A Return to Tashkent We came back to Tashkent on the high-speed train and it is much cooler here. As hot as it gets during the day, you can sleep with the windows open at night as it drops into the 60’s and there is no humidity. It’s easy to see why silk road travelers […]

King Cotton Uzbekistan labored under the yoke of either Czarist or Soviet repression from the mid 19th-century until the fall of the USSR in 1991. Some of that repression is directly tied to the American Civil War when the availability of cotton was interrupted by President Lincoln’s “Anaconda” plan to strangle the Confederate states with […]

First, the weather report. At two in the afternoon it’s 113 in the shade. I rolled out at 5AM this morning to see the city at the verge of dawn and to escape the heat. No surprise, it was still and cool with only the sounds of doves cooing. People were walking or biking to […]

Fast Train to Bukhara It’s early Saturday morning here in Uzbekistan, hot already, and we are on the high-speed train to Bukhara, one of the ancient and great cities of the Silk Road. “Silk Road” refers to the trading routes stretching from Beijing all the way to Syria which were in use thousands of years […]

Central Asia Ten hours to Istanbul and another four put me in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, yesterday in the middle of a sultry night. The plan is to see some of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and go trekking for ten days in Tajikistan before returning. These places are the crossroads of the world, famous and ancient trading routes […]

To the amusement of some, I always visit a fire station, wherever I am, to see how they do what we all do. Those visits have included places as diverse as Kathmandu, Nepal, London, England, Kandy, Sri Lanka, and Istanbul, Turkey. And yesterday I added Ilulissat, Greenland, to the list. Fire protection, as essential as […]

From Sisimiut to Ilulissat Ilulissat was the next stop, where the icebergs are, or at least a lot of them, and we elected to travel by ship, up the Davis Strait on an “overnight” voyage to get there. Is it really overnight if it never gets dark? The Arctic Umiaq Line is a single-ship operation […]

Assaqutaq We have been traveling on the southwest of the island, in and around Sisimiut, on the Davis Straight and east of Baffin Bay. Greenland is a place of coming and going, for at least the last 4,500 years, as successive waves of people have arrived from many parts of the globe. Settlers include Siberians, […]

Greenland’s Second City The population of the entire island, the biggest in the world, is just 55,000 and the majority of that is on the west/southwest side. Nuuk, the capital, has a population of 17,000 and Sisimiut, where we flew the other day, has about 5,500. The name means “place of the fox burrows” and […]

The Arctic Desert I’ll start by observing how blessed I am to have seen a fair chunk of the world and yesterday may hold the record for the greatest single day contrast thus far. It began at 0600 in Copenhagen in a hotel and thanks to the wonders of jet travel, ten hours later I […]