Off Silk Roadin'

Our Mission

We set our course for regions of instability and change, traversing the recovering battle field of the Balkans, the even fresher war fields of the Cacus, and moving on to Central Asia, the vast high church of Absurdistan, high unemployment, totalitarianism, of abundant natural resources and pipeline disputes, an home to Borat).  Our travels are through a land itself largely defined by travel across thousands of years, especially in the form of the Silk Road trade route from Asia to Europe, but also the largely nomadic indigenous peoples.  The course will speak for itself.  Our mission is to experience and document our encounter with the land and people of these regions.

The Adventurers

Amanda Dunn, aka aD –

Born of Mother Earth herself, Amanda is most at home with green and living things. An avid rock climber, traveler and hot springs hunter, she has traveled far and wide in search of the beautiful places and people of earth; a search that has largely landed her in San Francisco, with the occasional trip to Asia, extended stays in Hawaii, and the wilds of the US. Her nurturing spirit has led her to teach minds and mend bodies over the years, as an elementary school teacher and Jin Shin Master, though recently she has become a bit ‘westernized’ and is currently finishing her nursing degree at the San Francisco State University. She is a guru of herbal remedies and the ways in which nature can be a healing force (“Kids, don’t forget to eat your vegetables!”). Music, of many varieties, together with the proper body movements, forms a valuable facet of her artistic character. On this trip, her goal is to push beyond the comfort zone and to define those otherwise intangible properties that make exotic travel a passion of us all.

Tristan Ursell, aka T$, aka “el doctor” –

After washing up on the Jersey shore wrapped in only a lab coat and a pair of tiny birkenstocks, Tristan spent his childhood setting his home and various other facilities on fire with homemade explosives and developing his taste for fine Spanish olives, the only green food he will consume. As a strapping young undergrad, Tristan built SCCA Formula Four race cars and developed his abilites to do a thorough check under the hood, making him our team grease monkey. He now spends his days as a postdoc at Stanford conducting ground-breaking research of the lipid bilayer, in search of shiny things in dark holes, and the freshest donuts the world has to offer.

Peretz Partensky (aka dr./pp) was born in the capital city of the Urals, Yekaterinburg but grew up in the northeast of the United States.  His life path of leaving the umbrella of the USSR resembles the national history of many countries we are visiting.  He is also the only one that knows a major language of the region.  He’s been sporadically blogging at tolerableinsanity.com/blog/.

Dr. Hari Shroff, aka H| –

Hari was born (at least his parents claim) on a tea plantation in Southern India, and named after a scientist in an Isaac Asimov novel. When he was one, he was dragged screaming acrosss the ocean to England, where he suffered eight years of bad weather and bad food. At 9, he moved to Cleveland, OH, and then to Seattle, WA, where he painted bee wings as an undergrad. A stint in the bay area earned him a PhD, but 5 years of Bezerkeley convinced him it was time for a change, and he fled across the country to Virginia. After a quick postdoc, where he looked at cells moving really really slowly at really really high resolution, he has decided to examine biological events that occur marginally faster at somewhat lower resolution. The NIH has (foolishly?) given him resources to do this, but has also (wisely!) given him time for this trip.