09 Sep 2016
I arrived in Ulaanbaatar at 2 am after twenty hours of travel, and hopped into the van of my driver and guide to be assaulted by a barrage of questions and opinions concerning US politics—more specifically Trump. My attempts to seek a little peace by staring out the window and acting uninterested failed, so I was extremely happy to pull up to my hotel and get into my room. I slept a few hours and woke in time to watch the sunrise over the city.
28 Jul 2013
We were invited to drinks by the nations business ministers, we saw the king drive by us on what our guide told us was one of his many road trips around the country where he visited the people in their homes, children played with us and loved to see the pictures we took, it was not uncommon to see men walking holding hands having discussions and the Bhutanese had no fear of us even though the country had only opened its borders to the outside world in the 1970’s. Some go to Bhutan for the trekking, rafting and biking. However, you can do those things in many places. This is an unusual place for a westerner; I recommend taking part in its unusualness.
23 Apr 2013
Kathmandu is a beautiful disaster. Amid the color, pattern, texture, filth, ritual, pollution, hippie westerners living on the cheap, marketing, mangled infrastructure, smell, music, traffic, corruption and the holy, it was hard not to feel like I was in the most unenlightened place in the world–a poverty tourist with the objective of seeing every aspect of life splayed out onto elaborately decorated fascias where everything is hyper real accept the armature.
09 Sep 2011
When in Beijing it is of course obligatory to visit the Great Wall of China. We hired a private guide to pick us up at our hotel and take us to a less traveled area of the wall located in the Hebei province. The drive was about an hour and half to the Jinshanling section, which we were told had less tourists. This turned out to be completely true, as we saw maybe a total of ten other travelers during the day we spent there. The Jinshanling section was of particular interest to us because there are sections that are both restored and not restored, so we were able to see what toll the past four hundred years had taken on this massive structure.
07 Sep 2011
We only spent four days in Hong Kong. We found it to be like many large cosmopolitan cities. Some of the highlights were afternoon tea at the Peninsula Hotel, which is Hong Kong’s oldest hotel, and a trip to the nearby Po Lin Monastery to see the Tin Tan Buddha. I think the most memorable site though, was while walking to the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens, we came across a black cobra eating a frog on the sidewalk.
