Ah, the ‘stans. I really liked this part of the world. After a wild series of connections through Addis Ababa, Beirut, and Istanbul, I arrived in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, mor than a day later. Boarding the flight in Istanbul was pretty funny. Anyone with a western passport had to get in a different…
View More
We took a barely-more-than-an-hour flight from Istanbul out to Cappadocia and stayed in Goreme for 3 nights to fulfill a dream: take a hot air balloon ride. And it was everything we dreamed it would be. We stayed in a traditional cave hotel and had a fire in the fireplace to keep warm. Views from…
View More
Early in the morning, I flew to Doha and then to Erbil in Kurdistan. Kurdistan not only includes the northern region of Iraq but also northern Syria and southeast Turkey. There is a strong independence notion in the area, that they should form their own country by separating from the other 3. Politics aside, here’s…
View More
I have to admit that I was not looking forward to visiting Muscat after how ridiculous my previous entry & exit experiences had been with passport control in Salalah, Oman. I was expecting a lot of grief and delays. The guy at passport control was clearly preoccupied with a text message conversation he was having,…
View More
If there was any advice about Bahrain I got, it was the same one from everyone: “a day is the right amount of time.” Yup. A day was plenty. It’s a small country, and it also didn’t have anything that jumped out at me as overwhelmingly unique that needed more time to investigate. It’s another…
View More