Category: Excursions
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On the road to Mandalay, eventually
You can actually fly to Mandalay from Yangon for about $75US, so the romance of the road is somewhat lessened. After bouncing around the Mon State south east of Yangon for the past week, I’ve come to value the brevity of flights. I’ve learned a few other things here, which I’ll note briefly. I’m saving…
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Notes on Yangon (which is also Rangoon)
1. Burmese script initially reminded me of the patterns woodbugs make when tunnelling into a two-by-four, then I decided it looked like binary code without the 1s, as seen through a wonky dot matrix printer, and now I’ve finally reconciled myself to the idea that it’s really just a series of counterfeiters’ adaptations of the…
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From Yangon, with sanity
Obviously no one briefed the censors that I was coming. This site is one of the only things out there that isn’t blocked. Thank you for your trust, Junta. Appreciated. We arrived yesterday morning after a long (and yet not long at all) journey from Shanghai: our flight out to Guangzhou sat on…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) Plum Rains
Last night around 10, my immune system decided it felt like inviting a cold around for a visit. Just as I was readying myself for what ought to have been a full night’s sleep, my nose went awry and my eyeballs hummed. This alone would have been fine, except that when I finally dozed off…
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Despo(t) 2010: Stan!
Also in this series: Death By Exposure and Despo(t) 2010: The Axis of Awesome In our quest to avoid the crowded pavilions at Shanghai Expo 2010, we embarked on an intensive one-day project to visit as many maligned countries as possible. We visited the Axis of Evil and a few non-affiliated-but-still-iffy countries. We…
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Shanghai Despo(t) 2010- The Axis of Awesome Pavilions
Also in this series: Death By Exposure and Stan! We went back to Expo on Saturday for a stubborn second round of heat stroke and agoraphobia. The first time we went, which was just last Tuesday on the second day of the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, we waited two hours in an increasingly…
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Death by Exposure: Expo 2010, Part 1
Also in this series: Despot 2010: Axis of Awesome and Stan! After we spent the first day of the Dragon Boat Festival being slothful, alternating dragging our bodies out for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, and lying dugong-like on the sofa, reading and drinking coffee, we decided to be ambitious for the second…
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On food and kitchens with three stoves
We had gone to Qiandao Lake, about three hours by car from Shanghai, for a weekend of diving: at the bottom of the the lake was a thousand year old village that had been flooded back in the 1950s for a dam project. When we arrived and suited up and threw ourselves overboard, we discovered…
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How Not to Organize a Bike Tour in Rural China
The road ended at the edge of a crumbling cliff, after a series of abrupt structural adjustments: what had been smooth asphalt turned to dusty asphalt, then to pot-holed concrete, then to broken concrete then to gravel then to rutted, dried mud. It was when we hit the rutted dried mud that we found the…
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The Hordes of Yangshuo
The hills are so famous that they are on the 20rmb note. Looking closely at a 20rmb note, I failed to see the armies of uniformed tour groups and the clusters of hotels and the endless checkpoints of touts and vendors surrounding the hills. They are there. I know they are. We walked amongst…
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Best Little Whorehouse in Cairo
In Tahrir Midan, the Picadilly of central Cairo’s circuses, after a long, hot, dusty day spent being shadowed by touts and hissing men, we searched for dinner, for a beer, for a rest. But trouble in Arabic was brewing above a teahouse on the corner and robocops were filling the side alleys. We hadn’t…
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Berfumery and Hosbitality in Cairo
We will start with Mohammed Ali and the perfumists of Cairo. We wandered down the mad and busy streets between the meydans, searching for a cafe, a restaurant, anything for a hint of food. Do Caireans eat? There are bags and watches and travel agencies and tea houses but we could find no food…