Everything had gone according to plan. A pleasant English-speaking Georgian at the train window sold me my berth, the equivalent of first class, on the train that would take me out of Tbilisi, across the border to Armenia, and ultimately deposit me in Yerevan in the early morning. The big remaining question: would I have… Read More Yerevan the Eternal
Well I broke down and took a tour. I’ve prided myself for many years on being an independent traveler, getting from point to point by taking whatever inconvenient bus is plodding along the side of the road. In the end, at least in Georgia, its too much damned work and instead of hunting down some… Read More Deconstructing Iosif Dzhugashvili
Honestly I had only a vague notion of what Georgia (the country, not the state) would be like. Friendly people, pretty countryside, good food. All this was gleaned secondhand at best through friends who had visited in years past, or from more distant sources like Lonely Planet. But the impression given was a good one… Read More Sakartvelo on My Mind
I had been to our last stop, Shanghai, a few times when I lived in China. The city had never grabbed me, seemingly just another big Chinese metropolis, though admittedly one a bit more full of itself than most. I will confess to enjoying it a lot however with Hannah, perhaps in part due to… Read More Once More Unto the Breach
The almighty Cloud has, unfortunately, let us down. In lieu of saving and securing photos sent off into the supernatural ether, it has decided that removing them instead was the better option. As a result, this particularly entry will have to rely on the strength of my ability as a writer to describe a scene.… Read More Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
It had been five years since I’d last been to Hong Kong, nexus of east Asia. The city remains the same outwardly, spindly concrete jostling each other to crowd out the sky, hemming in narrow pavements thick with people walking and carrying out their commerce. The same calls for copy watch, copy suit, copy handbag… Read More Hong Kong & Shenzhen: The Reboot
Taipei served as the brackets to the 2017 trip to Oceania, a day-long layover both to and from Australia. In each instance, this meant an early morning arrival and late evening departure, with a full (and at times long) day in between. I had been to Taipei only once before, in 2008, for a few… Read More Parenthetical Taipei
We landed at the airport in Kayseri mid-day. The city is a pleasant and tidy, if uninspiring, vision of Turkish urbanity set at the foot of some vast mountain chain on the plains of central Anatolia. Owing to the fact that airport traffic seems exclusive to only 2 destinations, we were soon whisked away in… Read More Anatolian Lions
Beyoglu and Sultanahmet, though each charming in their own respective ways, are merely small slices of Istanbul. In the last 100 years the city’s population has ballooned; once small villages have passed from suburbia into the urban. An ever-expanding march of development and the relentless drum beat of modernism in the construction hammers and the… Read More Modern Times
We landed late in the night into Istanbul, nee Constantinople, just beating out a charter flight from China to the passport control line, a fortunate turn given the general disregard for lines and queues. We too were somewhat short of the willpower to fight them off, but before too long we ushered ourselves into a… Read More A Tale of Two Cities
Zak Abroad 