless you really want to save money and are in a major tourism center... you are better off with a private room for a few extra yuan, especially as security is one of your priorities. The cheaper/smaller/odder places tend to all have weird annoying issues and/or eccentric management.

Get a registered taxi from the airport - I can't remember what the toll is these days, probably something between 60-150 roughly. Meters are fair and drivers are honest in Kunming, so don't worry about being ripped off. It helps to have your destination written down in Chinese. The new airport is a long way out of town.

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Forums > Living in Kunming > Moving from Kunming to Sanya

Sanya can't be too bad as a former Kunming resident American teacher friend moved there and has stayed for many years.

The interior of the island in particular has some interesting Austronesian/Tai history.

The weather in Hainan is probably better than Xiamen, and there is probably less pollution.

You can go sailing in either place.

In Sanya you can go surfing, have the option to learn Russian, and they speak Mandarin instead of Fujian Hua which will likely be better for the development your Chinese language skills.

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Forums > Travel Yunnan > Advice: Diqing to Kunming but less touristy?

If you are looking for stops in between Xianggelila and Kunming, I would recommend Baishuitai. It has nice mineral terraces and a walk in the forest above the town is breathtakingly beautiful. Since it's mushroom season the locals may take you up picking. You can climb 1000m from there, it's pristine Himalayan pine forest. From there you can continue to Tiger Leaping Gorge via Haba, and either get the ferry across the river or hike the gorge backwards (maybe even for free).

Past there, check out Shibaoshan. To get there, just get any bus headed toward Dali or Kunming from the western end of TLG, then jump off at the turnoff to Jianchuan. You want to get a bus down Jianchuan way, get a room in Jianchuan, then walk up to Shibaoshan yourself the next day. It's a fair walk but definitely doable return. Alternatively, stay in Shaxi and do it from there.

You could also look at visiting Jizushan northeast of Dali's Erhai lake, or even Chenghai or Lugu Lake (after a boat across from TLG's eastern end), instead of going to Shibaoshan.

Between any of those places and Kunming is Chuxiong, which is also a great place to be in mushroom season, and has a dinosaur theme park based on its fossil vein as well.

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Forums > Living in Kunming > Sidecar Motorcycle

Definitely speak to the owners of Bad Monkey bar in Dali. The guy has a huge collection and is an escaped/retired professional classic car mechanic.

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Xishuangbanna is run Fujian mafia. Evidence includes exclusive ownership of major real estate, transport (golden peacock bus company, boat to Thailand), tourism (tropical park, elephant park) infrastructure. Central government needs to clear them out.

I have run an exchange for the last four years. It is considered normal to take full payment from brokers or individual market participants when accepting a buy order.

There are only two cases in which the described situation can emerge.

First, in some cases leverage is offered directly by the exchange (eg. 'You can put 5,000 on the table but we let you invest up to 15,000 (with extra fees)' ) as a means to increase liquidity (ie. overall trading volume) on the exchange. This is particularly the case on specific assets. Sometimes, fees are reduced or waived for certain market participants who are known as 'market makers' in exchange for a certain minimum amount of activity which facilitates a base liquidity to make the exchange attractive to others.

The second possibility, which sounds more likely, is that the Kunming operation in question has been 'double dipping' by claiming the customer funds as deposits for market positions, storing them in customer-linked accounts while actually spending the money on other things behind the scenes. Now, when some major portion of investors want out, there is frankly not enough cash available to provide. This is not necessarily illegal behavior, it's exactly the same type that UK banks were caught red handed for a few years earlier. In response the UK government enforced strict delineation between consumer banking and investment banking such that customer funds could not be gambled freely by the institution, and increased minimum deposit requirements for funds that are re-invested (ie. % of potential loss is smaller).

It's also possible that they do have the money tied up in other assets (eg. real estate) and just can't lay their hands on it so quickly.

Also check out Zigong in Sichuan, the first place to do deep drilling wells in the world ... and for the purpose of salt extraction! It's not far from Leshan, and also offers a park showing the proceeds of the rich local dinosaur fossil vein.

Sounds like an excuse. The west is moving in to Burma big time, China is fighting to stay relevant now that its long term geostrategic play of Burmese dominance and energy transit has been basically burned at the stake.

Sounds like China are going to use the excuse of poverty alleviation to build more roads and dams in the region, sell electricity and plastic trinkets to Burma thus ensnaring them economically, and perhaps try to open the road to Bangladesh or India. Burma, the US and the local state armies (Kachin, Wa, Shan to a lesser extent) don't want this. India already has communist insurgency problems (ala Nepal's recent situation) and that northeast corner of India is where China once waltzed its army in and out to prove a point before India could do anything.

The area is very geostrategically charged. Failing some kind of invasion (unlikely), it will be a long road away from methamphetamine manufacture, clear-felling forests, slave-like mining conditions, and heroin.

Sailing in Kunming

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Anyone still interested in sailing on Fuxian Lake can get in touch with me by private message here. I sail New Zealand designed, commercially produced trimarans, high speed boats made of light weight fiberglass and carbon fiber. No experience necessary.

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