Dave & Meredith's Travel Blog

Here is the view from the window in our hotel in Orbetello where we stayed on Friday night:

— Meredith

On the suggestion of Dave’s co-worker who writes guidebooks for Italy, we decided to check out an area along the Tuscan coast on Friday after arriving on the red-eye (and before starting our villa stay in Tuscany on Saturday).  The area is not very well known by American tourists – mostly, Italians go there to get away from us.  😉

The area is called the Silver Coast, about an hour and a half north of Rome, and has some beautiful hills descending right into the Mediterranean.  We stayed in a little town called Orbetello on a spit of land leading out to a peninsula.  We did not remotely do this area justice in only one day and night, but we had a nice time.  Some pics below:

Looking toward Orbetello.

A windmill on the water at sunrise.

 Gorgeous coastline.

 This guy is hilarious.  But not effective, because we ate gelato elsewhere.

 Outside for dinner at a yummy pizzeria.

 Fishermen at dawn.

Street scene.

– Meredith

When I rented a car for this trip, I knew I’d need room for four people and I knew I had to allow for a decent amount of luggage since some people would have been traveling already for a week or two and I would have a load of photo gear. At the car rental agency’s web site, I chose the minivan class which showed a picture of a Fiat minivan with the usual caveat phrase “or similar.” When Meredith and I arrived in Rome and went to the rental desk to pick up the car, we waited for what seemed longer than usual and then, instead of the attendant driving up to the desk with our car like he had for the other customers, he handed us a set of keys and said it was parked out side the building. Hmmm. First sign of trouble. We followed his directions down a few levels and out of the building. This is where the phrase “or similar” was stretched a bit. We came out onto a row of large, white mini-buses. This thing was huge and sat 8-10 people:

Il elefante bianco

For a moment I entertained thoughts of driving this around, especially the look that would be on our friends’ faces when we came back to the airport the next day to pick them up in this thing. But Meredith said, “no way” and we headed back up to the desk. The man’s eyes widened and Meredith said, “troppo grande!” We cleared up the confusion and ended up with a VW minivan that was “perfetto” and much more “similar” to the original I had rented.

— Dave

We’re dusting off the travel blog for our upcoming vacation to Italy!  We thought it was a good idea for a few reasons:

1. We’ll be away for 10 days, so that’s enough time to do some meaningful blogging, instead of just a couple quick status updates on Facebook.

2. My mom is STILL NOT ON FACEBOOK!  Seriously.

3. We didn’t blog too extensively during the last trip from the locations we’re going on this trip, so perhaps we’ll have something interesting to say.

We’ll be spending a week in Tuscany and 3 days in Rome with our friends Dan and Hanneke.  They’ve never been to Italy, so we’re pretty excited to show them some of the places we loved from our last trip, find some new great places, and just generally have fun.

You can expect to see new pictures from Dave, and I’m sure I’ll have some sort of embarrassing story to tell from the journey.  In fact, I already have one:

Last Friday at work, we had a fire drill and I fell down some stairs.  As I was falling, all the images from our last trip to Italy of me being on crutches and Dave pushing me in a wheelchair came rushing back in.  However, I lucked out – only bruises and scrapes from this little fall.  So, as of today, I’m a-ok for the trip.

Didn’t you miss us?  😉

We’re out of here on the redeye from Boston to Rome, so we’ll be in Italy tomorrow morning.  Talk to you soon!

– Meredith

I’ve posted a gallery of pictures from my recent trek through Mongolia. You can click here to see it or look at the list of galleries on the Photo Galleries page. I’ve also posted a short video of our guides singing a Kazakh folk song on our last night camping – click here to see it.

– Dave

I had two days in Ulaan Baatar before flying back the States. I mixed it with some souvenir/gift shopping and some sightseeing.

A Mongolian band playing on the side of one of the bigger cashmere stores in Ulaan Baatar. They were pretty good and the guy was really good at different kinds of throat-singing.

I went to the black market which is huge and has everything you can imagine: clothes, saddles, electronics, furniture, etc.

A shoe vendor at the black market.

My guide from the lake took me to a new entertainment complex that Mongolia is building a few miles outside of UB. He said it had a status of Genghis Khan and kept smiling as if it were some joke on me. It was definitely a surprise when I got there. It’s over 40 meters high not including the building that is its pedestal. It’s (currently) the world’s largest status of a horse with a rider.

The view of the statue as we walked towards it.

The statue from below.

Here I am on a viewing platform on the horse’s head. You can take an elevator inside the statue and then stairs to get outside.

And in the completely random and unexpected category, here is a door we saw while walking around UB: its the main office of the Mongolian National Beatbox Association.

And that’s the whole trip. Late that night, I flew out of UB and after 30 hours of travel, I was back in Boston. I loved the trip and am sure I’ll go back again but it felt great to come home.

– Dave

After the horse trek in the west was finished, I went to the north of Mongolia for a few days to check out the area around Lake Khövsgöl. The lake is known for how deep it is and the clarity of its water. It’s big enough that it contains about 1% of the world’s fresh water. The scene is pretty mellow and after two full days of a horseback ride, a boat ride, and a short hike, my guide and I packed up to head back to UB.

Looking down the shore of Lake Khovsgol. The water is deceptively clear: in some places you think you could swim to touch the bottom but it’s much, much further down than you think.

A look up the lake from Khatgal, the town at the southern end of the lake.

Here I am inspecting the Mongolian Navy whose home port is Khatgal. 🙂

At the top of the mountain behind our ger camp.

My guide, Byambaa. He’s far more fit than I am so I was happy that I beat him to the top. Then again, he paused for 15 minutes to call his girlfriend back in UB.

A beautiful sunset over our ger camp the night before we left.

On the way back to the airport, Byambaa took me by one of the highest concentrations of deer-stones in the world. These are remnants of an older civilization and there have been many interpretations of the markings on them but he said that recent research indicates that the society was a matriarchal one and these stones are monuments to the leaders. They’re called deer-stones because of the deer usually etched into them like in this picture. They believe these represented the tattoos on the leaders’ bodies.

One of the deer-on a deer-stone.

Me next to one of the few deer-stones left that has a person’s head on it.

After seeing the deer-stones, we drove to the airport and flew back to UB.

– Dave

When I went to Mongolia in 2008, one of my memories was that I felt a bit sore after some of the longer days in the saddle. The saddles are supplied by the local Kazakh guides and are called “Russian cavalry” saddles. They are basically a steel and wood frame with a leather cushion on top and they’re somewhat comfortable in spite of that description. One of our American guides last year brought his own saddle – a gift from a previous client. I tried riding it for about 15 minutes at the end of the trip and thought that if I came back again, I’d bring my own saddle as well. So earlier this year, when I found myself planning to go back, I put this at the top of my packing list.

I was reading in one of my Mongolia guide books about people who bring their own riding gear and they interviewed a guide who said that the best saddle for comfort would be an Australian saddle. Meredith and I have a friend Sharon who is a serious rider and when I spoke to her and mentioned an Australian saddle, Sharon said, “no question, long days in terrain with lots of ups and downs? You want an Australian saddle.” I’d never heard of Australian saddles before. All I knew about was English or Western. It turns out that Australian saddles are modified English saddles, created when settlers brought English saddles to Australia and found that they didn’t work well for working cattle all day. They modified the design to maximize comfort and to make it safer, i.e. hard to get out of the saddle unless you actually want to. Ok, sounds good. It was tough to find one in New England though – it’s hard enough to find Western gear here. Almost everyone here rides English. I tried several shops around which had a couple of used saddles but none fit well. I got lucky when a woman in Rhode Island advertised a used Australian saddle on Craig’s List. I drove down one Saturday morning, rode it for a few minutes and bought it.

Getting it to Mongolia was a bit of an adventure. I sent it as checked luggage in a big cardboard box and with a lot of other gear packed around it for protection, the box weighed 65 pounds. (Luckily, Japan Air’s limit for trans-pacific flights was 70 lbs. or this was going to be expensive.) I was pretty relieved when I unpacked it 5 flights later at our first campsite in the park and it was intact.

The verdict after riding it for 10 days of 4-7 hours per day? It made a huge difference and was worth all the effort to find it and haul it over there. I’ve left it there in storage for my next trip back.

The saddle on my horse. This was a real Plush-o-Matic. In addition to the very high seat back an Australian saddle has, I also bought a foam rubber pad for the seat (called a Seat Saver or, less manly, a Tush Cushion). The saddle blanket was thrown in by the woman who sold me the saddle. Note the built-in saddle bags – sweet!

Yours truly all saddled up and at the very end of our ride. It was cold and windy that day and I’m wearing about 5 layers.

– Dave

When we’re at camp, things are pretty relaxed. Once you get your tent set up, you can go hiking or for a ride if there’s time. One site is my favorite for simply walking upriver past several streams so you can look down an intersecting valley. Our group of camels posed nicely along the way for me.

Always an unexpected contrast: camels and snow.

Meal time was always a social event with lots of good conversation.

Dinner time meant plenty of food… 

…and sometimes a surprise like watermelon martinis.

The trip is a series of beautiful campsites but the ones near the end are my favorites.

The view from my tent near the end of the trek.

Our last campsite – at 10,000 feet next the glaciers.

One of the last things at each campsite: in the morning, our guide Eddie gets out a map and lay out the plan for the day.

– Dave

Although there were a few camp sites where we stayed more than one night, life on the trail typically began in the morning with packing up and moving on. We used camels for carrying our gear – about 7 or 8 of them. After getting your own gear packed up, you’d hand it over to the guides who would load it onto the camels along with all the camp gear.

Karbai and Sarkut loading up a camel.

One fully-loaded camel. It’s amazing what they can carry – about 500 lbs. each.

We would usually saddle up and ride out ahead of the camel train to get a head start. There is a lot of varied terrain out there. Sometimes we were riding in valleys, some times over a rocky pass, sometimes through meadows.

Most of the trip was sunny but here we are riding through a valley on a cold, rainy morning. Bummer.

Riding over a 10,000 foot pass.

Walking our horses down the other side of the pass. Amazing views along the way.

Around mid-day, we’d stop for lunch on the trail. Lunch was always hearty – you never went hungry on this trip.

Amy and Jess, two of our guides with the lunch spread.

Our lunch spot as we rode closer and closer to the glaciers near the end of our trip. 

A lunch-induced food coma sometimes was unavoidable.

After lunch, more riding. Sometimes we would stop in a local ger. They would invite us in and serve us food like at the beginning of our trip.

This ger had a freshly killed goat carcass hanging on the wall. Its head was on the floor near the door. Pretty grim.

The area is full of history and there are many petroglyphs and deer-stones, etc. One day we were in an area with many of them and we spent time exploring.

A part of on rock panel showing an Argali sheep and a moose. Probably about 3 or 4 thousand years old.

The group rides through a valley on the way to the next site.

Some days were short – only about 4 hours of riding. Some were long and went 6 hours or so.  It was always very nice to finally get to camp and relax.

More to come…

– Dave