Category: non-US

Travels with Dick and KarenCHINA Spring 2012Part 7Hong Kong(again) On the flight from Guilin to Schenzhen, Karen was fascinated by the building thunderheads and that the bottoms disappeared. The bus from Schenzhen in China to Hong Kong passes over a many mile long bridge, passing through miles and miles of oyster rafts shellfish Once again…

Travels with Dick and KarenCHINA Spring 2012Part 6Yangshuo You’ve seen dozens of these Chinese brush paintings, depicting exotically-shaped mountains wreathed in fog and mist, with hanging trees and occasional pavilions… that’s the Li River near the town of Yangshuo. This was hanging on the wall of our room there. Getting there from Jinghong was an…

Travels with Dick and KarenCHINA Spring 2012Part 5Jinghong The bus from Menglun crossed the Langcang River… which will cross the border in about 20 miles to be renamed as the Mekong, serving as the border between Laos and Burma. Jinghong is a much smaller city than Kunming… only a half-million people. So far it has…

Travels with Dick and KarenCHINA Spring 2012Part 4Menglun We had the choice of taking a nine-hour bus ride from Kunming to Jinghong, or a one hour flight. We chose the flight. At Jinghong we hopped in a taxi for a quick shuttle into town to the long-haul bus station. There we caught a two-hour bus…

Travels with Dick and KarenCHINA Spring 2012Part 3Shilin(Stone Forest) We visited the Stone Forest as a day-trip from Kunming. We had originally wanted to stay overnight but couldn’t contact any of the hotels mentioned in the guidebooks. Once we arrived we discovered that all the old hotels had been torn down to make way for…

Travels with Dick and KarenCHINA Spring 2012Part 2Kunming This is a gate… most of our internal flights started and ended with a bus taking us from the terminal to a walk-up stair somewhere out on the tarmac. Sometimes the bus would stop mid-way from the aircraft to pick up another flight-load (making for a very…

Travels with Dick and KarenCHINA Spring 2012Part 1Hong Kong We left Seattle on a mid-February afternoon, allowing spectacular views along the British Columbia coast and these fjords in Alaska AK fjords Hong Kong Airport sees millions of tourists per year. They gather at their assigned posts, waiting for their pennant-carrying guides. The food at the…

Travels with Dick and KarenSouth AfricaPart 4Animals and Mountains:Addo to Krugervia the Drakensbergs Just north of Port Elizabeth is Addo Elephant Park which the guide books all raved about. Soon after entering the park we saw lots of evidence of elephants, such as these: and this: But the first few animals we saw were antelopes(hmmm……

Travels with Dick and KarenSouth AfricaPart 3Tree Tops and Surf:east of Cape Townto Port ElizabethSouth Africa- Garden Route At Strand we hit the sea again. High-rises on one side of Beach Road, and…. … across the road is a wide sweeping beach. Under-populated on this early spring day but apparently thronged in the summer. Without…

Travels with Dick and KarenSouth AfricaPart 2Namaqua: flowers and shores of the west coast We finally headed out of Cape Town. People descending upon cars at intersections to hawk their wares was common. But we only found one case during the whole trip (in the Drakensbergs) where a simple “no, thank you” was not sufficient…