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When I thought of Siberia, I remembered concentration camps, snowy winters and lots of unhappy Russians. Never once I imagined sandy beaches, scorching summers, and a load of happy tourists at Baikal, the oldest and deepest lake in the world.
I usually preferred a more authentic, off-tourist destination. However, I can’t recommend enough the tourist-trap Olkhon Island, the largest island in the middle of Baikal, a popular base for travelers to get lost in the tranquility and wide-open space.
Mongolian children were so adorable with their rosy, puffy cheeks, tiny eyes and faces as dirty as their surrounding. I must be the picture-perfect environment I found them in. I saw toddlers and young children playing around their tents while older boys herding their family’s livestocks on horseback, running small errands on motorcycles and girls fetching water from small streams or assisting their mother greeting guests.
Children growing from the countryside were very eager, polite and resourceful, characteristics I found lacking from those in the cities.
Where else to ride a horse than the very place which invented horse riding. I did 3-day horse trekking at Khovsgol Lake starting from Jankhal where the guide and his horses lived.
The manager of Garage 24, the Guesthouse we stayed in Khatgal, called other families in the region until we found a family who gave us the best deal. It cost 20000 MNT per day for the guide and10000 MTN per day for a horse plus each horse plus one horse to carry our luggage.
Navigating and understanding a large city of more than 10 million was like chewing a piece of leather. Moscow has more people than the entire Czech Republic where I even got lost in my own back yard. My first day in Moscow was a complete nightmare. With an 18-kg backpack not adjusted very well, I felt the entire load on my neck and shoulder. A wind blow could tip me over. In this condition, I had to find my way in the maze of Moscow’ underground while deciphering Cyrillic.
No other country in Europe, except Albania, did I hear many disheartening comments like Georgia. “People are a little strange.” “Men there are like monkeys; They will rape you.” “How about you have a kid, wait until he grows a few years then you can go.” To be fair, Georgia, as we know it–thanks to the media–isn’t a sunny beach resort where tourists go to get a tan or a cosmopolitan capital lined up with coffee bars and restaurants. It isn’t a peaceful village where cows roam on green pasture, nor it is a place where one escape to the cottage in the summer. Georgia, as we know it, is the South Ossetia four years ago with vivid images of tanks, flying rockets, and bombed buildings. When I found out the mountainous area I wanted to visit, Kazbegi and Svaneti, located in proximity with the problematic autonomous Abkhazia and Chechnya, I seriously wondered about the environment surrounding this country.
Christian Ronaldo is hot (OK I admit it.) The perfect-haired lover-boy is always seen in tight jeans, clean-shaven legs, occasionally dressed in pink and sometimes with flowers on his hairs. He is by all accounts the metrosexual icon of modern football. Adored by young football fans around the world and worshiped by many in his native country Portugal. It came as no surprise when the most recognizable face I saw in Lisbon was who else than the Ronaldo on many ads and posters.
I had never sampled so much new food in just one day let alone one sitting. Usually, it took an entire trip to get down only a few dishes.
Dan, my host, took me to lunch and ordered a tableful of Georgian dishes. I was still under the Central European time; that means I had lunch at 10 o’clock in the morning. I ate so much I almost fell asleep in the car after and had to pinch myself to stay awake and chit chat with Dan.
I walked behind a bus, waited until the engine roar and inhaled a deep breath. I turned to Jarda and said: “Honey, you’re right. It doesn’t smell at all.” My boyfriend told me how Sweden was environment-friendly. Their vehicles didn’t produce the stuff which turned the sky black and your face red coughing everything out. Buses’ emission didn’t pollute the environment as confirmed by my mini experiment. But come all the way to Sweden and smell the bus? Well, Whenever I visited Scandinavia, I somehow got bored and did strange things.
Say cheese! In 2007, a series of surveys about happiness ranked ranked Denmark as the happiness place on earth. Two years later in 2009, OECD – the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development agreed. Like other Scandinavia and Nordic countries, Denmark scored high on education, living standard, salary, health, etc. The one thing which set them apart was while others were a bit depressed and ‘suicidal’, The Danes were a jolly bunch. Danes called it the happiness factor.
My name is Cindy, also rhymes with travel junkie. A friend said I was probably a gipsy in my previous life. One of my many secret missions in life is to convert you to run off every once in awhile.
