Mongolia!! The name of this landlocked Asian country has a magical ring to it. We could not think of Mongolia without our minds drifting on the image of the legendary Genghis Khan. Born in the 1160s, he spent his early life assembling a dedicated army of nomads from the immense grasslands of the Gobi, at […]

Many of you may recall back in Tajikistan Blog #8, we had met this amazing young girl. If not or if so, here is an update on the Magic Girl of the Pamirs. It was another spectacular warm sunny day in the mountains of Tajikistan,— as warm as it gets at 14,000 feet. The intense blue […]

During the night the temperature had dropped to 37°F but Green slept well in the down sleeping bag we had provided for her, spread on top of two thick Cascade Design Therm-A-Rest sleeping pads. Morning dawned; another beautiful day, perhaps our last in China. Knowing the bureaucratic paperwork that waited for us at the border, it […]

Happy Thanksgiving To all our US Friends and Family around the World   Gratitude Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, A stranger […]

As previously mentioned, we had been advised that shipping our truck from China back to United States was not a good idea. The truck could be held in a Customs’ storage lot for possibly a month or more, sitting in the salt air and open to vandalism and theft. Our plan now was to drive […]

So, it was a long way to drive for dinner, like about twenty thousand miles from Portugal, or even longer from California or Belgium where our expedition truck rolled off the ship into Europe. After all that driving we could not leave Beijing without enjoying the famous Peking Duck, a dish as iconic to Beijing as […]

Much of the historic areas of this 3,000-year old city have been destroyed to build modern condos and apartments that are often financially impossible for the average citizen. Green, our guide, described the older apartment she and her mother live in. Maybe it had running water and maybe electricity most of the time. It was […]

Moving on, we passed through the Tiananmen Gate to reach the Forbidden City. There are five massive doors to the gate and seven bridges spanning moats or streams. It was from this Gate on October 1, 1949 that Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic China. The dominating portrait of Mao is a must photo background opportunity […]

B E I J I N G! Over twenty-one million people, plus or minus a few thousand tourists. We had completed our second goal of driving from the Atlantic to the Pacific, wheels on the ground, and now our first goal to follow the Silk Road and on to its final end in Beijing. Formerly […]

We had seen the Great Wall of China twice now, and our China “bucket list” was getting short. We headed east toward the fog-draped Pacific Ocean and its polluted Bay of Bo Hai, where Tanggu, the nearest port to Beijing is located. Green, our trusted guide and constant companion, had no idea of how to […]