Fringed by the peaks of the southern Carpathian Mountains, Braşov is one of those European cities that is simply saturated in charm with its gothic spires, baroque buildings, medieval gates and daunting towers. It is also a city which is rapidly being discovered and will undoubtedly escalate with the opening of an airport currently under construction. There are abundant opportunities…
Sometimes in life you just gotta take a walk to savor slow travel at its utmost. The Romanian countryside around the small city of Miercurea Ciuc in autumn is ripe, and beckoned us to set out on an admittedly very vague plan to walk a “Mineral Water Trail” dotted with natural springs and thermal baths spread out over 50+ km…
When we arrived to Romania, we were treading into an unknown. For the first time since leaving the U.S. in July, we didn’t have any plan for where we were going in the coming weeks. On the ground in Bucharest and Braşov we began asking a few locals, “what’s your favorite place to visit in Romania?” Almost without hesitation, and…
Mt. Ararat looms over the city of Yerevan at 5,137 m. (16,854 ft). Ararat, now in Turkey, is notable as the mountain on which Noah’s Ark landed upon, and according the Bible, the remains rest there under its snow-capped peak. Armenians consider Ararat the symbol of their state no matter where the mountain lies . There is a giant statue…
We never expected to spend eight weeks in Phnom Penh, or for that matter, ten weeks in Cambodia, but COVID-19 gave us an opportunity. If we had to be “stuck” in a SE Asian country, we think we landed in a good spot, especially based on the more Draconian measures set forth in neighboring Thailand and Vietnam. The Cambodian government,…
Before COVID shut down all the tourist sights in Phnom Penh, we went to the Tuolsleng Genocide Museum, followed by the Killing Fields, one of only 343 known sites where thousands of Cambodians were executed by their own people during the 1975-1979 Genocide. Three million of Cambodia’s eight million died during this tragic regime. This is when the Khmer Rouge…
Kampot is a coastal city on the Preaek Tuek Chhu River in southern Cambodia. We’d had our eyes on heading there for several weeks so it felt good to finally get the opportunity to hop on a totally empty, A/C blasted, $8/ticket mini bus for the three-hour jaunt out of Phnom Penh. Although the area is most widely known for…
We knew very little about Georgian cuisine before arriving there other than the drool-worthy recommendations we’d read on guidebooks and blogs. But we knew we were highly intrigued. The recommendations lived up to their hype and in the three weeks we traveled here, we never tired of it once thanks to its variety, simple sophistication, and unique flavors and spices…
