Category: Travel
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More food, rain, near-redemption and a sudden end in Georgia
Photos by Francis Dennig, Sebastian Stumpf and Martin Georgia is a country neighbouring the sky. At least, this is what several billboards at the Sarpi border checkpoint tell travellers who enter by road from Artvin province in Türkiye, another neighbour of Georgia’s. While this surely sounds like a bold claim, it is not certain that…
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A detour through Kurdistan and a brief return to skiing in the Kaçkars
Photos by Johannes Braun, Sebastian Stumpf and Martin Once Markus gets going behind the wheel, he can be hard to stop. There is of course no denying that, yet again, the weather was also a factor. With snow lines climbing to beyond 2,000m in altitude, stops in Erzincan or Erzurum were not particularly appealing. And…
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Anatolia: arguably too much Köfte, not enough skiing
Photos by Sebastian Stumpf and Martin Luckily, someone in the car noticed that we were overshooting the right turn towards Istanbul and that Burgas was, in fact, on the Black Sea coast. This small detour notwithstanding, Turkish passport checks at the Hamzabeyli checkpoint were cleared quickly. Customs were a different story. Instructions by officials were…
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From the Carpathian to the Rila Mountains, Shopski-Style
Photos by Sebastian Stumpf and Martin It was not a particularly difficult decision to leave the Alps in this ‘winter’ of 2023, which was the second warmest on record and lacking precipitation. Although snow only seemed abundant in the far west of North America, or so Instagram and local sources were suggesting, another trip that…
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Cuba para debutantes
A recently published paper about an acute fuel shortage and trade relations with Venezuela summarised Cuban official government statistics as a story of discontinuities, puzzles and obfuscation. Similar words have previously been used by economists to describe Cuban national accounts. They are arguably also an accurate summary of life in Cuba more broadly. As the…
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Mexico continued: colonial Oaxaca and Mayan Yucatan
The scenery through which my southbound bus ride took me, past the Iztaccihuatl and Popocatépetl volcanoes and through the Sierra Madre del Sur, was breathtaking. After my less than successful visit to some of the most renowned cultural sites in CDMX, I tried to redeem myself with an extended stop in the city of Oaxaca,…
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Mexico: From Nayarit to CDMX
The United States of Mexico, as they are officially called, are vast. So vast and diverse, in fact, that any traveler who has less than a lifetime to spend in the country needs to make some extraordinarily difficult choices. I had signficantly less than a lifetime on my way through in September 2022 and, after…
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Summer in SoCal
Against all odds and with lots of sweat, I made all connecting flights and touched down at Los Angeles International Airport on the evening of 16 August. My bag, on the other hand, had stayed in London. It would be hard to claim that I had not been warned about flights with layovers in the…
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Italy versus Austria: Alto Adige or Südtirol?
After a visit to Napoli earlier in 2022 (see here), another incursion into Italy would take me to a region that is, on nearly all levels, decidedly different from Campania. Months earlier, Mike had floated the idea of taking our mountain bikes to Südtirol, apparently after binge-watching bike channels on YouTube. It was a long…
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Napoli: a city of many layers
There are many layers that make the city of Napoli. Some are rather apparent and delineated, the presence and boudaries of others more subtle. It is not always entirely clear across which dimensions these layers cut but they certainly stratify time, architecture and culture, as well as probably a number of other dimensions, depening not…
My Impressions 