Those pictures are absolutely stunning. Share more.

Cardshark's whole thread on the Stans is amazing and packed with stunning photography, both of landscapes and scenes as well as portraiture or quasi-portraiture of the locals that goes way beyond what a typical tourist would even aim to capture.

+1

Submit to NatGeo... they pay like crap but you deserve to get published. Those are truly stunning pictures.

The thread in the Travel forum is truly remarkable. Recommended reading for sure.

I've been interested in going to the 'Stans for a while but going there is a bit cost-prohibitive for most westerners to get there. Maybe in the future.

ty, ty guys, but really there's so many good photographers out there these days that nice travel shots are a dime a dozen! I'm not going bombard this thread, but I've got two or three photo-trip reports in the travel forum if anyone is interesting in seeing more.

Bob, flights are getting pretty cheap nowadays! I just randomly looked on Skyscanner in March and from UK --> Bishkek you can find $240 one way, and sub $200 from Germany ---> Bishkek, so not too bad. And once you're there, it is remarkably inexpensive...

Better reply here I guess. Spoke to the wife and it’s on the itinerary.

I'm leaving shortly for Hong Kong and we will be there Saturday - Friday. I found a super cheap flight so I am taking the family with me the week of my son's spring break.

Thursday - TPA-ATL - Stay in ATL that night
Friday - ATL-YYZ-HKG - Arriving Saturday afternoon
Thursday - Overnight trip to Macau
Friday - HKG-YYZ-ATL - Staying the night in ATL
Saturday - ATL-TPA

Super jammed in there because of the 1 week spring break but I just couldn't resist that cheap fare. $600 RT each (not including the Tampa to Atlanta leg, using SWA points for that). Also all hotels are using Marriott points.

Helpful travel tip is to sign up for Scott's Cheap flights. I think it's like $15 for a year and you see some great fares. It's mostly US to abroad but also includes some Hawaii cheap flights too.

Hong Kong is a fantastic place. Make sure you have Peking Duck the traditional way. You won't be disappointed.

Link? I can’t find **** on Tapatalk

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/9...ns-p1-1704834/

(but good luck loading much of it on your phone - my desktop browser is still chugging 5 minutes later)

Works fine for me! Coincidentally I have been to Xinjiang and Western China myself, back when I fancied myself a budding paleontologist. We didn’t get a lot of tourist time, though, so now I’m getting to see all the neat stuff we missed.

I spent some time in Irkutsk, Lake Baikal and then took the last leg of the Trans-Siberian to Mongolia. It was an amazing trip - definitely recommend.




The Mongolian Steppe


(the horse lived)


Smiley family selling pine nuts



This was 2004 before I got serious into photography. I've got more picks around somewhere - but not up on flickr.

Yeah, this is outstanding stuff.

Just open this up in a new tab and then do something else for 10 minutes while it loads. It's worth it.

Trip report and pictures were A+, nicely done!

Nice thread
Going to Malaga, Spain later this month.
I have already located the cannabis club and a casino.
19% CBC + 30€ rebuy tournament

EDIT: Dropbox is AIDS. Wait.

I spent a long weekend in Malaga in December 2015. The city was under pretty heavy construction at the time. So it wasn't the prettiest place to look at sometimes. I only have 2-3 pictures of Malaga though I'm sure that I have taken more. I also do not have any photos of my experience in Granada . But I did have quite a bit of fun. I'd argue that Malaga has some of the best tapas in Spain and a massively underrated night life. It also has really quick connections to Granada and Cordoba which are also beautiful cities.

These are a mix of my pictures (which are horrible) and some better ones (which aren't).

Calle Larios's Christmas Lights - Malaga, Spain

At the end of November, the government turns on Christmas lights all throughout the city center. Unfortunately, i only have one picture of this available and it is actually the least remarkable of them all. It was very late at night and the pedestrian street was packed on a weekend.



Here's a better picture of what you can see elsewhere in Malaga:



And the lovely halo over my head



Alcazaba and Roman Theater - Malaga, Spain

To me, this is the tourist attraction to visit if you're in the area. The ruins of the Roman Theater is adjacent to Alcazaba. Alcazaba is the Spanish transliteration of the Arabic word al-qasbah, which means citadel). The fortress is at the top of a hill which allows for some amazing views of the city.




Calle de los Flores - Cordoba, Spain



As this was December, most of the flowers were either dead or on the verge of dying. If you go there during the summer, it'll look more like this:



Patio de los Naranjos - Cordoba, Spain

The courtyard is known for having over 90 orange trees and is located outside of the Mezquita-Catedral de Cordoba. However, they are not to be eaten. Supposedly, they are sprayed by some kind of pesticide or substance to discourage animals from eating them. This makes them extremely bitter and horrible tasting. I have personal experience with this as I tried to eat one off a tree in Valencia in lieu of buying an orange and I definitely paid the price.



Mezquita-Catedral de Cordoba itself is pretty remarkable. It was originally a mosque but was reclaimed in the 13th century and built a Catholic church in the center while retaining the structure of the mosque itself. The pictures I have of it are atrocious and do a disservice to the beauty of the place. Here's a nicer one. First one is of the mosque and the other is of the church within.

I'd love to hear more about the Camino de Santiago! Do you walk the entire way, or are portions of it done via car/bus/train? What were your accommodations like and how old were you when you did it? Is it mostly something for people in their early 20's? (I see some stuff about people staying in hostels.)

How much time did you have to stop and see different towns and enjoy the area? I assume there were several hours of walking most days?

This is really interesting to me... How long do you have to stay for the short-term version? Are we talking weeks or is it still something you'd have to do for a couple months?

I was actually once offered a job in Guangzhou doing English-language PR for the Asian Games. I spoke precisely zero Mandarin, though, and found that to be a bit too intimidating. I also would have had to spend a couple years there, and while the pay would have been plenty by local standards, IIRC it translated to like $10K a year in US dollars, so I wouldn't have been able to save up at all. It also wasn't the field I was trying to work in, so I was really only considering it for the adventure.

The guy who offered me the job was basically selling me on the experience, how much the women there loved Americans, and how good it would look on my resume.

Every now and then I wonder what it would have been like, and whether or not I would have learned much Mandarin. I'm sure I would have tried, but given that my work would have been entirely in English and I would have been living in a small community of fellow Americans working there, I'm not sure how immersed I would have been to pick it up. I'm sure in two years I would have gotten a fair amount, but I would imagine the first six months to a year it wouldn't have been all that much.

But doing something where I would be able to go somewhere in China for a few weeks and get a miniature version of the experience would be pretty cool.

I don't think there's a minimum length of time. I just did it for a week. The only downside culturally is that the town is a backpacker enclave, so while you talk to people who have flown in, Chinese people who live in the town generally don't have any interest in making friends. I tend to like those outdoor/adventure sports towns (it's a little like Interlaken, Switzerland or Queenstown, NZ, both of which I also highly recommend) so it doesn't bother me that it's deluged in tourists.

Re the Camino, a friend of mine did a few hundred km of it. You're supposed to move at least 5km every day, I think it was, but it's not strictly enforced and aside from that you go at your own page. He said he had an awesome time but ended up developing some sort of injury - I think a stress fracture in his foot? It's not to be underestimated the amount of wear and tear that can build up if you're walking significant distances every day.

This is who we used, they were great 5 years ago when we went: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attracti...t.html#REVIEWS

You want to make sure you read the reviews of whichever tour company you use, some have better equipment than others. The one we used had the tubes tied together, which is much nicer than some tour groups where you have to interlock legs with everyone including strangers to form a line. At least that was the case 5 years ago, maybe they’ve all upgraded their equipment now I don’t know. This tour also had us stopping at a seemingly authentic nearly homemade belizean lunch, it was quite good and some of the best food we had on that trip.

My experience of biking for 21 days and then my knee hurting a little bit for about 5 years is, if it hurts take a break. The first day my knee would start clicking after about 25 miles. On the last day it didn't start clicking until about 65 miles, but the problem is I did like 30 miles with a clicking knee every day.

Anybody been to Singapore? I'm planning on going for the Grand Prix in September. The. Working my way up and over through Eastern Europe.

I've got a story I shared in the Lounge a few years ago, but so few people have seen it, might as well give it a go here:

Back in the early 90s I was in Kenya and Tanzania filming a couple of documentaries with a small crew. One of them was in and around the Ngorongoro Crater where we attempted to get footage of some cheetahs and other wildlife.

On this one excursion we had two Land Rovers packed to the gills, with a crew of three in each one. We were days away from anything resembling modern civilization, although we would come across various small indigenous settlements every now and then. We slept in the open air on bedrolls for a few days. Pretty glorious.

Well, one day one of the Land Rovers broke down. In the middle of the African wild. So we all loaded into one Land Rover and drove a few hours to this dirt crossroads that had about 10 people milling about a small, open-air "bar." The camera crew was dropped off to hang out while two others took the working Land Rover back to civilization to get the needed part to repair the broken Land Rover. It would take roughly a day and half to get there and back.

So we were stuck. All we did was sit in what little shade we could find and drink the warm Cokes and beers that the proprietor of the bar provided. Now, this bar was really just a couple of coolers with cans of soda and beer in it. No ice. But whatever. Natives would come and go, on foot, from god knows where. There were a couple of sad little huts at the crossroads, as well. I guess a couple people lived here.

So we sat. And waited. We told stories and took photos of the locals. Bull-****ted. Laughed, and sat some more.

Around 4 in the afternoon, we looked off in the distance and could see a dust cloud on the horizon. Someone was coming! We were momentarily excited to think that maybe it was our guys in the Land Rover with the fixed part. But we soon realized the dust cloud was from the wrong direction.

Deflated, we were still curious to see what was coming. Now, Africa is HUGE. And the distances you could see in all directions is enormous. So we were staring at this approaching dust cloud for 20 minutes or more before we could ascertain that it was a vehicle of some sort - but still way off in the distance.

Closer and closer it got. And everyone sitting around drinking warm soda and beer was getting excited. Who was it? Would it stop here? Maybe they spoke English!

Like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia approaching Peter O'Toole for the first time, the vehicle morphed through fractured heat waves into a ghostly vision of a bus.

Coming. Still coming. Still aways off.

Closer it got, and we could see that it was brightly colored with crates on top. The dust kicked up into the sky behind it like a huge rooster tail.

We were beyond excited. After hours of sitting around and doing nothing, this was - literally - the highlight of our day.

The bus approached, traveling much too fast, we thought, to stop at our little crossroads. But it screeched to a halt directly in front of us, about 20 feet away. The dust settled. The engine of the bus ticked and whined. The anticipation was incredible.

Suddenly, the driver opened the bus door and out rushed - a chicken.

Half flying, half hurtling down the bus steps and across the dusty ground, the chicken (really, a rooster) scrambled quickly past us and into one of the sad, little huts, squawking and clucking.

No one else got off or on. The bus had stopped specifically to let that chicken off. The door closed, the engine revved, and the bus lurched back to its journey across the Ngorongoro plain.

We sat there, stunned, and contemplated what we had just witnessed, quizzically looking at one another, trying to find an answer to the myriad of questions we obviously had.

How did the bus driver know to stop for the chicken?
Did the chicken know to get off the bus, and if so...how? No one threw the chicken off the buss or prodded him - we saw it happen.
Did the chicken also get on the bus back where it came from, patiently waiting for its stop?

The chicken obviously had somewhere it had to be - that sad, little hut. And it did not come out of that hut for the rest of the time we waited on our ride.

So for the next 12 hours, we sat there, coming up with explanations for the bizarre event we had just witnessed.

"Maybe it was a homing chicken. You know, like a homing pigeon."
"It was probably payment for a debt and the chicken just happened to go into that hut by accident."
"How did the chicken pay for its fare??"

And so on.

Our Land Rover eventually came back for us and we continued on our shoot. For two weeks we were in Africa, seeing amazing things and meeting incredible people. But our conversation always came back to that damn chicken.

My friend Rudy, who was the director on that shoot, recently visited me here in Vegas. We went out to dinner and the only thing we could talk about, twenty years after our trip, was possible explanations for the Chicken Who Took the Bus.

To this day, I still wonder about it.

A couple years is pretty huge investment, and 10k USD/yr is a not a good salary for a large Chinese city. No wonder he tried to talk up the 'experience'. And even if you're popular among some of the women, you're still living in a dirty, overcrowded, polluted city that stays gloomy and overcast basically all winter. Fwiw, I made that salary teaching English 18 hrs/wk in the middle of nowhere China.

And if you're not fully committed to learning Mandarin, your progress is going to be pretty limited. It's so different from English and you have so many characters to memorize, it takes a pretty dedicated effort. I've put in hundreds of hours over the last year and I'm still like somewhere between the beginner and intermediate range.

I'm going to Fusa next.