I enjoy traveling in China overall, but that enjoyment does not generally extend to the accommodation search outside of popular destinations. Only hotels with the proper license are allowed to accept foreign guests and the Chinese government does not seem to hand out many of those licenses in less visited destinations. In many small towns only one or two places will be allowed … [Read more...]
Survive New Delhi Station and the Rest of India is Easy
New Delhi railway station serves as a great introduction to India in that it combines much of what is annoying about the country into one location. Every visitor to India will have stories of annoying touts and scams and some people will have nothing but. In actuality, only a small part of the country provides the fodder for these stories; unfortunately, that small part is the … [Read more...]
Don’t Let China Into Your Home!
The concepts of manners and personal hygiene are viewed very differently in China. In my two years in the country, I saw people clipping their toenails at their restaurant table, grown men defecating by the side of the road, a pretty violent brawl between two old men on a bus and virtually everybody smoking everywhere all the time. Luckily, it's always possible to retreat to … [Read more...]
Jade Dragon Snow Mountain: Choose the Correct Chairlift or Suffer
When you imagine spending a day in the mountains, you don't generally picture yourself second-hand smoking hundreds of cigarettes amidst thousands of people in a large, dimly lit room, but that's pretty much what a day on the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (Yulong Xueshan in Chinese) near Lijiang in China's Yunnan province looks like for most visitors. Waiting times for a chairlift … [Read more...]
Bagan by Horse Cart: The Best of Three Bad Options
When most people think of Myanmar, they imagine a hazy, flat plain with hundreds of reddish-brown stupas poking up above the patchy tree cover. The area they are picturing is called Bagan. It lies in Myanmar's dusty central plains on the banks of the Irrawaddy River and is characterized by not hundreds, but thousands—over 2200, to be exact—temples and stupas. Due to its … [Read more...]