There are very few tourists in Iraq at the moment, so I was expecting the ancient city of Ur to be almost deserted. But no, as we approached the great ziggurat, we saw about 40 tour buses parked and hordes of teenagers cavorting around the site. Say what? It turns out it’s the last month […]
Browsing Posts in Travel
Ancient Ur
March 26, 2012
False Dawn in Murmansk
December 22, 2011
I was in Murmansk for the Winter Solstice. The city is North of the Arctic Circle, so the sun never actually rises in mid-winter. I had been vaguely expecting that I would be encountering a 24 hour night, but no, the sky was actually a bright twilight from about noon to about 4:00pm, as the […]
Stalin in Vladikavkaz
September 29, 2011
I’m in Vladikavkaz (“Lord of the Caucasus”), North Ossetia, Russian Federation, where Stalin lurks. I was visiting the fine WWII memorial park “Monument to Glory”. And there he was, posed casually in front of a giant historical mosaic. The most surprising part is that the bust is new, added in 2009 by the local Communist […]
Tskhinval, South Ossetia
September 28, 2011
The breakaway “Republic of South Ossetia” was a major focus of the 2008 Georgian-Russian war. The border with the rest of Georgia is closed to foreigners, but it’s possible to visit from Russia. You need advance permission from the South Ossetian authorities. They don’t issue a visa or even provide an authorization letter, but instead […]
Novorossiysk: Brezhnev
September 24, 2011
I’ve bagged Lenins by the dozen. And even a couple of Stalins. But a Brezhnev? In the wild? Now there’s a real rarity. But there he was, striding casually down the street in downtown Novorossiysk. So I nabbed him. This isn’t the doddering, geriatric Brezhnev of the 1980s. This is the rising apparatchik, posed with […]
Balaklava: Giant Secret Lair
September 20, 2011
In Balaklava, Ukraine, I visited one of the USSR’s super-secret bases, “Facility 825”. This is a giant semi-submerged underground lair, where submarines could enter, be refueled or repaired, and be entirely invisible from the air. Oh yes, and it was designed to survive a 100 kiloton direct hit. The base seems to have been conceived […]
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