Cathedral restored for the tourists. Renaissance era philosophers wandering the ruins of the Roman Empire wondered: What sort of super-humans could have built these structures? What sort of knowledge did they possess that was no longer available? Why did they let it all slip away? The Europeans simply could not comprehend how it could have been lost until Gibbon tried to explain it two Read More

It all started as I was grabbing coffee with a close friend of mine. After a very successful, but exhausting year in Mongolia, I was looking for a holiday location where I could unwind. The prerequisites were that there be limited phone or internet access to avoid roping me back into work. I wanted a place that I could truly escape to and that Read More

My friend Chris Mayer continued his journey through Myanmar. If you missed Part I, click here. If you want to visit the Capital & Crisis website, please click here.   “This is a market of 65 million people where everyone is basically at the starting line. There is no other market like this.” — Masaki Takahara, managing director of Jetro (a Japanese trade organization), on Myanmar   Read More

For the better part of a year, I have been trying to find some free time to go and visit Myanmar. My good friend Chris Mayer seems to have beat me to it and in the first of what I hope will be many entries (keep writing Chris!!) posted some initial thoughts on his Capital & Crisis website.   “The heat rolled from the earth like Read More

Back in early September, I took a trip to the South Gobi in Mongolia. I went to look at Erdenes Tavan Tolgoi (ETT), which owns the largest coking coal deposit in the world (now ramping up) incidentally named Tavan Tolgoi. While in the Gobi, I also got to get a good look at Mongolian Mining Corp’s (975: HK) Ukhaa Khudag mine also ramping up, Read More

Please see Part I for the first 2 days of our trip. As we travelled around, we got to visit dozens of small cities that I would never have had a chance to ever visit. When you pass by rapidly, they really don’t look like much… …but once you stop and look around, you find all sorts of interesting sites to check out and people Read More

I’ve now spent the majority of the last two years of my life in Mongolia, yet I haven’t really ventured much outside of the capital of Ulaanbaatar. Last weekend, some good friends of mine took a roadtrip and I naturally decided to tag along. Here’s the photologue of our trip. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed living it…. We started Read More

Please see Kazakhstan Part I if you missed it. You cannot have a real estate bust without debt — lots of it. When looking at real estate busts, very few American cities can even come close to the epic collapse that Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, experienced. Of course, to have a bust, you also need a boom, and here again, Almaty’s ascent from Communism is the Read More

It’s now been a bit more than 2 weeks since I spent a few days in Almaty, largest city and economic capital of Kazakhstan. I’m still trying to process it all. When people think of Kazakhstan, they naturally think of Borat, but that is simply a mistake. Almaty is such a sophisticated and cosmopolitan city with the unfortunate residue of Soviet architecture. Even here, Read More