Going with the flow: How scrapping our itinerary helped us land the story

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Going with the flow: How scrapping our itinerary helped us land the story

By the time I arrived in northwestern Kazakhstan, three of my interviews had been canceled, one of my interpreters had quit, and I had run out of cash (to the dismay of a hotel employee who was weighing whether to give me my room key or wait until I scurried back from an ATM). I had been traveling through Kazakhstan for eight days, reporting on the oil and gas fields that feed the Caspian pipeline, a 939-mile oil transport route stretching from …