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Showing 1-25 of 39 results
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Conquering (?) Vertigo in Tiger Leaping Gorge
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 30 October 2011
Z jumps from stone to stone across the waterfall which tumbles in a rocky stream across the cliff-edge path and a mile or so down grassy rock, autumn wildflowers and...
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The Friday Photo: Autumn Wildflowers in Tiger Leaping Gorge
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 28 October 2011
Trekking the world’s deepest gorge in mid-October, pushing two miles above sea level, you don’t expect to see wildflowers. But in Tiger Leaping Gorge, in northern Yunnan, China, not far...
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Oh James! I’m Sorry About the Jade!
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 26 October 2011
James is bookish, bespectacled, educated in Kunming and Chiang Mai, a walking encyclopedia of Chinese history and culture. He’s thirty, with a three-year-old son, yet old enough to remember the...
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The Friday Photo: Black Dragon Pool
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 21 October 2011
This is Black Dragon Pool, one of the most tranquil places in beautiful Lijiang, China. It was built as a pleasure garden for the feudal ruler’s wives and on clear...
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The Prettiest Town We’ve Ever Visited
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 19 October 2011
Ever heard of Lijiang? It’s an old town in northern Yunnan, in what was once the Dali Kingdom, the fought-over hinterland between China and Tibet. Curved eave buildings topple up...
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House-hunting in China — Easier than it Seems
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 22 September 2011
This morning, I woke up on the 32nd floor, looked out of my bedroom window, across the smog that clouds the rising sun, across the skyscrapers, across the building sites,...
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Photo of the Week – Shangri La China
Blog: Ottsworld - 10 December 2010
The Tibetan Buddhist Monastery named Songzanlin is the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Yunnan and one of the most famous in the region. The monastery was constructed in 1679 and looks like a Kasbah – with houses stacked on top of each other on a hillside. Approximately 700 monks live in those houses in this [...]
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Come away O human child
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 24 October 2010
To the traveller there is a special kind of horror which lies in the plotted map. The fear of permanency, of the unchanging and eventually becoming the eternal. The knowledge that you can never really fully leave a place nor at the same time ever return to it again. That all the memories in your [...]
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Enter the Dangsters
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 13 October 2010
“Whooooooo!” the girls in the doorway screamed, “is everybody ready to paaaaarty!” she shouted throwing her arms in the air and allowing her body length black shawl to fall to the floor revealing two inch stiletto high heals, fishnet tights, hotpants, a bare midriff and a overflowing corset jam-packed and on the brink of going [...]
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Back drifting
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 3 October 2010
Dreams of Siberia give way to the blue morning haze, ice on a northerly wind, winter has found me once again, its time to flee, to south and out of China for good, already I have been here nearly two months, time to move on. I plot a course skirting the border back to Kunming [...]
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Yunnan: A Must-See in China?
Blog: To China... and Beyond! - 2 August 2010
On Twitter last week, I happened to see a tweet from @WildChina promoting their “Chinese Treasures” tour as the perfect first-trip-to-China. It includes stops in Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an — and Lijiang, in the northwest of Yunnan Province. Beijing, Shanghai and Xi’an are obvious and good choices, but Lijiang? I’m not so sure.
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Dr. Ho
Blog: Hello, Pineapple? - 22 July 2010
Dr. Ho is one of the most popular and publicized characters in South West China. He lives in the traditional Naxi town of Bai-sha. From our home base in Lijiang, Yunnan Province, we decided to take a day trip to visit the famous Taoist physician in the hopes of receiving some natural remedies for EZ's knee ailments. Usually to get to Bai-sha the thing to do is depart by bike from Lijiang and cycle through the majestic country side.
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Rubber Stamp - Story 1 (without horror)
Blog: Hello, Pineapple? - 16 June 2010
EZ and I had heard so many horror stories about travellers being denied VISA's into China, getting turned away at the border, having books such as Lonely Planet China confiscated by officials, that we were ready for anything when we began the process of getting our tourist Visas. Information on the government of Canada website led us to believe that travellers can only get their tourist Visa from a Chinese embassy in their native land. This was also false. We got ours at the Chinese Embassy in Singapore and the process could not have been smoother.
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Hoist the sails once more
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 12 May 2010
22nd Oct I cant stay here forever, I just cant I have to move, but where? How do I get to Vietnam? I have to get a visa, that can be done in Kunming but will probably take the best part of a week, perhaps I’ll skip Hong Kong, what do I even know about [...]
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Shangri-La: No Longer a Figure of Speech
Blog: To China... and Beyond! - 3 May 2010
The first few times I told my mother I was going “to Shangri-la,” she thought I was unusually excited about my next trip. Since its first appearance in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, “Shangri-la” has become a shortcut for paradise, a place so wonderful it cannot be described.
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Ducking Boulders, Dodging Rockslides & Living To Tell The Tale
Blog: To China... and Beyond! - 28 April 2010
This is the second of two posts about my adventure hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge. Monday’s post describes the beginning of this not-so-easy trek. After a pretty tough hike on day one, Lily and I didn’t know what to expect from day two in Tiger Leaping Gorge.
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The Guidebook That Cried “Wolf”
Blog: To China... and Beyond! - 26 April 2010
The extent to which I underestimated Tiger Leaping Gorge can be measured in pounds: 2.7 pounds, to be precise. That’s the weight of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 944-page tome Team of Rivals, which I mistakenly thought would be a good hiking accessory.
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Doubling Back
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 16 April 2010
16th Oct As unfashionable as it is in this age of social networks, where every job application requires buzzwords like outgoing, fun, teamplayer, an era where introspection is held in suspicion, as the mark of a flawed person or worse a perversion, I must admit it that its rare that Ive ever travel with somebody [...]
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At the sky-edge
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 7 April 2010
15th Oct Wander around the monastery, climbing the steps at this altitude becomes as feat of almost Herculanean proportion. Exhausted and panting like some sort of barn animal I eventually reach the top where a Buddist monk catches my eye and throws me a sly knowing wink as he playfully reaches over the barrier to [...]
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The making of Shangri-La
Blog: Four Seas As Home - 6 April 2010
Our last stop in Yunnan was a town that until nine years ago was known as Zhongdian (中甸), now called Shangri-La (transliterated into Chinese as 香格里拉), and is an excellent (if extreme) example of the touristification of Yunnan. In the 90s, other towns in Yunnan, like Dali and Lijiang, were beginning to bring in big [...]
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The secret land beyond the clouds
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 30 March 2010
14th Oct The cold Lijiang dawn greets me bringing strange paranoid haze, my first instinct is to hole up here in the hostel of the day. Outside the constant stares and laughter would normally wash over me but in this fragile mood seclusion seems preferable. Its one of those rare occasions that the constant hustle [...]
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Tiger Leaping Gorge
Blog: Four Seas As Home - 29 March 2010
A hike through Tiger Leaping Gorge (虎跳峡) is one of the must-dos for Western backpackers in Yunnan, and with the lure of fresh air and beautiful views, we were no exception. In China, these kinds of places tend to be fairly developed, with stone paths, stairs up the steeper parts, elegantly disguised trash cans, railings [...]
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Xishuangbanna
Blog: Yoyo's travel blog - 21 March 2010
Xishuangbanna is the chinese Thailand. Or maybe the Thai frontier. It’s more like an outpost of south east Asia, set in southern Yunnan. Walking the streets of Jinghong, the region’s capital, you notice the difference immidiately. People are darker skinned, they wear shorter cloths, tree-tops shade you from the sun and different cuultures show their [...]
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Dali favorites
Blog: Four Seas As Home - 18 March 2010
Favorite hotel We stayed in the Yuyuan Guesthouse (玉源客栈, recommended in Lonely Planet), which is probably our favorite hotel on the trip so far (although the Fairyland hotel chain in Kunming is a close contender). Yuyuan is on a small, beautiful pedestrian street (红龙井) that has a brook-style fountain running down the middle, close to the [...]
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Wanderings in the realm of the hungry ghost
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 17 March 2010
Cooing softly from the darken alleyway, Lijiang the beautiful, the seductive, soft and yielding, the painted lady of Yunnan. Lijiang the chinese fairytale, a sinophillic fantasy, Lijiang the city-ornament of the east, Lijiang pretty, beguiling, hollow and empty, the whispered promise of a whores voice. I spend the day wandering the old town, its incredibly [...]
