Whenever I travel to a new country, I tend to form my expectations around what I hear and read from various sources. The kind of information one collects in a lifetime. It comes in bits and pieces from what other people have experienced or what other people thought would be there.

The photographs I see may give me a very specific opinion on the place they are taken in. Sometimes they are taken in such a way that they make the place and its people more beautiful and more spendid, or they can make the place and people seem more frightening or even wilder than they were to me upon arrival. Tuva was no exception.

The photos were of great beauty to me, the Tuvan shamans looked powerful and wild and the place so hidden away – from our world – made the region even more interesting. For all that I knew, I was most curious as to what I would feel there. How would I feel in the presence of these shamans.