⊕

The smooth and fast road leading into Barskoon Valley.

On my recent trip to Kyrgyzstan, one of the highlights was the beautiful Barskoon Valley. On the south shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, sits the town of Barskoon and this road brings you up into the Tien-Shan mountains and beyond. Somewhat unusual for Kyrgyzstan, is that this road doesn’t totally suck! We managed to do about 90 km/h in our UAZ on this dirt track, while we could only manage about 20 km/h when we were travelling in the south of the country around Naryn.

Often when I am blogging, I am describing past events such as holidays and one of my hobbies during those times is to take some snaps. Hakyll, my static site generator, lets you write these articles in markdown format, insert image tags and have them rendered by pandoc into HTML.

⊕

The dunes of the pre-sahara, located in Merzouga, in the eastern extremities of the country, meld into the surf of the Atlantic beach of Essaouira. Double exposure on Kodak Gold film.

After a long winter and a damp spring, by April, it was finally time for a holiday and the chosen venue this time was Morocco. For me, there is a particular allure to leaving Europe and vacationing in a new continent and I have barely scratched the surface of Africa so far in my life. Furthermore, the decision to travel to Morocco was further spurred on by the fact that Ryanair flew to several destinations in the country for less than $40, which is certainly a price that can’t be argued with! Amongst those options, my friend and I chose to fly to Essaouira, a small fishing town on the Atlantic coast, about midway down the length of the country.

In August 2022, I spent a couple of weeks visiting the office in Berlin and decided to take my Zorki-4K camera with me. I found a couple of rolls of Kodak ColorPlus in DM, so decided to use that to capture my explorations of the city in my free-time. Although ColorPlus is known as a cheap film, I was pleased with the results and although it doesn’t have the fine detail of Kodak Portra, I think the colour reproduction is very near as good. The following blog entry describes a bit of the back-story behind these photos.

⊕

At about 5:30, half-asleep and emerging from a tent smelling of maple-bacon, I caught this view.

The best photo I have taken has to be the one shown above, which I took in September 2019. I was travelling with a friend from San Francisco, down to L.A. and then back up again. We had rented a Nissan pick-up truck, or really I should, as a self-respecting Aussie, say Ute, which was of course a novelty for us compared to the “euro shitboxes” one mostly sees back at home. We were around the Yosemite / Death Valley area and had found a lay-by off a forest road which was in an isolated spot, perched up on the gentle gradient leading down to Mono Lake in the distance.

⊕

The peaks of Mount Ararat, the symbol of Armenia, float off in the horizon. On a clear day they can be seen from the capital, Yerevan. Though look carefully and you will see the border fence which now places it in Turkey.

Already preceding my entry into Armenia, had I heard accusations and assertions about this place. It was on the train journey to Kars, a town in Turkey, near to the border with Armenia, had we been conversing with a Turkish man who, when we told him we were going to Armenia, made sure to explain that we would hear much about the Armenian genocide, but that it simply wasn’t true. After all, the Ottoman Empire was a powerful entity, he stressed to us, surely if they wanted to exterminate the Armenian people, they would have done so thoroughly and without any half-measures?

⊕

Horses hanging out while it snows in the wintry valley.

Georgia is a land of stunning geography but one of the highlights for me was our tour starting in the capital and driving the Military Highway through the Caucuses mountains up to Gudauri, which is a ski resort town. This road is steeped in the history of the region, having been used by invaders and merchants since at least the first century BC.

Many Linux users settle on whatever their desktop environment their distro provides. Then there are others are endlessly tinkering–that was me. However, for the last couple of years, I’ve settled on what I think is a happy middle-ground between the flexibility of a tiling WM like sway and the usability of GNOME or KDE.