Outside's Go Magazine - Travel and Style for Men

By Kent Black

FOR THIS ISSUE, I was planning on writing a classic Letter from the Editor. I figured I’d get my picture taken in some elegant library wearing a tweed custom suit, possibly with a silk Lanvin waistcoat and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses with fake lenses perched on my nose. I’d be reclined in a leather club chair with a snifter of brandy at hand while I puffed away on my bone pipe carved from the knee of a giraffe I’d mud-wrestled during a tribal initiation ceremony in Bozoland. Not sure what I would have written about ... maybe Really, Really Deep Travel Thoughts.

The problem was that our postcard river had run dry. In two months of awaiting the mail each day, the only card that arrived was a depiction of the Amsterdam red-light district. Our anonymous correspondent simply wrote “Wow!” I prayed it was sent in a spirit of irony.

So there I was, ready to pen some personal reminiscences about deportation, when not one, not two, but three postcards arrived from Bulgaria. And they weren’t sent from one of our readers rotting in a Sofia prison; they were from Swedish actor and director Dolph Lundgren. For those of you poor souls unfamiliar with his oeuvre, Mr. Lundgren, who got his start in Rocky IV as the Soviet superman, Ivan Drago, is one of action film’s luminaries.

The postcards were charming in their earnest, Soviet-era positivism, so I decided to track down Dolph for a chat. I found him in Los Angeles, where he’d just returned from filming the action-packed Direct Contact in Sofia. He was on his way to his home in Marbella, Spain, before returning to Sofia to direct another thriller, called Command Performance. We chatted about his movies and the economic advantages of filming in Bulgaria, and he remarked about what attracted him to that country. “It isn’t so developed, and it’s a little bit of an adventure,” he explained. “Streets aren’t neatly laid out. You see a lot of old buildings, little old gardens, and wooden fences from the thirties, and you get a feeling of prewar Europe.”

This issue contains stories from three places that, like Bulgaria, were once part of the Communist bloc: Mongolia, Georgia, and Croatia. One of the reasons these are now such great destinations is that several decades of isolation saved them from the rampant development of Western tourist hot spots. The fact that Tbilisi, Zagreb, and Sofia are not littered with cookie-cutter hotels is partly what makes them irresistible. As you’ll read in Tim Neville’s A Steppe in the Right Direction, one of the ways we can be responsible tourists is by helping emerging countries preserve their charm and their resources, whether that’s grasslands, trout streams, or skylines.

While we at Go appreciate 800-thread-count sheets and premium wines when we travel, we do not advocate the McResorting of the world. We all need to do what we can—be it participating in conservation projects (as in Mongolia) or simply choosing our trips carefully—to help the wild and authentic places on earth remain just as they are.