Dive into the archives.
- Safe in Kunming by the skin of my teeth
After a night train to the border, a day in Sapa, and a night bus from the border to the center of Yunan we’ve arrived safely in Kunming, but not after a hair-raising few days.
We rented a motorbike and biked around the mountain town of Sapa (my traveling partner drove, I hung on and took [...]
- Enclaves II: The Caucasus
Part I. Enclaves and Exclaves
The first region we want to look at, which is rife with enclaves, is the Caucasus. I recently noted the tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan which are a direct result of the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karbagh. Indeed, enclaves are almost always consistent causes of trouble whether due to ethnic tensions, smuggling, [...]
- Chinese Invaders, French Colonialists, Japanese Fascists, and American Imperialists
Hanoi is a bustling city and there’s much to do. I spent the day seeing the city on bike—no easy task with Vietnam’s traffic—including the old Citadel, the Temple of Literature, Ho Chi Minh’s Maosoleum, and the Military History Museum.
Although Hanoi is currently in the middle of the fourteenth Communist Party Convention or something [...]
- Gajan Kristnaskon!
Lake Ontario. I wanted to get a shot of Lake Huron in honour of Gitchi Manitou, but alas, this is the best I could do
Season’s greetings, Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah and have a great Muslim Christmas to all our readers from around the globe!
I am leaving Ontario early tomorrow morning, but will be blogging again [...]
- Crazy Vietnam Travel Photos and the Case of the Poisonous Rhubarb
We arrived at Hanoi after a harrowing twelve hour night bus and wasted no time in making our way to the Perfume Pagoda. It was an exhausting but exciting day, and I’ve got more pictures of temples, pagodas, caves, and dramatic landscapes. But since that’s essentially more of the same, I will instead [...]
- Christmas Rendition
“As usual I have returned from America rather depressed by the greatness and vitality of that huge and young nation with which it seems useless for us to compete in the long run on anything like equal terms.” -Sir Igantius Valentine Chirol (1904)
That’s right, it’s that special time of year when Chirol leaves the land [...]
- Enclaves and Exclaves
In the spirit of ComingAnarchy’s love of Geography, history and geopolitics, I’d like to introduce the first in a series of posts on a geographical oddity which has led to a great deal of political trouble throughout history, namely, the enclave and exclave. An enclave is a piece of land which is totally surrounded by [...]
- WaPo in Yemen
Something about Yemen has always fascinated me. I had always planned to take a trip there, and maybe I will in the future. In the meantime, I will just have to read an interesting series the Washington Post has on an American NGO working in Yemen. So far there are two articles, an extensive photo [...]
- Hue in Sepia
I just got back from a cruise down the Perfume River, where we joined a charming elderly French couple to see the famous pagods and tombs of central Vietnam (for background see yesterday’s post). It was rainy, which in Vietnam means everything gets caked in mud. Fortunately our boat only broke down once, [...]
- FA’s top books of 2005
Foreign Affairs magazine has compiled a list of the 20 top-selling books on American foreign policy and international affairs. Notables include:
#1 The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman
#2 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
#7 Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground [...]
