Common Sense and Whiskey

Fifty Photos: #17

This photo, of a woman and her llama on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, is today's contribution from the Top Fifty Prints collection at EarthPhotos.com. Get top-notch professional 8x12 Glossy & Matte prints of any of the Top Fifty Prints for just $11.50 at EarthPhotos.com.

DPRK: Negotiations Off, Games On

We already know not to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. Now it appears that unless you want it to walk out of your nuclear talks, you don't want to insult North Korea.

From the BBC: "North Korea now says it is walking out for good, after describing the UN action (condemning their recent rocket launch) as an 'unbearable insult'."

*****

Separately, though it's too soon to stay at the hotel of doom, we've just gotten an email from Koryo Tours telling us that North Korea's Mass Games are on again this summer, from 10 August, and that "American tourists will also be welcome in North kora at this time of year...."

Details from the Koryo Tours web site.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Arirang gets green light in DPRK! (gadling.com)
• N Korea to boycott nuclear talks (news.bbc.co.uk)
• N. Korea Vows to Restart Plant and Boycott Talks (nytimes.com)

New RSS Feed Link

Just a note that, in addition to the Common Sense and Whiskey RSS Feed link at the top of this blog, I've added a new link to the AlphaInventions.com Travel RSS Feed in the Travel Tools list here on CS&W. You might take it out for a spin and see if you like the content they aggregate from like-minded blogs.

Tough Times for Thai Tourism

Less than five months ago protests shut down the shiny new Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, stranding travelers for days.

With the Thai people again at  each  others'  throats (running updates here via Bangkok's Nation newspaper), perhaps it's better to picture Thailand the way most visitors experience it - like in this photo of a beach on an uninhabited islet off Koh Samui.

As governments around the world react to the return of violence in Thailand with travel warnings, the tourism industries in neighboring Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam stand to benefit.

In Laos, the emerging showplace is the ancient royal capital of the Lan Xang Kingdom, Luang Prabang, a UNESCO World Heritage site on the Mekong River. The introduction of scheduled air service a few years ago has eliminated the need for a long overland trek or, as we experienced in 2000, a long float in from upstream, at the Thai border north of Chiang Rai.

Direct flights have brought other changes. In 2000 a tall cold Beer Lao in Luang Prabang would come with a big smile and change back from your dollar. Nowadays you can spend just shy of USD$500 a night for lodging.

Cambodia is touting development of its coastline, most notably at an island called Kep and adjacent to Vietnam's Phu Quoc island.

Vietnam's tourism sector has a huge jump on Laos and Cambodia. See a photo tour of Vietnam from the Cambodian border in the south all the way up to the far northern Chinese border, previously posted on CS&W. And as you're planning your non-Thai holiday, check out photos in the Laos Gallery and the Cambodia Gallery on EarthPhotos.com.

(Photo above from the Thailand Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Fifty Photos: #16

This photo, overlooking Paris from the Sacre Coeur cathedral in Montmarte, is today's contribution from the Top Fifty Prints collection at EarthPhotos.com. Get top-notch professional 8x12 Glossy & Matte prints of any of the Top Fifty Prints for just $11.50 at EarthPhotos.com.

Airplane Armrest for Two

A welcome idea.

Friday Photo Quiz #21

This downtown shot comes from a bustling national capital.With an estimated 8,000,000 population, this city ranks at the 22nd largest in the world, but if recent economic immigrants are included, the population is thought to almost double.

Can you name the country? The answer is after the jump.

A good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey & EarthPhotos.com.

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)

Driving Southern Chile

Punta Arenas, Chile was 110,000 people, a proper town with a proper town park just across the street, which was the home to the statue of Magellan and its smooth, often-rubbed toe (conveniently located for rubbing), which was mandatory according to the local lore. 2200 kilometers south of Santiago, you take what you get.

One passenger ship was calling just now. Across the strait, looking just about west to east, low hills rose around Bahia Porvenir, Tierra Del Fuego, home of a village of the same name, though I couldn’t make it out.

*****

Having rubbed the toe we spent the rest of the day driving to Hosteria Lago Gray. And weren’t we the city folk, speeding our petite white Nissan Saloon across 430 kilometers of utter wilderness as if we were in a hurry.

A wire screen over the windshield was to avoid a crack due to gravel, the rental car man made me understand. But no one else had one, so I gathered this really must have been the last car for rent in town.

We looked silly, I thought, motoring off toward the hills. A 1/4 inch mesh of expanded metal, anchored to the window all around extended far enough out for the wipers to operate underneath.

New Travel Sites

My friend Nomadic Matt, who runs the fine Nomadic Matt's Travel Site (listed in the Worth Your Time section here on Common Sense and Whiskey), has some new projects that I commend to you. Check 'em out when you have a chance:

Tropical Islands
Travel the World
How to Teach English Overseas

Tensions Around the Rim of the Former Soviet Union

from EarthPhotos.com

Photo of Rustaveli Boulevard and the Parliament building, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia from EarthPhotos.com.

More protests in Moldova (more later) coincide with a protest being planned in another former Soviet Republic. Watch the Republic of Georgia tomorrow at 13:00 local time, when organizers have promised a "Tulips - No to Violence" rally in Tbilisi, in which "participants will hand tulips to police officers."

The National Interest has background on the event, which comes as reaction to a Presidential pardon after a murder many believe was government-connected. The period since last August's Georgia/Russia war for South Ossetia hasn't been kind to President Mikheil Saakashvili, and it looks like he's feeling the heat.

There have been calls for his resignation, arrests of opposition leaders and the voluntary suspension of the Georgian language version of the Georgian Times, which came with this remarkable article in the Georgian Times' English edition.

Georgia Poised for an Unstable Spring reads a headline in the Gulf News. We hope not. We remain in touch with a friend we met on our visit to Tbilisi in 2006. With his permission, we'll share his impressions of the current state of affairs in the coming days.

But besides all that, Georgia is just one gorgeous little slice of the planet. Poised near the spine of the mighty Caucasus Mountains, here is the 14th century Trinity Church (Tsminda Sameba) perched beneath mighty Mt. Kazbek, at 5033 meters/16512 feet, taller that western Europe's tallest mountain, Mt. Blanc.

See more photos in the Georgia Gallery on EarthPhotos.com.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tensions Grow in Georgia Over Accusations of a Plot (nytimes.com)
• Moldova students raid parliament - BBC News (news.bbc.co.uk)

Photo Coverage from Moldova

For photo coverage of today's violent demonstrations in Chisinau, Moldova, watch this web site: Unimedia.info.

(Photos from Unimedia.info with permission, and thanks.)

Violence in a Last Outpost of European Communism

Foreign Policy wonders if Twitter will bring down the government in Moldova.

They ask: "Could it be that five years after the famous protests in Kiev's Maidan Square another technology - Twitter - will usher in another revolution in neighbouring Moldova? Will we remember the events that are now unfolding in Chisinau not by the color of the flags but by the social-networking technology used?"

They report the Twitter tag "pman" stands for "Piata Marii Adunari Nationale," the Romanian name for the biggest square in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau.

It's all mostly unintelligible to English speakers, but it's fascinating nevertheless. Could we be watching a revolution in real time?

(Photo via Unimedia, with thanks.)

A First-Timer's View of Rural China, 1995

We're deep into planning a July trip to Szechuan and Xinjiang provinces in China and then a quick spin through Kyrgyzstan & Kazakhstan. The full range of luxury hotels on offer today in Chengdu and Urumqi contrasts utterly with our first China visit almost fifteen years ago.

I went back to find a little taste of how China, mid-nineties, felt to a first timer. Here's an excerpt from our wide-eyed first trip to Guilin:

    Kiosk keepers huddled under strings of bare bulbs. An old pagoda perched high up on the hill across the river. Fruit and vegetable vendors and a magazine stand stood open at nine o’clock at night. Around a bend in the road, storefronts set sample dishes on the sidewalk, just out of the rain.

    A wet old man beckoned me in. We didn't speak a word in common except “OK” and “bye bye.” I drank a couple of big tall green bottles of beer I couldn't read  and I bought a bottle of something he thought I should buy. And there was some clear toast he kept pouring. Mostly we sat in his store and stared into the fog.

    A boy who'd studied English for three years came in. Then his brother came in, and the thing they could do best in English was urge us to come back tomorrow.

*****

    One side of Guilin was shiny, the other just rubble. Five years before, Guilin tore down the buildings on the whole west side of Zhongshan Road and rebuilt them all. Now they were doing the same thing on the east side.

    A bed careened by, balanced on a bicycle. Pointy-nosed little three-wheeled machines sputtered along, almost but not quite trucks. Water buffalo halted traffic and chewed the roadside, right in town. Guilin, somehow, was dusty even in the rain.

Fifty Photos: #15

This photo, of the Leaning Tower and Cathedral at Pisa, Italy, is today's contribution from the Top Fifty Prints collection at EarthPhotos.com. Get top-notch professional 8x12 Glossy & Matte prints of any of the Top Fifty Prints for just $11.50 at EarthPhotos.com.

Those Scared Little Noises

I can testify from personal experience that this is true, and it extends to Finland, too.

Intermittent Technical Problems Today at EarthPhotos.com

Approximately 3:00 p.m. eastern U.S. time today, Friday 3 April, 2009, EarthPhotos.com, hosted by Smugmug, which in turn contracts with Amazon.com for cloud memory, appears to be affected by the DDOS problems that have afflicted Amazon.com over the past couple of days. Service at EarthPhotos.com may be intermittent, and we apologize.

Related articles by Zemanta

• DDoS attacks hit major web services - Securecomputing.net.au (domainmacher.com)

Friday Photo Quiz #20

This photo comes from the center of a vibrant, tidy, well-functioning European capital. With a one hundred per cent literacy rate, this country is second in the world in female enrollment in primary, secondary & tertiary schools.

It has a mixed presidential/parliamentary system, and the current president is female. Can you name the country? The answer is after the jump.

A good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey & EarthPhotos.com.

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)

Lost in Translation?

Hee hee hee!

Thailand and Cambodia have been going through a bit of a rough patch lately, with troops facing off at a temple on their border, and this can't help. The Phnom Penh Post reports that Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen claims Thai Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya referred to Hun Sen as a "gangster."

No no no, the Foreign Minister replied. To the contrary, he didn't mean "gangster" at all. Instead he intended to praise Hun Sen as ‘sportsmanlike" and "big-hearted," "generous" and "manly." It was just a mistranslation.

(Photo of statues near Angkor Wat from EarthPhotos.com. There are photos from both countries in their respective photo galleries, the Cambodia Gallery and the Thailand Gallery on EarthPhotos.com.)

Fifty Photos: #14

This photo comes from Nagarkot, Nepal. It's today's contribution from the Top Fifty Prints collection at EarthPhotos.com. Get top-notch professional 8x12 Glossy & Matte prints of any of the Top Fifty Prints for just $11.50 at EarthPhotos.com.

*****

We left from Nagarkot bound for Lhasa, Tibet.

Ashray Raj Gautam waited in the dark before dawn. Men worked under the hood of his Toyota Corolla while we stuffed our things in its trunk. We pushed the car down the hill to get it started, and little Gautam took us to a town called Banepa, north of Kathmandu. Mirja bought junk food, I bought cheap Indian whiskey, and Gautam disappeared.

We waited for a long time, and when Gautam came back he had a confession. He did a sheepish, dusty little shuffle.

“We came here with no fan belt.”

He was sure we could get one in Banepa but he couldn’t find one.

“Excuse me sir, we have to wait for new car from Kathmandu one hour.” He went to find a phone.

So we were off, sort of, driving from Kathmandu to Lhasa. Our Tibet travel permits would be waiting at the border. The fellow who booked us said don’t bring pictures of the Dalai Lama (I had five), and don’t be surprised if the police follow you - they’re not too used to private visitors.

Continue reading our short story Blazing Across Tibet with Noodle Boy. See also the Nepal Gallery and the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Earth Hour Photos

Nice glamour shots from world landmarks and big cities around the globe on Boston.com's Big Picture coverage of Earth Hour 2009.