After 4 days and 3 nights in the saudade of Tokyo, a city that actually lived up and dare I say, exceeded expectations (even though travel never is supposed to go your way, every now and then with rare exceptions like in Tokyo, it sometimes does), some of us had to...
To preface this entry, Kyoto is more massive than I’d expected. But not the massive as in where every square foot is a temple, going as far as the eye can see like in Bagan. Rather, I was surprised how it was massive more in a dense, in-your-face, modern...
After 2 days in Nagasaki, we headed northeast for Hiroshima, first boarding the 3:20pm Kamome 26 Train (which leaves hourly on the :20) from Nagasaki Station to Hakata. We arrived on time into Hakata at 5:13pm, transferring to Platform 13 for the Shinkansen...
Apparently I haven’t learned the last time we, the monsoon, flew in the middle of a typhoon. A travel miracle had saved us then, and another miracle has saved us today. A few hours ago I woke up to an email from All Nippon Airways (ANA) informing that our...
After watching the late Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown special on Okinawa 3 years ago while kicking it at a downtown Russian Sauna back home in NYC, I knew I had to add it on any itinerary I would design for an eventual Japan trip. Home of the Ryukyu...
It’s time to shift monsooning back into higher gears — today we’re visiting Nakhchivan! A landlocked exclave separated from Azerbaijan by Armenia (or as some say, physically located within Armenia), but an otherwise autonomous region under the control of the...
After a late morning checking out Gobustan National Park, its petroglyphs and mud volcanoes south of Baku, we drove up north of Baku to explore more of the land of fire. The Ateşgah Fire Temple was our first stop. Built in the 18th century by numerous Indian...
