It started with an international robbery, and resulted in a magnificent landmark. Saint Mark’s Basilica, officially known as Patriarchal Cathedral Basilica of Saint Mark is located in the heart of Venice in Piazza San Marco. The original Saint Marks was ordered built by the doge (prince) of Venice in 829. Conspiring Venetian merchants smuggled out the [...]
A church rests near a mosque. Tight jeans mesh with head scarves. Nargila smoke wafts through the alleys. You are in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, also known as BiH. BiH is scrunched next to Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro in the convoluted Balkans. Sarajevo surrounded by the Dinaric Alps numbers near 400,000 residents. The [...]
This is a continuation of the article on Yahoo Travel on the international rally - A Crazy New Kind of Amazing Race: International Car Rallies. Picture the scene. You have been driving for over 15 hours. The monsoons are thundering down. You and your friend are in an auto-rickshaw, laboring along an ink-dark road in the [...]
The water sparkles. Sunlight kisses the gentle, undulating waves. White sands connect the azure ocean to the green of the canopy. I am standing in paradise. There are so many overrun, overpopulated, polluted beaches in Thailand, but Surin Islands is not one of them. All hyperbole aside, it is a slice of unadulterated heaven. Surin Islands [...]
Wedding Crasher In Ulan Bator. I am no Jeremy Grey or John Beckwith, but I have crashed a wedding or two in my day. The most recent one was in Ulan Bator in Mongolia. Courtesy of New Line Cinema It all started off innocently enough. I lazily snapped photos of the historic Gandan Monastery. This Buddhist [...]
I had the honor of being interviewed by prolific podcaster, Nathaniel Boyle. Nathaniel has done over 180 podcasts with a vast range of travelers. Check out his engaging interviews! They are like potato chips, you can not just listen to one. I had the pleasure of speaking with him for 30 minutes. We covered a wide [...]
Value and service. For the traveler, this can be an elusive combination. For the vendor, is the goal to pad your margins or to grow customer relations? The answer for many is to pilfer their customers. Value and relationships be damned. When choosing a hotel, like many, I look for “free Wi-Fi”; in fact it is [...]
It was the summer of 2009. Both a great and a bad time to visit the Middle East. Great, because it was prior to the Arab Spring and it was a much more stable time to visit the region. And bad, because every day simmered at over 100 degrees. I was tired of sweating incessantly. As [...]
Spend 2 days in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (the world's worst nuclear disaster) with over 100 photos! Sign up to get your free copy of the book.
