ORD to Anywhere

If you ended up here you're probably purposefully looking for travel information on Guyana's capital city. Congratulations! You've made a good choice. I spent four days in the city and was quite surprised at how much I enjoyed my time exploring, munching, and to be honest ... sweating. If for some odd reason you ended up here on accident and are like most people in the world, you probably have never heard of Guyana or at most know very little about it. To bring you up to

A lot of the buzz on Vientiane is that it's a sleepy backwater town that hardly seems like it should be the capital city of a country in one of the world's most dynamic and frenzied corners of the globe. With neighbors like Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, and even Phnom Penh, I'll admit that Vientiane is definitely a change of pace .... but things are changing! The Laotian capital is now experiencing a period of fast paced growth and development, but it admittedly still lags beh

My trip to Zanzibar in January of this year was my first trip to Africa since 2012 but it wasn't the last one I made this year. A few weeks after getting back from the eastern coast of the continent I headed back for another adventure, this time on the far western tip of Africa - Senegal! While West Africa has always been an area I've wanted to explore, I had put it off for so many years because (to be 100% real) my French is fucking terrible. TERRIBLE. I can barely manag

At the end of every year I do a look back at all of the trips I've taken and share my favorite photos from each location. I've typically made this as one gigantic post but for 2017 I'm moving in another direction and will be doing each destination on its own. I'm doing this for two reasons, the first being that logistically the omnibus post was horrible to work with due to the number of photos in the post. The second is that I want to give a fuller recounting and depiction

As I mentioned in part one of this "top sights" installment, Delhi is a city that really polarizes travelers. Often seen as aggressive, overcrowded, and polluted by foreign visitors, I would argue that while it is all of those things there is a lot that redeems the city and makes it a great place to start an exploration of the subcontinent. After several trips through India over the years I can honestly say that Delhi is one of my favorite cities, not just in India but in t

If you know me at all the following statement should come as no surprise - I love India. Other than Japan, India is perhaps the country that I have enjoyed traveling to the most and consequently I have made multiple trips to that intoxicating corner of the globe over the last few years. I'll be the first to admit - it's probably not for everyone. When I tell people how much I love visiting India it's usually a polite mix of shock, horror, and disbelief. And this isn't even

I was lucky enough to visit the Kathmandu valley two years ago on one of my (at the time) frequent swings through Asia. This was during a time in my life when i was much less fit than I currently am, so my interest in Nepal was less about hiking in the notoriously gorgeous mountain ranges and much more about exploring the dusty corners of Nepal's biggest city. Unfortunately I made a big mistake on this adventure - I forgot my camera! I'm not sure what happened during my pac

As I detailed in my recent review of Amtrak's California Zephyr service, the absolute best thing about my journey was the opportunity to see some amazingly beautiful vistas and landscapes as I road the rails through the American West. I was truly stunned by many of the sights that passed by my window as I slowly made my way from the coast of California back to my home in Chicago. Whether it was the desert landscapes of western Utah or the snowy mountain tops of the Rockies

I've been missing Asia quite a bit lately. Other than a trip to the Republic of Georgia in 2016 (which is arguably not really Asia even though it's geographically there), I haven't been to one of my favorite corners of the globe since September 2015. And sadly, at this time, there's nothing on the books in the future that would take me back either. It's the eternal struggle of a dedicated traveler - do you branch out and see new things, or return to your old favorites? I'

Let's be dead honest for a minute folks - 2016 was a freaking rough year for most of the world. Whether it was the Syrian refugee crisis, the siege of Aleppo, the slew of celebrity deaths, the UK's Brexit vote, the insane US election cycle, or the poisoning of Flint's water supply, it's been difficult to limp into the last week of December without feeling like the whole world is nothing more than a series of raging dumpster fires. But it wasn't all bad news this year! The Ch