Don't worry, we're not feeling lonely. The title refers to the current reality here in Myanmar where once bustling tourist sights and streets have been transformed into ghost towns. Strings of flashing lights still hang from restaurants advertising the best Burmese, Indian, Nepalese – and even Tibetan – food in town, but the sobering and obvious fact is that most of these restaurants have only a few customers per day…and that's on a good day. There are simply very few tourists here.
Daniel Noll
Pamir Mountains Travel: A Beginner’s Guide
Our visit to the Pamir Mountains introduced us to some the most spectacular scenery we’ve taken in on our journey thus far. Other mountainous areas, hyped in guidebooks and on travel websites, have only paled in comparison. The Pamir region not only stands out for the severity and beauty of its landscape, but it shines most of all for the colorful, hospitable and fascinating Pamiri people who live there.
The Pamir Highway, roughly speaking begins in Kyrgyzstan and winds its way through Tajikistan, is one of the world's greatest road trips.
Myanmar: Go or No Go?
Myanmar (Burma) is a country noted for its oppressive government and lauded for the kindness of its people. This September, though, the political situation heated up again under protests and a corresponding government crackdown.
We’re back in the neighborhood of Southeast Asia again and we have the opportunity to visit. Do we go this time or give it another pass?
Big Almaty Lake and Kosmostancia: The Hike and The Observatory
Sometimes we seek beauty and sometimes we find it. Sometimes we seek a thrill and it finds us, giving us more than we had bargained for. Along our journey into the Tian Shan Mountains in Kazakhstan, we encountered pieces of history, stunning landscape, a draining hike, and the softer side of Almaty. The only thing missing: a map.
Couples Travel Hack: My Day, Your Day
Though long-term travel has its advantages, physical and emotional challenges are plenty. It also involves quite a bit of continual planning and preparation. In order to better maintain our sanity and preserve our marriage while on the road, we’ve recently decided to return to a practice that we applied successfully while traveling through Europe for five months in 2000. This little life hack technique goes by different names, but we call it “My Day, Your Day.”
Kazakhstan’s Postal Police
You know you are in trouble when the only people in the place who smile at you are the missionaries.
A trip to the post office in each country we visit is pretty standard for us. We dread it because of the time it usually eats up, but we always find ourselves making the journey in order to mail backup DVDs of our photos or an occasional postcard. From a cultural anthropological point of view, however, a trip to the post office affords us another slice of real life and provides a window into how a country actually works (or doesn’t).
Reflections: Expectations and Delivery in Turkmenistan
While planning our itinerary through Central Asia, we dismissed Turkmenistan mainly due to Audrey's impressions of the place. She envisioned a dark, totalitarian state where people mysteriously die in jail. The outlandish whimsical declarations of its leader, Turkmenbashi, would be humorous if they didn’t encase the six million people living there in a difficult reality. Having worked with Turkmenistan and some of its neighbors in the job she’d recently departed, Audrey was certain this wasn’t her vivid imagination running wild.
Dan kept Turkmenistan in sight and brought it up often enough to keep it on the radar of travel possibilities.
Reflections: Crossing the Caspian Sea
Your trip across the Caspian may provide some of the scariest and most fulfilling moments of your entire journey.
— A veteran journalist we met in Tbilisi, Georgia who had seen it all in the former Soviet Union.
Although we are posting this from Pingyao, China, we dial back a few clicks to the beginning of our journey in Central Asia in an attempt to adequately address the images in our mind and the notes in our journals.
Oddly shaped like a damaged index finger or a distressed plume of smoke, the Caspian Sea pumps out oil and caviar in the midst of the surrounding desert and extreme landscape.
Liv Tyler and Chinese Wine
Having just uncorked our first bottle of Chinese wine, we began to reminisce about the small, lovely and affordable French wine collection we'd built in Prague (then quickly quaffed), thanks to the Salon de Vignerons Independants (French Independent Vintners Festival) that we attended in February 2005 and February 2006 in Strasbourg, France.
Badakhshani Express: Scraping the Pamir Mountains with Tajik Air
As the end of our Tajik visas rapidly approached (overstaying one’s visa in Tajikistan comes highly unrecommended), circumstances forced us to take a puddle-jumping lunch box with wings from Khorog, the main town in Tajikistan's Pamir Mountains, to the country’s capital Dushanbe.