TRAVEL
July 8, 2012
LAOS Slide show Pierre Odier will discuss the remote ethnic villages of northwestern Laos and the Taialue, Kamu Lue, Akah, Hmong and Black Tai peoples. When, where : 7:30 p.m. Monday at Distant Lands, 20 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena. Admission, info: Free. RSVP to (626) 449-3220. CLIMBING Presentation Isabel Suppe will discuss her book "Starry Night," which tells the tale of her survival in the Bolivian Andes after falling 1,100 feet off an ice face.
NEWS
April 13, 2012 | By Mary Forgione, Los Angeles Times Daily Travel & Deal blogger
Twenty years ago, Asia Transpacific Journeys started a tour to Vietnam , Laos and Cambodia under the unifying theme Passage to Indochina. The trip has become the company's most popular small-group tour. "We pioneered this combination of activities when these countries were just opening their borders," Marilyn Downing Staff, founder and president of Asia Transpacific, says in a statement. The Passage to Indochina trip takes 17 days to explore the region.
NEWS
March 3, 2012
Martin Voet and his partner, Thea Cohen, traveled to Southeast Asia last fall with a group of UC Berkeley alumni. In northern Laos, he spotted this boy sitting with an elderly monk at a temple along the banks of the Mekong River. The contrast between the monk's expressive, weathered face and the young boy's calm look caught Voet's attention. The Mission Viejo resident used a Nikon D7000. View past photos we've featured . To upload your own, visit our reader travel photo gallery . When you upload your photo, tell us where it was taken and when.
BUSINESS
January 2, 2012 | By John Boudreau
When Yon Meakchan isn't converting publications into electronic form for customers such as Stanford University, he pedals his bicycle 10 miles south from his office to the rural edges of this city of 2 million people to help his family, pulling weeds in rice paddies, tending to banana trees and wading into a murky river to bathe oxen. "Poor people work very hard," said Yon, the eldest of eight children who grew up in a bamboo and thatched-roof house. "If they want to buy nice clothes or a motorbike, they can't.
ENTERTAINMENT
September 25, 2011 | By Nick Owchar, Los Angeles Times
The novel "The Night Circus" (Doubleday: 387 pp., $26.95) is receiving a good deal of attention, and it's rightly deserved - even though some comparisons of Erin Morgenstern's fable to other popular books seem sky-high and unfair (to her). Does anyone's book, for instance, really deserve the pressure of being called the next Harry Potter? Can anyone live up to that? In the vaguest of terms, there's a similarity to Rowling's saga. Morgenstern's novel also centers on two dueling magicians, one of whom is difficult to pin down by name.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
February 5, 2011 | By Diana Marcum, Los Angeles Times
They promised a funeral fit for a king. There were to be dignitaries; a long red carpet; thousands of pigs, cows, chickens and ducks to be sacrificed for feasting. It had to be a funeral that crossed cultures and time, peace and war. For this was both goodbye to one man and to the founding era of a people. So thousands of mourners ? including the exiled prince of Laos, widows of Hmong soldiers who died in a "secret" war and families who battled an East Coast blizzard to make it in time ?