Category: Travels for Fun
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TRAVELS WITH JOHN
Facebook today has reacquainted me with a long lost friend and travelling companion. In 1978, I stumbled into a losmen (guestroom) on Samosir Island in northern Sumatra. I saw this seasoned traveller there – a skinny, long haired bearded man wearing Coke bottle bottom glasses and eating porridge and bananas. John Ducedre was a Canadian and we hit it off perfectly and explored the island together. Eight months later, John showed up at my house in northern Wisconsin driving a beat up van and offered me a ride to Banff. I…
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THANKS FOR THE RIDE
I was going through some old stuff and found my old hitchhiking card, designed and printed by my brother-in-law Duane Miller, which brought back a rush of memories of simpler, safer and more carefree days. I started hitchhiking in 1976 to get home from college and in the late ’70s used my thumb to get everywhere. I saw myself as the Jack Kerouac of the ’70s, travelling the country, meeting folks, experiencing their lives and writing about it. I crossed America several times, hitched south to New Orleans and the southern…
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A LAST BREATH AT THE PLAZA DE TOROS
In November 1994, Padma and I followed my photographer mate, Victor Englebert, through the gates of Cali’s main bullring, the Plaza de Toros de Cañaveralejo. The concrete terraces were already filling, families and old men in hats leaning forward over the red timber barrier. Brass music drifted in the heat. Dust hung in the air. The spectacle began with ceremony. A woman rode a compact, muscular horse around the ring, reins loose, posture upright. The crowd applauded her precision. Then the matador entered in a gold-embroidered traje de luces, pink stockings…
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LAS LAJAS
Santuario de Nuestra Senora de Las Lajas is located seven kilometres from Ipiales in southwest Colombia. Built between 1916 and 1948 in a valley on the Guaitara River, it attracts pilgrims from all over Colombia and abroad – one of most visited religious sanctuaries in the Americas. One shrine is to an Amerindian named “Maria Mueces” and her deaf-mute daughter “Rosa”. Rosa saw the Virgin Mary in a cave here in 1754 and suddenly spoke a few words.
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MARKET DAY IN SILVIA
On a Tuesday morning in July 1994, my photographer mate Victor Englebert and I drove up into the hills of Cauca to the town of Silvia. Every Tuesday the Misak people – also known as the Guambiano – descend from the surrounding páramo and villages to trade, catch up and, just as importantly, be seen. By mid-morning the plaza was a wash of deep indigo and cobalt. The Misak favour blue: blue woollen ponchos edged in pink, blue skirts falling to sturdy boots, blue shawls pinned against the chill. And everywhere,…
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ECUADOR WITH MOM
Padma and I lived in Cali, Colombia in 1994. My mother visited us and we took a roadtrip to Ecuador during Padma’s summer holiday. I didn’t keep a journal and never wrote about the trip. Just some photos and a few scattered memories remain. We visited Otavalo, the Middle of the Earth equator monument, Quito and Riobamba. In Riobamba we watched an evening parade and then visited the weekly outdoor horse market. We circled Volcan Chimborazo and came home. We travelled about 2,000 km in a beat up old Suzuki jeep.
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FROM ALEPPO IN A VW
In May of 1993, Padma and I and our VW camper van left Syria with the hopes of spending a few months exploring Turkey. That didn’t quite work out the way we had planned. Our VW wasn’t was licensed in Syria and the Turks didn’t accept our international registration. It’s all complicated but in the end we had to pay a USD5000 bond and were given five days to pass through Turkey. Amazingly we got our $5K back at the Greek border but our plans of a few months photographing the…
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NEMRUT DAGI
My ICARDA mates, Eunice Carter and Michael Baum, did a four or five day roadtrip to Nemrut Dağı, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in April 1992. THe mountain top is littered with statutes and it is assumed to be a royal tomb from the 1st century BC. Perhaps we were pushing the season as a lot the area was covered with snow. I only took two photos from the summit … don’t know why. On the way home, we saw a farmer tilling his field with horses about three kms from…
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CARPETS BUT NO ARK
In June 1991, my mates Heiko Schnell and Ben and Sharon Timmerman and I drove from Aleppo, Syria to the NE corner of Turkey where it borders Armenia and Iran. Our destination was Mt Ararat. We didn’t find the ark but found this carpet/kilim/soumak vendor along some quiet road with a view to Ararat. I had a hard time passing carpet vendors in those days. I don’t believe we bought anything from this gentleman partly because we had just bought carpets the day before and I already had a soumak very…
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