Nate and I are now back in the United States after having traveled on the Trans-Siberian railway for 3 1/2 weeks from Beijing to St. Petersburg, with side trips in Shushenskoe for the Sayan Ring Music Festival and Kyzyl, Tuva.

Russia is a far more beautiful and fascinating place than most Americans realize.

I have thousands of photos to download and process, dozens of videos to cut, and many pages of writing to do. Expect to see the full release of my work in a week or so.

Today was a productive day of photographing the most famous Tuvan in the world in the morning and getting tickets and sim cards in the afternoon. Tomorrow we will take a taxi to Abakan and get on a train for Moscow. We will be riding the train non-stop for 72 hours (getting off every few minutes in the major cities).

I have been traveling for almost three weeks now and have been in Russia since around July 5th. While Nate and I were on Baikal Lake, the largest lake in the world (with 20% of the freshwater on the planet), we met a German in a bar that spoke of a three day music festival called Sayan Ring starting in a few days. This is the largest music festival in Siberia and is held annually in Shushenskoe, about three hours from Kyzyl, Tuva. Once he mentioned that there would be throat singing, Nate and I looked at each other and immediately knew we had to be there.

We took off the next day back to Irkutsk, then a 15 hour train to Krasnoyarsk, then a 9 hour bus to Shushenskoe.   The festival had around 30,000 people and we never saw a single native english speaker.  Finally on the third day we were greeted with our first Tuvan group. It was absolutely stunning to hear throat singing in person.

The next day we took a bus, then a private car to Kyzyl, Tuva.  Traveling to Kyzyl was the focal point of this trip, something I will elaborate on in future posts after I get home.  For now, read up on this amazing area here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyzyl

Today is our second day in Kyzyl.  We met with Dina, the assistant to the President of the Republic of Tuva for an interview that we organized prior to the trip.  Nate and I lived on his sailboat named “Tannu-Tuva”, and the news site Tuva Online was interested in doing a story on us.  Afterwards, we were interviewed by the Tuvan news channel THT about our experience.

It just so happens that Kyzyl is a very small place, and Dina helped get me in touch with Kongar-Ol Ondar, Tuva’s most famous throat singer.  I will be photographing him at his school tomorrow morning.

At the very least, if everything else goes wrong for the rest of the trip, we have made it to Kyzyl.  I still cannot believe it.

I have been traveling for a little over a week now and I am thanking myself for packing light.

I started in Shanghai to visit my brother, then met Nate in Beijing three days later.  The following morning we took the 30 hour journey to Ulan Bator in Mongolia by train.

This is a strange and incredible place. The city of Ulan Bator has skyscrapers and a very modern lifestyle, while two hours away there are families living in yurts subsisting off the land.  We just stayed with a family last night, playing basketball with the kids while fending off goats at night while sleeping outside (only for 3 hours, it started raining around midnight so we retreated to the yurt).

Since I didn’t bring a laptop and all of my photos are in RAW, photo postings will be few and far between. When I have the time I will try to take a shot of my Nikon’s LCD screen with my iPhone to give a sample of what i’m seeing.

However, you will have to wait till I get back to see the real stuff.