On a Sunday afternoon my brother and his coworkers and I took a trip 35 km out of Bordeaux to the vineyards surrounding Saint- Émilion. The village, now a World Heritage site, was overrun with day-trippers (like us), souvenir shops, and wine stores. An easy five-minute stroll in one direction landed me in a quiet [...]

We took the road south out of At-Bashi immediately passing a huge animal bazaar. Our Kyrgyz driver carefully weaved his way through the cows and horses being led across the main road. We continued, overtaking huge 18-weelers full of Soviet scrap metal, lined up miles before the Torugart Pass border, the back way into China’s [...]

After hopping a train two stops south from Apatity, my hosts’ father and I walked about an hour further along the railway and then cut through the forest on a trail and over a short mountain with and old rusty lookout tower. The mosquitoes were incredibly huge and we constantly swatted them from our face [...]

The Giant’s Causeway is a series of 40,000 interlocking hexagonal basalt columns thought to have been formed from rapidly cooling lava some 50-60 million years ago. In the morning, I left my hostel in Portrush on a rented bicycle and peddled the 10 miles through a strong headwind along the beautiful coast of County Antrim, Northern [...]

1) The Plaza de Armas in Arequipa.  Arequipa is also known as “the white city” because many of its buildings are made from a white volcanic rock called sillar.  The city rests in the Andes around 7,800 feet above sea level and is the second most populated city in the country (around 904,900 residents) 2) [...]

The Jinshaling section of the Great Wall of China is located in a mountainous area 125 km northeast of Beijing.  We spent the afternoon hiking the 10.5 km along the wall to Simatai, passing 67 towers, five passes and two beacon towers, much of wall rubble beneath our feet.  This section was built about 1570 [...]

After changing trains in St. Moritz, I rode through the Bernina Pass and chugged slowly down into Italian-speaking Switzerland. I enjoyed an espresso and a short stroll through the town of Poschiavo and snapped this photo while hanging out of the train window as we returned up the steep grade to the alpine pass. Photo and text [...]

After a day of cycling and walking through a cold, rainy, gray December day in Copenhagen, a friend and I ducked into this cozy cafe for this artist creation of a sandwich. After an hour of trying to talk over rowdy, drunk English football fans in town for a match, we got back on our old [...]

This photo of the Armenian Cowboy was taken in Nagorno-Karabakh. Earlier in the day we visited Gandzasar Monastery, a beautiful 13th century hilltop Armenian monastery.  A few miles down the road from the monastery, at  junction in the road, we tried to hitch a ride on a country road north to Dadivank Monastery complex.  After [...]

Photos by Tata Nadaryan