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I’ll be heading to the US next week, and one of the things I’m looking forward to is attending the Oregon Country Fair. It’s one of the biggest craft shows in the US, and my son has a booth there. Over the last forty years I’ve always made it a point to look for antique beads wherever I travel, and I travel quite extensively. It wasn’t hard to put together a couple… Read More
After Tamgaly Tas we drove 260 km north of Almaty to the Altyn Emel National Park. We planned to stay at a local homestay for the night and take two days exploring it. First stop was the visitor’s center to get tickets. Nice faux snow leopard outside. READ MORE…
I visited the Tamgaly-Tas petroglyph site on the banks of the Ili River at the beginning of a two-day trip to the Altyn-Emel National Park. Here follows a quote from an article entitled Kazakhstan: The Petroglyph Site of Tamgaly-Tas, in the book Heritage at Risk: “The stones of Tamgaly-Tas were engraved by the Oirat-Djungar (or Kalmyk) people who were Western Mongol tribes converted to Tibetan Lamaist Tantric Buddhism in the 16th century…. Read More
I first read about the Tamgaly Petroglyphs, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in a book on the Bronze Age archaeology of the Scythian Nomads called Kurgans, ritual sites, and settlements — Edited by Jeannine Davis-Kimball Visiting that site was the main purpose of my trip to Kazakhstan, and it wasn’t easy to reach. No tours or tourists were interested in such a place, so I had to hire my own driver to get… Read More
I visited Kazakhstan during the summer of 2017, basing myself in the old captital of Almaty. I stayed in a dorm at the Almaty Backpacker’s Hostel, and it was about a twenty minute walk to the center of town. One of my first trips was to the Central Museum to see their collection of Scythian gold. Almaty is the cultural center of the country and it looks like a modern overlay on… Read More
(1977)
THE ARDENT ENTHUSIAST 