As mentioned below, I spent part of the Dragon Boat Festival holiday in Dehang (德夯), in western Hunan Province. This beautiful village is located approximately 550 km west of Changsha, near the border with Guizhou and Chongqing. To get there, I took an eight-hour overnight train to Jishou, the gateway city to Dehang and many [...]
I just got back from two days in Dehang, a small village nestled in the mountains of western Hunan Province. Historically, it was an agricultural community belonging to the Miao minority group, also known as the Hmong. Now, the center of the village has been spiffed up for tourists, with plenty of shops, restaurants and [...]
If you happen to see the blog looking terrible today, I apologize — I’m trying to update Wordpress and make the blog integrate a bit better into the main site.
Tomorrow, May 28, is China’s Dragon Boat Festival, or Duanwu Jie. This traditional festival, which was added to the list of official holidays just last year, commemorates the heroism of Qu Yuan, a poet and government official from the Warring States Period. According to legend, Qu Yuan was exiled for daring to criticize some of [...]
Over the weekend, a group of fellow teachers and I headed out for one of our favorite Changsha traditions: spicy bullfrog! Called 牛蛙 (niuwa, which literally means bullfrog), is a specialty of Hunan cuisine. Dinner at the Bullfrog Restaurant is the traditional first-group-dinner for the Yale-China fellows in Changsha every September. This weekend, we were [...]
The blog I Will Teach You To Be Rich posted a terrific guide to inexpensive, full-time travel last week. Some of Nora Dunn’s tips were best suited for those planning to be on the road for a long time: work while traveling, get free accommodation, etc. But a few can just as well be applied [...]
Nomadic Matt recently posted about how his travel style is changing, from backpacker to something more upscale:
When I first started traveling, I always went for the cheapest option. Big dorms. Eating in hostels. Buses. Hitching. Overnight trains. Constant haggling. Street food. Stealing extra breakfast rolls. Now, I go for smaller dorms, I don’t mind flying, [...]
A few recent items of interest:
This New Yorker interview brought my attention to Earnshaw Books, which republishes old books on China, with a specific focus on foreigners’ accounts of their travels through China. I’ll be adding “Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom” to my to-read pile ASAP.
An AP correspondent in China offers this account of [...]
Lonely Planet just released the newest (11th, May 2009) edition of their guidebook for China. I haven’t seen it yet, but hopefully the new release addresses some of the map errors that plagued the 10th edition.
Amazon is selling it for $21.11, or 34% off the cover price of $31.99. Alternately, Lonely Planet is doing a [...]
James Fallows posted yesterday that, thanks to swine flu panic, China has modified its visa rules for US citizens:
China is tightening its visa rules for Americans, in the name of controlling the spread of swine flu. Normally, you could expect to get a routine tourist or business visa cleared in one to three days, depending [...]
