I just want to go home. I’m tired of all this visa stuff.

– A distressed traveler at the Kazakh embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

So what does sex have to do with Central Asian visas? Simple, really. Thinking about, planning around, and procuring visas for Central Asian countries begins to dominate one’s time and mindspace — almost to the point of obsession. We’ll leave it to you to do the rest of the comparison. Continue Reading »

We are often asked “What were your best experiences? What are your favorite places?”

“All-time favorite places” is a difficult one to answer without writing a book, but if we limit the question to 2007 (as we did in our personal growth exercise last night), the answer becomes manageable and something worth sharing with our readers. Continue Reading »

Barely recovering from self-inflicted death march from Kazakh mountains. Copter airlift looked likely. Rappelling down waterfall = escape.

- Our Twitter update from Almaty, Kazakhstan on 3 September 2007

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. Continue Reading »

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).

Shakedown at the Kiddie Painting
Almaty, Kazakhstan was no different. We stood in a line of three people at the main post office and awaited our turn as a possessed animatronic postal worker repeatedly stamped letters drawn from a stack about two feet tall. Continue Reading »

Wedding parties, mountain lakes, Soviet scientific centers and parks - images from Kazakhstan are up in our photo gallery. Enjoy!

Weddings, Markets and Miscellany

Almaty Parks and Sites

Tian Shan Mountains

Changes to our home page, our erratic publishing schedule, and varied topics have thrown some of our readers off. It’s time to come clean.

We’re not actually traveling. We’ve been updating this site from a beach in the Maldives. We’ve fabricated all of our stories and grabbed content and photos from around the web and Photoshopped ourselves in where possible. Isn’t technology amazing?

OK, the real story.
For those of you who believe everything you read, that last bit was a joke. All the experiences are ours. And so is the content. Continue Reading »

“This is a hotel, right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have rooms?”

“Yes. How long would you like the room?”

“For one night.”

“The whole night? You mean until morning?” It was 11:00 P.M. The woman at the desk seemed surprised by Audrey’s response. Continue Reading »

Have you ever watched the news and witnessed escaping refugees at a border crossing, crushed against iron bars like animals in a cage? You know the scene. Now superimpose two backpack-laden white faces onto that newsreel, throw in a few cries of “Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan” amongst the shrieks of old women and children being squashed in a sea of madness, and you would just begin to understand what we went through at the Uzbek-Kazakh border yesterday. Continue Reading »