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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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METEORA
In May of 1993, Padma and I and our VW camper van passed through Meteora in our journey from Syria to Germany. I didn’t write a story about the trip but here are some photos. Meteora is a collection of monasteries in the centre of mainland Greece. The region has what appears to be inaccessible […]
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A DOLOMITE DETOUR
In May of 1993, Padma and I drove our Volkswagen combi van from Syria to Germany. We were heading north on A22 bound for Austria after spending a night at Lago di Garda. But the to east the Dolomites were beckoning. We pulled off the A22 at Ora Auer and drove up a windy road […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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A WESTERN TURKEY ROADTRIP
From 12-19 April 1991, my ICARDA colleague, Anne, and I travelled in his little car on 2500 km roadtrip to Western Turkey during the Ramadan Eid. I did not take journal notes and can only piece together the trip via a vague memory and a few captions on photos. We began in Aleppo and drove […]
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DIVING IN BELIZE
In February and March of 1990, I had some time to kill. I was in between jobs. I had finished my job at the University of Wisconsin because I had been hired by ICARDA to work in Aleppo, Syria. But there was delay after delay in getting my work visa. So I figured I’d go […]
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