The tour to Laos/Vietnam/Cambodia was promoted as a scouting trip by Mehmet. However he scoped out many of the places in advance to ensure that our small group would be comfortable. As always, no one ever goes hungry on these trips. Food in SE Asia is amazingly affordable, made with fresh ingredients, and delicious. The […]
Turkey #3 – Van
We continue our journey exploring Eastern Turkey enroute to Van, which is filled with ancient sites and many views of Mount Arawat. We took a ferry ride out to Akdamar Island, to photograph an Armenian church. This was a perfect chance to send up our drone, to get aerial images of the church (upper-left, upper-center […]
Turkey #2 – Kars & Dogubeyazit
We photographed the ruins of the old Armenian capital of Ani located right on the border between Turkey and Armenia. Ani is an old fort situated at the top of a massive hill, and is currently being restored. We met shepherds with their cattle still working the hills. There are impressive ruins of Armenian churches […]
Turkey 2023 #1 – Istanbul, Uzungöl and Erzurum
We have just started the “off the beaten track photo tour of Eastern Turkey” with Mehmet Ozbalci of Turfantastik. This will be our sixth trip with Mehmet since discovering him nearly a decade ago on our first tour of Western Turkey (click here to see the list of 26 blog posts from that trip). The […]
Balkans 1 – Bosnia 1
We have just started our latest adventure with Mehmet Özbalci of TurFantastic, this time to photograph five Balkan countries. Mehmet has become our favorite photography tour guide, and we have traveled with him to Iran, Sri Lanka, Georgia, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey and other countries. He knows where to go at which time for the […]
Home After Whirlwind 10 Weeks
We are back home, and loving it! Yes, the travel was fantastic. The places were fantastic. The people were (mostly…) fantastic. But our own beds and showers are more welcome after a long trip like this. After 10 weeks covering 6 countries, we did so much that it is hard for it not to start […]
Sri Lanka 1 – Colombo
NOTE: Starting with the Thailand trip just completed, I have begun limiting each “photo story block” to only seven images. A few years ago, I was using eleven, but received feedback that the images were too small. I have since been using nine-photo blocks. Some people have commented that they read this block on small […]
Dubai, UAE
THE BIGGEST! TALLEST! THE MOST GRANDEUR! Over-the-top in everything! That is our first impression on entering Dubai — and that feeling never leaves you as long as you are here. The tallest building in the world is here — the Burj Khalifa at 163 storeys high (“Burj” means tower in Arabic, so there are a […]
Portugal 9 – Lisbon
Our three month adventure in Europe and Central Asia is now over. This is our 37th and final blog entry covering this trip that has taken us to Italy, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, and finishing with a month in Portugal. On our last day in Lisbon, we decided to check out their zoo. We […]
Photo Tour Travelers
Wow… Five countries (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Armenia) in six weeks. Mehmet Özbalci organized this tour through his company Fantastic Photo Tours, based in Istanbul, Turkey. We used him in 2016 for a tour of Turkey, and liked his approach so much that we decided to use him again for these countries. I thought we would […]