Postcard from Bishkek

One of the many claims made in order to attract tourists to Kyrgyzstan refers to the traditional hospitality offered by the nomads … Now, this has always struck me as a strange claim … not because I think there’s any doubt about the traditional value placed on hospitality amongst the nomadic Kyrgyz down the ages […]

A number of our staff have been nagging me to go and see a doctor … but I have been resisting. One of my friends told me in an email that I should be more careful of my health and he thought that I was probably in a state of “denial” … like an adolescent, […]

One of the first tour groups I had to deal with provided me with quite a few challenges. It was part of a Silk Road trip … a group from New Zealand travelling from China through Kyrgyzstan into Uzbekistan (driving from Bishkek to Tashkent via Kazakhstan). I had been corresponding with the tour company planning […]

The other day we had to call in the computer engineer … we had a problem with one of the hard drives … and no sooner had he arrived than something else cropped up … then another problem … and another.  What should have been a fairly straight forward visit lasting, say, half an hour […]

As the holy month of Ramadan gets underway, I thought I would spend a moment to consider what this night mean for visitors to Kyrgyzstan. Maybe it is because I was a teacher, but the first piece of advice for any person traveling to a country where there is a substantial Muslim population, especially during […]

SPOILER ALERT: This postcard has (virtually) nothing to do with Kyrgyzstan. One of my fabourite sayings is that “I don’t believe in absolutes …” which is ironic because that, in itself, is an absolute. Even though I taught Mathematics, the Queen of the Sciences, which is often considered to be about rigour, logic and absolutes … […]

I was complaining to the kids the other day about how often they fail to give a straight forward answer to a direct question; something like : Me: “Where are you going?” Maxim: “Out”, or Me: “who are you writing to on Facebook?” Andy: “A friend” I feel like saying “That tells me a lot […]

The theme for Travel Talk on Twitter, (#TTOT), this week was Responsible Tourism. I have mentioned TTOT before – it was organized by a number of people connected with tourism to enable people to hold “conversations” on Twitter.  Twice a day on Tuesdays, (at 3pm and 9pm GMT – twice so that they can reach […]

I was talking with someone the other day and the topic of conversation turned to the differences between trying to do business here and in the west. For example, the  tendency here for things to happen “at the drop of the hat” … and at very fast pace.  Even of something like an event or […]

There is a story of a journalist interviewing Kim Philby in Moscow.  Philby, of course, was the original Third Man, one of the Cambridge undergraduates recruited by the KGB to work for Soviet Intelligence, who went on to follow a brilliant Career in MI6, rising through the ranks to a senior position and was even […]