I stopped a night in Jinghong (after a 9 hour bus ride down from Kunming), intending to cross the border into Laos.
First of all, there are NO more flights from Jinghong out of China - you have to fly from Kunming if you want to leave China. Ok, I found that out the hard way.
Next, the thing they - being both guide books and the genuinely helpful dude (Alex) in Banna (not Banana unfortunately) cafe - say is, to cross to Laos, take a bus to Mengla (somehow pronounced mulla, weird), stay the night there, get up early and get a bus that goes through Mohan (the border) and onto Luang Namtha. But I decided that was a night I didn't want to waste in Mengla (according to the guide book, super boring, and it looked it), so I got a bus from Mengla straight to Mohan (about 1 hour, but lots of stopping), and then just jumped out of the bus, exited through Chinese customs, and got a tuktuk to Laos customs. You can buy a visa there (looks like it's a pretty permanent thing, but who knows with Laos).
On the Laos side, things turned shit for me (see next post). Do NOT pay 200RMB to get a shit tuktuk to Luang Namtha - it's too much money.
Oh, I had my first chicken on a bus experience. Surprisingly it was China and not Laos. It was on the quite nice bus from Jinghong to Mengla. We stopped in the middle of nowhere and these really brown Chinese people got on with bags of vegetables and a live chicken (soon to be eaten I suspect, after they got off...).
Went with the flow (Stephen bought an iPod classic) and bought an iPod touch in San Fran. Surprised at how much I like the device - I always thought there were a bit useless but I'm really enjoying it.
Stephen and I went into Virgin in the middle of the city looking for ipods. They had a pretty small range. Then we decided San Fran must have an Apple store, so we walked for *hours* looking for it. Couldn't find it anywhere. Crazy. So we trudged back to the hotel to look up the address...and we found out it was very close to where we just were. How had we missed it? We trudged back...and there it was, a huge, hulking Apple store with a massive Apple symbol on it...directly opposite the Virgin store we had first walked into. No idea how we had missed it...could it have been simply because it didn't have the word "Apple" written on a wall somewhere?
I have now drunk (considerable amounts of) alcohol each day for the last 7, which is the first time I've done this since about 1995...actually, it's 8 days.