mstravels

There is an old saying that all good things come to an end. However, I have always found such old infantile adages ridiculously stupid. Nothing has to end. Except life, when one day we will be burnt into a black powder and sprinkled on someone's lawn for cats to shit in. That reminds me, in Varanasi, India, you can watch corpses be burnt on open fires. But not corpses of children, pregnant women, cows, or people bitten by snakes for all you sadists out there. Those people have a rock tied round them and then they are thrown into the Holy Ganges river to float to the bottom for the fish to eat (which are then caught and sold in the market). And sometimes if you go and watch these cremations, young Indian boys will come ... read more

Well an awful lot has happened since I last left you all in Lahore almost three weeks ago. Due to Pakistani internet connections being extremely slow, I have honestly not had the patience to wait four hours to check my email. Apparently religious leaders here have stopped the spread of high speed internet because of the fear that young sexually repressed Pakistani men will use them for unislamic activities. Aka they will download pornography. Given some of the comments that I have received in the past week of men saying that they wanted to "make sex" with this young British journalist at the Shandur festival and that European women have no social values (using as evidence pornographic films which they seemed to think was a good example of the cross-section of the European female population), I ... read more

"If you get lost, you will boil to death," Hamid told me. It is probably not the smartest choice you can ever make to go walking in a desert. The lack of recognizable monuments for one, the possibilty of sudden sand storms and the whole no water available thing kind of makes such activities suicidal at best. This time yesterday, I was on my way to the hottest city on the planet, Shadhad (by some measures of course it is not, but the locals claim such fame and I am readily to go along with it.) In the heat of summer during the middle of the day, Shadhad has been known to reach 65 degrees celcius. In the center of the nearby desert where we were headed, the temperature during the day at this time of ... read more

Greetings from the Islamic Republic of Iran, or to be more specific, the province of Koredestan. Yes, after southeastern Turkey I am continuing my exploration of Kurdish cultures. I am currently in the city of Sanandaj, the capital of Koredestan and given that I had forgotten that it was Monday today (all museums are closed on Mondays in Iran) I have nothing to do and getting some of my thoughts down from the past 10 days seemed a good enough way to spend a couple of hours before I go and do my laundry (yes, it is time after one month of avoiding doing it) I don't think I have ever been to a country as fascinating as Iran. I have quickly realized that 30 days in this beautiful country will be nowhere near enough to ... read more

Greetings from Turkey! Diyarbakir to be more exact. I apologize in advance for the grammar mistakes. I am typing on a Turkish keyboard and the letters are in different places. As I touchtype, writing out a blog makes for quite a difficult task. I have been on the road for I guess four or five days now and am having an amazing time. I arrived on Sunday in Istanbul - which has to be one of my favourite cities in the world - and then left Tuesday for Southeastarn Anatolia where the population is for the most part Kurdish. I always find it so interesting the kinds of people you run into while travelling, both locals and other tourists. Last time I was in Istanbul it was April so there were not as many tourists around ... read more