The days here in striking Yangshuo have blended together in a heady mix of wet, warm air and karst pinnacles covered in fog and foliage so dense its hard to tell which side is winning, the mountain or the jungle.
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Foggy Karst Romantics (20060428-30)
Food for Karsts (20060428)
Take a walk down any street in Yangshuo, and you’d be hard-pressed to avoid looking at a misty view of at least one towering karst. They litter the area like giant forest green anthills, and there is so much fog it’s hard to separate the enormous columns from their shroud.
All this impressive scenery stirs the stomach as well as the eyeballs, which suits Yangshuo just fine: there seem to be as many tasty dishes as there are karsts.
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Suckered (20060425)
If you look real carefully at the night sky, you might see a faint blinking glow coming from the direction of China. That strange red luminescence is the word “sucker” written in neon across my forehead, a result of getting on the wrong end of a tout this morning.
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Tiger claws and food stalls (20060424)
Arriving in China has been my trip’s equivalent of a human landing on Mars rolled into the Second Coming, with a 100cc dose of any solid Chinatown like a visual needle stuck right into my optic nerve.
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Goodbye, Pad Thai (20060422)
The benefits of being forced back to Bangkok with my tail between my legs (so to speak) were not readily apparent.
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Natural Penis Enlargement – The Hard Way (20060404-17)
I was released from a Bangkok hospital yesterday, 11 days after what had started as a disturbing but not overblown incident in Vientiane, that wound up swelling to enormous proportions involving general anaesthetic and something the insurance companies like to call “medical evacuation.”
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Possible Facts on Laos Tourism (20060405)
I’m stuck in Vientiane waiting for my China visa to return. Sad to say, it’s not a very exciting or interesting city. Not nearly half as charming as Savannaket, nor as filled with the hectic life as Bangkok, it just sort of sits here on the Mekong, pleasantly happy to exist as it does.
There are a wonderful plethora of restaurants, though, and the French-Vietnamese sandwiches and food at PVO are stomach-stunningly good.
I did, however, manage to peruse a somewhat newish copy of a newspaper from Bangkok, and came across these statistics on tourism in Laos in the print copy of the April 2nd Bangkok Post. I can’t seem to get their web page to load, which may be a Laos thing or may be a BP server thing. If anybody wants to hunt down this story on their home page and send it to me, this might be a bit more attributable.
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