Posts tagged 'personal'

The Mardi Himal Trek

posted on 24 November, 2025 in travel, personal

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The first morning of the trek, up to Australian Camp, started with many stairs.

One of the items on my TODO list in Nepal was to go trekking in the Annapurna region. The most famous option is the Annapurna Base Camp (ABC) trek, which is a breathtaking trek right through the valley of Annapurna and up to the base camp at about 4500m. However, that takes about a week and I was rather looking for something cheap and cheerful. The owner of the hotel I was staying in suggested the Mardi Himal trek, which is relatively new and a lot shorter (3-4 days), so fit the bill well. Although it wasn’t quite as breathtaking as ABC, it definitely didn’t disappoint either.

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The Ganges

posted on 23 November, 2025 in travel, personal

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Boats moored on a ghat of the Ganges.

Varanasi is one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities and frankly it shows in some less than ideal ways: the oldest parts of the city consist of dense housing and narrow labyrinthine alleyways. Now that’s not a problem necessarily, as Venice and many cities in Spain are also built in the same way. However, Varanasi takes city life to a new level. The alleyways are also home to local cows, which while holy, do tend to make a huge mess on the pavement and hog up the streets, making it difficult to get to where you’re going. Other animals are also present, wandering the streets, like goats. The animal husbandry, combined with the open drainage channels down the streets, gives the place a very “charming” medieval feel, but it’s not for the faint of heart.

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Kashmir

posted on 22 November, 2025 in travel, personal

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The sun sets over Dal Lake on a hazy autumn day in Srinagar.

The best part of a trip are always the unexpected turns and surprises. For me, this manifested itself while I was walking down the street from New Delhi railway station, hoping to get to my hotel. By chance, a fellow pedestrian struck up a conversation with me as I was dodging through the general chaos and detritus of the Delhi streetscape: autos, hawkers and strewn rubbish piles; I’m sure you can imagine what it’s like. The fellow pedestrian turned out to be an anglophile and very much into snooker. Particularly Ronny Sullivan and definitely not at all that Chinese guy who’s ascendant. This made for a humorous conversation, even though I know next to nothing about snooker. However, as we talked futher about my plans for the trip, I showed him my onward train ticket: it turned out that a simple mistake was about to change my whole itinerary and send me to somewhere entirely unexpected!

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The Malabar Coast

posted on 2 April, 2025 in personal, travel

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A view of the tea fields in the Kennan Devan hills near Munnar, Kerala.

After having experienced the hustle and bustle of Bangalore, the next plan was to explore Kerala, a state which is located on the tropical south-western tip of the subcontinent. On its coast, it is home to vast stretches of palm tree adorned beaches, which are flanked by rice fields criss-crossed by small canals, just as in Venice–though maybe a bit less flamboyant. Going further inland, one meets the mighty Western Ghats mountain range, a high-altitude rainforest, home to elephants and tigers, which is ideal for escaping the oppressive humidity on the coast. Politically, it is also well-known within India for its high degree of development: it has the highest literacy rates, life expectancy and lowest impoverishment rates in the country. All great things. And they also love a bit of communism too it turns out.

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Bangalore and Karnataka

posted on 1 April, 2025 in personal, travel

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A streetscape in a slightly edgy neighbourhood in Bangalore.

Bangalore, which is known as India’s “silicon valley”, was my first port of call for my trip to India. It was the winter semester break and I had just been travelling around Venice and Triest, so my mind was hitherto occupied with the calm and cultured sights of northern Italy. However, this collected state disappeared as soon as my first night in India, when my long-neglected sense of culture shock arose again and brought me back into the present with the overwhelming feeling of newness that all travelers crave.

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The Amerigo Vespucci Returns

posted on 28 February, 2025 in personal, travel

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Amerigo Vespucci being towed back into port.

I was returning to Triest on the coach, when overhead a troupe of fighter jets flew right over us, emanating smoke trails in the colours of the Italian flag behind them. Needless to say this was quite a surprise! It was because there turned out to be a major event occurring in Triest on that weekend: the return of the Amerigo Vespucci to Italy after a two-year long tour around the world.

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Escaping the Tourist Hordes of Venice

posted on 27 February, 2025 in travel, personal

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The gloomy weather in February keeps all but the most keen tourists away.

I’ve long been putting off visiting Venice as it has a reputation of being one of the most touristy places on Earth. It’s known as a place where the streets are clogged with Chinese and American group tours and everything is absurdly expensive to match. Then there’s the government’s response to the overtourism–fleece the tourists even more. Nope, neither of those sound particularly appealing. However, now that I live in Munich, it’s pretty easy to get a coach there and it’s not only cheap, but traverses some of the most beautiful countryside in Europe on the way there as it goes directly through the Alps on the Brenner Pass. So clearly it was finally time to make the plunge and visit.

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A Day in Nizwa

posted on 1 November, 2023 in travel, personal

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A relaxing shot from the garden of Nizwa castle.

Despite Oman having a long history, there wasn’t much evident of it in the capital city Muscat, which is a city caught between being a hectic middle-eastern metropolis and a resort town for rich oil-sheiks, depending on where you are and your station in life. Therefore, in search of some history, I took a coach out to Nizwa, a major city and oasis town in the desert interior of the country.

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The Delightfully Direct Shop Signs of Muscat

posted on 19 October, 2023 in travel, personal

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The Sale of Drinking Water shop

Mustcat, Oman, is a busy city of about one and a half million people. In districts like Al-Gubrah, it has wide, traffic-jammed boulevards lined with tall concrete buildings. There often isn’t any pavement but instead the side of the road is a car park for the shops on the ground floor. The sun was scorching when I visited in October and the temperature around 39c. Therefore, I wanted to stay in the shade as much as possible and that meant keeping close to the shop fronts. However, the more I walked around, the more amusing I found the names of the shops!

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Up in Naryn

posted on 4 October, 2023 in personal, travel

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The turquoise waters of Kol'su lake.

One of the highlights of the trip to Kyrgyzstan was taking the UAZ, the go-anywhere vehicle, up into the remote fringes of the country. It was the type of journey for which the van was designed and I was not disappointed! The scenery encountered along the way remains some of the best I’ve ever seen and being able to drive around essentially anywhere unrestricted or meeting much sign of human life remains a priceless experience for me.

The aim of the journey was to see Kol’su lake, an alpine lake hidden between the peaks of the central Tian Shan mountain range, which separates Kyrgyzstan from China. The lake itself sits at an elevation of 3514 metres. The lake itself has an air of mystical quality about it: Kol’su was formed by a seismic event in the 1970s and has no proper outflow. Nevertheless water manages to escape underground through cracks in the rock formations and through soil. This causes it to occasionally dry out entirely, before it can be resupplied by the Kurumduk river.

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On Tour with the UAZ

posted on 3 October, 2023 in travel, personal

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Our UAZ parked in front of some laundry.

You are cruising the pacific coast of California in your Mustang, the wind flows through your hair and the engine purrs as you thread the car through the gentle turns along the coastal highway. What could be better? How about trundling along in a UAZ!

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Barskoon Valley

posted on 2 October, 2023 in personal, travel

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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.

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Impressions of Morocco

posted on 16 June, 2023 in personal, travel

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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.

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A Summer in Berlin on Film

posted on 5 April, 2023 in personal, travel

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.

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Sunrise over Mono Lake

posted on 17 March, 2023 in personal, travel

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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.

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The Strangeness of Armenia

posted on 3 March, 2023 in personal, travel

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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?

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The Snows of Stepantsminda

posted on 13 January, 2023 in personal, travel

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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.

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On the Dogu Express

posted on 11 December, 2022 in personal, travel

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The Dogu Express reaches its penultimate stop, leaving enough time to buy and drink a quick Turkish coffee on the platform.

In November of 2022, I headed to Ankara for a two-week adventure through Turkey and the Caucuses with a friend that I have known for many years. It had been a trip months in the making, though it started with a humble suggestion during a Discord chat one evening. Both being relatively early into our careers, we did not have the luxury of spending money on long-haul flights to the U.S., a week’s worth of hotels in an expensive state as well as the petrol needed to get us around. Nor did the idea of staying in Europe and going to museums sound all that excited to us adventure-seekers. So instead, it was more a question of how far we could go for the least money and luckily, through browsing on Google Flights, we found short-haul flights to Ankara that fit the description well. So our destination had now become Ankara. But ask any Turk and they will tell you that there isn’t much to see in this city. Therefore, we decided to take the night train across the country and continue this journey into the Caucuses, which I’ll probably describe in a further blog post.

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