Bad Things

We arrived in Taipei on December 13th and left on the 18th to explore Alishan. On December 19th, 2025, a 27-year-old man threw smoke grenades and stabbed people in a Taipei metro station, killing three people and injuring eleven others. He then killed himself by jumping from a building. This […]

Taiwan: Shaking in Our Boots

It was an evening of our last day in Kaohsiung, and we were visiting the Dragon and Tiger Pagodas.  Temples in Taiwan usually have dragons painted by one set of doors to indicate that those doors are used to enter the temple, and tigers by another set of doors, which […]

Day Lilies, Yuli Noodles, and the Mountain Mist

Of the four days in the East, we spent three days driving up and down the coastal highway.  These days were filled with stopping at ocean viewpoints, exploring the shoreline’s rugged geoparks, and learning about local indigenous culture. But as we navigated through this narrow stretch of land, sandwiched between […]

The Wild, Wild East: Taiwan’s Enigmatic East Coast

Like Alishan, we considered cutting the East Coast out of our itinerary entirely. The region was remote, and it was a logistical puzzle to plan.  Also, it was the only place in Taiwan where we needed to rent a car and potentially drive through what looked on the map like […]

Food.  Taiwan.  Must I Say More?

I wanted to write about the top 10 dishes we ate in Taiwan and quickly realized that the list was way longer than 10 and each dish deserved its own blog post, and this would quickly spiral into Two Cats Backpack Eats Taiwanese Food for Entirety of the Foreseeable Future […]

Long Way Home

By Julia / April 11, 2024

On the morning of December 31st, Victor started running a fever.  It wasn’t too bad, and he didn’t even want to slow down or skip any of the sightseeing we had planned for that day.  I gave him a few pills of ibuprofen and forgot about it.  We celebrated that […]

Unexpected Oman

By Julia / April 5, 2024

There were many ways Oman surprised me, mostly due to my complete lack of knowledge about its history, politics, and, as crazy as it sounds, geographical location.  For whatever reason, I only considered countries separated by a land border to be Oman’s neighbors and cultural influencers.  It never occurred to […]

Paying the Price for Visiting Oman

By Victor / March 28, 2024

Recently, we did something we had never done before.  We went for an extended trip to a very expensive country. Or so we thought we did. Oman was our first Gulf country, and all we heard before our visit was that oil-rich countries of the region were not the friendliest […]

In the Heart of Oman: Exploring Sharqiya Sands

By Julia / March 21, 2024

One of my favorite memories from Egypt was the two days and one night we spent in the White Desert with the endless starry sky, surreal white rock formations, and sand dunes glowing in the sunlight.  I’ve wanted to go back for over a decade, and Oman finally offered a […]

Essential Oman – Forts and Castles

By Victor / March 7, 2024

Ten years ago, we went to Thailand, and one of our main concerns was how to see as many temples as possible without being “templed out”. By the end of the trip, beautiful Thai temples did start to resemble each other, but we left just in time before they became […]

The Wonders of the Wadi

By Julia / February 29, 2024

The next few posts are going to be about what we consider to be “essential Oman” – the natural beauty of breathtaking landscapes and the traditional architecture of historic forts and castles.  I am going to start with something we’ve never seen before and that only exists in a few […]

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