A Traveller’s Eye, A Thinker’s Heart
I like to tell stories. I like to take photos.
And I like to share them. Enjoy.
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AN OVERNIGHT IN HELSINKI
Noon in Helsinki. The sun hardly makes an appearance at 60 degrees North and barely gets much above the horizon. As we’re right near the winter solstice we only got about six hours of light, but it was hardly light as it was overcast and dark and dreary all day. A lot of ties to…
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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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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…
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ON! ON!
When I think of happier days in Syria, nothing brings a bigger smile to my face than memories of the Halab Hash House Harriers. I first ran a Hash House Harrier event on the east coast of Malaysia in 1978. I was in a little village and saw signs with HHH so I followed them…
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NEMRUT DAGI
My ICARDA mates, Eunice Carter and Michael Baum, did a four or five day roadtrip to Nemrut Daฤฤฑ, a ย UNESCO World Heritage Site, in April 1992. ย 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 didnโt 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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