Staying in Yuncheng, Northern China

Hi this is the hotel that I am saying in in Yuncheng, Northen China.

It ain't much but it's home for a while. They have dog on the menu. Yukky!

Friendly Chinese people

I just finished work at the factory at the usual time and got transport to the hotel with the rest of the guys from work. we went for dinner in the hotel restaurant and enjoyed some top notch Chinese food. people drifted away and I was left alone at the table finishing my last cigarette before retiring to my room when two Chinese waitresses appeared and said something to me which I obviously did not understand. I stood up to leave because I thought that they wanted to clear the table, at which point one of the girls produced a mobile phone and beckoned me to have a picture taken with her friend. I of course obliged and then it was the first girls turn. She stood close made the usual victory sign, the camera clicked and they both ran off in a fit of giggles. I guess they don't get many foreigners in this area of China. Damned friendly these Chinese people!

Doi Satep Chiang Mai

Thailand’s hill tribe people

A couple of years ago my wife and I went Chiang Mai and visited a hill tribe village, among other things. I took these pictures of of the Karen tribe and as you can see they wear amazing neck bands to extend their necks, hence the term the ‘long necked’ hill tribe.
We spent a good few hours in the village looking at the hand made goods that they had made to sell to the passing tourists. It was a fascinating day and we thoroughly our time there.

CIA hitman Bill Young found dead in Chiang Mai

Killing was part of the job' said former agent described as 'a retired James Bond
BY EDWARD LOXTON

An American missionary's son who became a top CIA Vietnam War-era hit-man in the jungles of Burma, Laos and Thailand has been found dead in his Chiang Mai home, a bullet in his head, a revolver in one hand and a crucifix in the other.

"Bill Young died as he once lived - violently," said a friend.

William Young was 76, a tall, lean, modest and quietly spoken man who belied the image of a CIA killer. He was likened by his British friends to a retired James Bond.

"He was an extraordinary individual who led an extraordinary life," said the US Consulate General in Chiang Mai, the main city of northern Thailand, in a death notice.

Despite his action-packed CIA career, Young drifted into quiet retirement in his rambling home on the outskirts of Chiang Mai. Disowned by the CIA after challenging US policy in Vietnam and Laos, Young worked at home for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, using the contacts he had built up over the years among the hill-tribes of Laos and northern Thailand.

I visited him over a period of several weeks, working on the script of a film about his extraordinary life. Our long recording sessions were broken regularly by phone calls from his contacts, conducted in at least four different hill tribe languages.

Bill was most at home among the Lahu, who inhabit the mountains of Laos and northern Thailand. Lahu mourners packed a Chiang Mai church, together with other hill tribe representatives, for a traditional ethnic funeral service today.

Hundreds of hill tribe people in traditional dress, including members of the warlike Wa, are expected to attend the burial on Wednesday in Chiang Mai's Foreign Cemetery, a leafy corner of the city watched over by a bronze 19th century statue of Queen Victoria.

Bill's grandfather was a Baptist missionary who converted thousands of Lahu tribespeople in British-controlled Burma in the late 19th century. His father, Harold, also a missionary, pioneered the CIA connection by joining the American intelligence service and conducting spy missions in southern China after Mao Ze Dong's Communists ousted the Kuomintang.

Bill was born at a mission station in Burma and grew up in hill tribe villages, learning at least five local languages and forging friendships that were later to help him in his dangerous espionage work.

Harold Young's Washington connections secured Bill a CIA post, and soon the young operative had gathered an army of several thousand Lahu warriors to help disrupt communist supply lines running through Laos during the Vietnam war. "Killing was part of the job," he told me, detailing several scenes where he had shot his way out of tight corners in remote hill tribe villages.

Although Laos was officially neutral, US special forces penetrated deep into the landlocked country as the Vietnam war raged, while US aircraft bombed border sections of the Ho Chi Minh trail which carried North Vietnamese supplies southwards. The US did all it could to cover up its Laotian operations, which came to be described as the 'Secret War'.

At the height of the fighting, Bill was air-dropped into the mountains of central Laos to find a suitable site for an airfield base. He scoured the mountainous, forested terrain on foot and finally found an ideal valley near the Plain of Jars. (The photograph at the top of the page, which was on display in Young's living room in Chiang Mai, was taken during this period.)

The CIA operation known as Air America based itself there and within months the

Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/77251,people,news,cia-hitman-bill-william-young-found-dead-at-his-chiang-mai-home-air-america#ixzz1IjTFlEgb

Taxis blockade Phuket cruise passengers

The luxury cruise liner Silver Spirit at Phuket Deep Sea Port this morning.

Phuket Marine Police chief Phuripat Theerakulpisut makes a point
during today's emergency meeting at the Deep Sea Port.
PHUKET: -- The latest tuk-tuk and taxi blockade at the Phuket Deep Sea Port led to a victory for the drivers, who from today will be given a “50-50 share” of access to disembarking cruise ship passengers.
Vice Governor Nivit Aroonrat, Phuket City Police chief Chote Chitchai and local Marine Police brokered the agreement at about noon today, four hours after the blockade was set up.
Many of the 472 passengers aboard the Silver Spirit cruise liner had planned to take half-day minivan tours of Phuket, returning to the vessel before its scheduled departure at 1pm.
Their Phuket experience will not be a fond one, however, as they were not allowed past the blockade of some 200 angry taxi and tuk-tuk drivers.
The drivers were protesting the fact that local tour agents pick up most of the passengers who disembark from cruise ships at the port, leaving them with no work and no income.
“We have discussed this with the tour agencies and local authorities 10 times already over the past year, but still nothing has been done,” Taweesak Jumpada, a local taxi driver at Ao Makham for the past 12 years, told the Phuket Gazette.
Japanese tour operator Osaki Takumi said, “We had four Japanese guests who have booked a half-day round-trip tour, but now they cannot enjoy that as the ship is scheduled to leave at 1pm.”
The passengers are on a cruise from the Malaysian island of Penang to Columbo in Sri Lanka.
One of the tourists, 50-year-old Brazilian Marlove Araujs, said she and her husband were disappointed that their half-day tour had to be canceled.
“I have been to Phuket once before and I was very much looking forward to having another look around,” she said.
Another tourist, 66-year-old Schettle Roland, of Luxembourg, said, “This is bad. I came here 10 years ago. I didn’t plan to go inland myself, but I am not sure tourists will want to come to Phuket if they are greeted like this.”
One of the taxi drivers who helped reach the agreement, 50-year-old Narin Kebsup, said he was part of a 160-member collective of local taxi and tuk-tuk drivers.
Drivers wait all day for fares at the port, only to find that their time has been wasted when tour operators send their own vehicles to collect passengers, said the 20-year veteran driver.
As part of the agreement worked out today, tour operators will now have to inform the taxi and tuk-tuk co-op when they plan to use their own vehicles, he said.
The latest blockade was aimed at the management of the Sea Tour travel agency, but the Ao Panwa taxi co-op has shown in the past they are ready to take on all comers when they feel their interests are at stake.
In June last year a similar blockade was staged to stop US Navy seamen from taking buses paid for by the US military to points in Patong.
It was later reported that US military personnel had been the subject of at least three similar blockades, yet US Embassy staff downplayed the incidents and continued to insist Phuket was a preferred port-of-call for off-duty servicemen.

-- Phuket Gazette 2011-04-06

This is what you can expect when you arrive at by sea or at the airport. It really is time that the Government did something to protect the rights of the tourists.

Rick