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Soviet Meets Shamanism, or Why I Loved Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

July 9, 2015Leave a comment

I love places that are truly lived in and can provide me with authentic insights into the culture of a place and a people today – not necessarily what that culture was thirty, or a hundred, or a thousand years ago. I get kind of grumbly when I read travel bloggers and journalists rabble rouse about destinations that have lost their authenticity, when what that really means is that they are developing.

Ulaanbaatar is one such place. By the rules of traditional Mongolian pastoral nomadism, Ulaanbaatar is a city that should not exist. Instead, it is one that is home to the majority of a country’s population. Built as a Soviet planned city largely after World War 2 (outside of the newer developments, most of the decaying construction today is from 1960-1985), it was built to accommodate new industry in what remains the most sparsely populated nation on earth. Soviets, and now a crowd of international investors, needed a base from which to explore and prospect the Mongolian countryside, and Ulaanbaatar (UB henceforth) was the result.

Changing Plans – Tunisia off the Table for 2015

July 6, 20152 Comments

I am recently engaged. On our last trip (in Istanbul, Turkey and the South Caucasian nations of Georgia and Armenia), I proposed to my soon to be husband David. What’s more exciting about the marriage and party, however, is clearly the honeymoon. I’ve never been one to care at all about the romantic implications of a wedding ceremony, and have certainly been to enough of them to know what I do and don’t like, and so David and I have used travel as an excuse to not really have a wedding ceremony at all – instead we’re putting some of that dough toward the honeymoon of our dreams and a lot toward paying down the principal owed on our house.

Sidi Bou Said by https://www.flickr.com/photos/bilwander/ — Sidi Bou Said, just north of Tunis, is captivating with its various shades of blue – by https://www.flickr.com/photos/bilwander/

Chiatura, Georgia: Rusty Cable Cars and the Stylite

June 29, 20151 Comment

My travel adventure to Chiatura began like most of my travel obsessions – with an internet-acquired obsession that set upon me like a flash flood.

I fall down rabbit holes easily, especially when I’m bored at work, thinking about where I’m traveling next. It may or may not be related to my OCD, but when I am fascinated by something, I will stop at nothing to learn everything I can about it. This extends to searching for hashtags on social media on a topic, looking at pictures tagged on flickr or google maps, to asking ridiculous amounts of questions on tripadvisor – I will go to any length to obtain every last bit of public information on an obscure place. This obsession became all consuming one day while I was planning David and my trip to the South Caucasus last year.

Chiatura, Imereti. A small town in Georgia, near the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Former Manganese mining capital of the world. I don’t know where I found the page, but it was likely through some serendipitous hub and spoke chain of hyperlinks. This town: