The 2010s: A decade to remember

Tbilisi, December 12, 2019

A mere 19 midnights separate me from the first day of 2020, the third decade of the 21st century.  (Yes, I know; the century should really start in 2001, but who really thinks that way emotionally?)  It is hard to believe that I have been blogging on this site intermittently for just over a decade now.  A few days ago I did my year-in-review post; now it's time for a decade in review.

One of the more terrifying aspects of getting older is that not just months and years pass by, but decades, without me being really aware of how long I've been alive.  This year was full of thirty-year anniversaries:  the Tien An Men massacre and the fall of the Berlin Wall were both pivotal moments in my conception of the world, with the gloom and menace of the Cold War suddenly replaced by an exuberant, giddy freedom in Eastern Europe, while the Chinese Communist party stamped on humanity's face with a jackboot.  I was barely 21 when those things happened; now I'm 51 and the optimism of December, 1989 has morphed into the dystopian ethnonationalism of Hungary, Poland and the United States, while the Chinese state's relentless authoritarianism has plumbed new depths in the repression in Xinjiang.

So I think that the spinning of the decades counter on our calendar is a good time to take stock of what I have been up to for the past ten years, mostly from the point of view of travel.  I don't have much time to write this, so it will necessarily be a cursory summary of a lot of travelling!

2010--The post-Silk Road Travels

I welcomed in the 2010s in Malta, That same morning I hopped over to Italy and rented a car to explore Sicily, a fabulous corner of the world, before making my way up Italy with a stopover of a few days in Naples, once one of the richest cities in Europe and now a poster child for urban decay, although blessed with Pompeii, Herculaneum and smaller amazing Roman ruins.  I then headed into Venice on my bicycle for the symbolic final ride into the city that Marco Polo returned to in 1295.  

After a brief skiing and job-hunting trip to Switzerland, where my sister Audie was living (and still lives), I hopped a flight to Ethiopia in early February for a cycle tour.  I spent two and a half months exploring Ethiopia's mountainous landscape and ancient culture, and dodging incessant rockthrowing by a substantial fraction of the youth of the country.  I also crossed (by public transport) into Somaliland and Djibouti before looping back to Ethiopia after my hopes of getting a Yemeni visa were shot down.

In late April I flew with my bicycle back to Canada to find a job offer from a school in Switzerland waiting for me.  My mother had taught at Leysin American School from 2001 to 2003, and now I was about to follow in her professional footsteps for the second time (after my miserable first international high school teaching experience in Egypt in 2004.)  After a few months of relaxation in Canada, including a car trip out to Newfoundland for my mother's 70th birthday, I flew off to Switzerland in early August.

2010-2015--The Leysin Years

I ended up spending five years teaching in Leysin.  It wasn't a fabulous school (despite the eye-watering tuition fees) but it was a wonderful place for an outdoors enthusiast like myself to be based.  I lived in a century-old building that was once a tuberculosis sanatorium for the wealthy of Europe (Stravinsky and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia both visited in the glory days), with an unbeatable view out across the Rhone valley to the Dents de Midi and (on clear days) a tiny sliver of the peak of Mont Blanc.  The skiing in Leysin was decidedly sub-par most weeks of most years, but there were always places to explore via ski touring.  The cross-country skiing was excellent, and in the fall and spring the road riding on a racing bicycle was incredible.  There were tennis and squash courts, and great hiking to be had.  It was a busy schedule, with teachers worked absolutely to the bone, but I generally always had energy for adventures whenever I could fit them in.  I ran the pub quiz in our village pub for almost the entire 5 years, which was great fun and an intellectual break from trying to hammer physics and mathematics into my students.

That first fall I mostly explored around Switzerland, by bicycle and on foot.  I stayed in Switzerland for the Christmas break and tried to ski (although it was the beginning of an epic months-long snow drought).  I also ran into a sporty New Zealand woman named Terri who turned out to be a wonderful partner in exploring the mountains and the world, and who is still with me nine and a half years later here in Tbilisi

2010 new countries:  Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somaliland (or Somalia, if you don't regard Somaliland as de facto independent).  

2010 year-end country count:  93

2011

I prowled around Switzerland all winter in a fruitless search for decent snow.  Eventually my supplications to Ullr the snow god were answered and enough snow fell for two weeks of excellent ski touring cabin-to-cabin in the mountains with some of my similarly skiing-obsessed colleagues.  

That summer I spent the entire break cycling from Tbilisi, Georgia (where I am typing this now) to Tallinn, Estonia, via as many of the ex-Soviet and Eastern European countries that I could.  I rode through magical Svaneti tragic occupied Abkhazia to Sochi in Russia, where Terri flew out to join me for a couple of weeks of hard cycling along the Black Sea coast, through Crimea (then part of Ukraine), Trans-Dniestria and Moldova.  Terri had to return to work, but I kept cycling across Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine again, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and finally Estonia.  I covered 5500 mostly flat kilometres and really fell in love with the countries I was crossing.

In the fall Terri and I got away hiking most weekends, all the way into early December since it didn't snow at all in the autumn.  When it started snowing, though, it didn't stop and we had a memorable ski season.  

At Christmas, I zipped off to the Persian Gulf to explore (very briefly and superficially) the UAE, Qatar and a tiny corner of Oman, before returning to Leysin for New Year's.

2011 new countries:  Denmark, Abkhazia, Russia, Ukraine, Trans-Dniestria, Moldova, Romania, Slovakia, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, UAE, Oman, Qatar.

2011 year-end country count:  108

2012

The winter of 2011-12 was epic for skiing and ski touring, probably the best of my five winters in Leysin.  Spring break was spent doing more ski touring before finally retiring the skis and taking out the bicycle.

The summer vacation was spent in the highest mountain ranges of the world.  Terri and I flew to India and trekked through the magical mountains and plateaux of Ladakh for a memorable month.  Again Terri had an earlier work deadline than I did, so I flew off to Kyrgyzstan to indulge my Reinhold Messner-inspired fantasies of mountain climbing.  I had had my eye on Peak Lenin and Muztagh Ata for years, so it seemed like a good time to try my luck.  My luck wasn't in on either peak, with terrible weather, heavy snowfall and poor conditions.  I decided that really high mountains weren't really my thing and flew back to Leysin to start my third academic year.

That fall I finally made it to Slovenia, the one Balkan country that I had not yet properly visited.  At Christmas I decided that I needed a bicycle tour, so I flew down to Lome and spent three weeks cycling around Togo and Benin.  It was a good  bike trip, but I didn't really warm to the two countries as much as I would have liked.  It was my first taste of West Africa after several trips to the north and east of the continent, and I resolved to come back one day to explore in much greater depth.

2012 new countries:  Slovenia, Togo, Benin

2012 year-end country count:  111

2013

The 2012-13 winter was also fabulous for snowfall in the Leysin region, and I had a great winter of skiing, ski touring and cross-country skate skiing.  Terri and I had a March break that overlapped for once (we worked at different schools with very different schedules) and we had hoped to do a week of ski touring.  Instead it suddenly stopped snowing at the end of February, and after waiting with crossed fingers for a while, we eventually booked a last-minute trip to the Maldives instead.  It was slightly self-indulgent, but it was also a reintroduction to diving for Terri, which proved to be a great thing for our future travels together.

That summer we set off together for Iceland with our touring bicycles.  We had a wonderful time exploring this tiny gem of a country, even if Terri did find the steep hills on dirt roads a bit challenging and annoying.  Then Terri returned to work and I flew to Canada for the first time in three years, visiting my mother in Ottawa, my father in Thunder Bay, my sister in Jasper and my friend Greg over the border in Montana.  The summer vacation was not yet over (I loved my epic summer holidays in Leysin!) and I returned to Europe to try my hand at a new (for me) form of bike touring:  riding a racing bike, travelling ultra-light and sleeping indoors.  I cycled from Avignon back to Leysin over as many Tour de France cols as possible (Galibier, Izoard, Agnel, Iseran, etc), then returned to southern France with Terri for another week of cycling.

That fall, the start of my fourth year in Leysin, did not go well.  I was teaching five different fairly challenging IB science and math courses, and I burned out spectacularly from overwork.  Not long after a long weekend in Dublin with Terri, I ended up having a minor nervous breakdown in early November and being sent off on medical leave for a few months, during which I went exploring Gran Canaria by bicycle and Laos by motor scooter.  It was a sobering reminder of my own mortality and of how unsustainably hard I was working at LAS.

2013 new countries:  Maldives, Iceland, Ireland

2013 country count:  114

2014

I returned to work after Christmas on a reduced teaching load and had a reasonable time of it, although it was a miserable ski season.  A few skiing friends and I spent spring break skiing in the Dolomites in Italy which was an incredible time, although I couldn't ski the last few days because of an incredibly sore back.

That summer Terri and I decided to take it physically a bit easier than usual since we weren't sure how recovered I was from my breakdown.  I flew to Bali via a brief visit to sad, ruined East Timor, and then Terri and I spent a month diving our way around Indonesia, with visits to Bali, the Togean Islands and the amazing Derawan Archipelago and its manta rays.  Terri had bought a small house in northeast Bali a few years earlier, and it made for a perfect base for our expeditions. After Terri's inevitable return to work, I stayed on, exploring the Solomon Islands and expensive, dangerous and deeply unpleasant Papua New Guinea before crossing back into Indonesian New Guinea for a few weeks of birdwatching and diving. 

That fall was the start of my last year at LAS.  I had already decided that I was going to leave, but LAS' deeply autocratic First Family had decided that I needed to be forced out, which didn't make the final year much fun at work.  Luckily it was a charmed autumn with perfect weather almost every weekend and a never-ending series of hiking and biking weekends that lasted almost into December that left me with a permanent grin and indelible memories of the fall colours blanketing the Alps.

I flew off that Christmas with three colleagues to show them the Japanese powder that I had been pining for during the many snow droughts of my Leysin years.   

2014 new countries:  East Timor, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea

2014 year-end country count:  117

2015

After some epic skiing in Hokkaido, I returned to Leysin for my final ski season there.  The snow was miserable for most of the winter, and when it did snow, I nearly got myself killed in an avalanche that took away quite a bit of my skiing mojo.  During spring break Terri and I flew to Georgia for a few days of skiing which reminded me of how much I liked this small, historic country in the Caucasus.

2015-18:  Three Itinerant Years

Mid-June saw me say farewell with affection and great memories to my colleagues and friends in Leysin and to the outdoor playground of the Alps.  Terri and I headed off for a month of cycling down the Danube, followed (for me) by sailing and cycling in Finland and Norway while Terri finished up her 15th and final year at Kumon Leysin Academy.  When she was free, we abandoned the bicycles and set off on foot to trek in the Pyrenees and then the mythical GR20 hiking route in Corsica.  Terri flew back to Switzerland for her Swiss citizenship ceremony, and then we were off, both finally free of work and commitments for the foreseeable future.

We visited our families and then rendezvoused in Ushuaia, Argentina for the extravagant splurge of a lifetime, a trip to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula on the MV Ushuaia.  Despite a fire on board on the first night, and having to dodge between South Atlantic hurricanes on the return journey, it was an incredible, life-altering trip that always seemed to have a David Attenborough voice-over playing in our heads.

After that, we started cycling north through Patagonia, stopping to hike in places like Torres del Paine and El Chalten.  We said good-bye to 2015 in a little town along the Carretera Austral, the little-used dirt road linking the remote communities of southern Chile.

2015 new countries:  Finland, Sweden

2015 year-end country count:  119

2016
We kept cycling north in early 2016, finishing on the island of Chiloe.  After a few days visiting friends in Santiago from my year of working there in 1999, we took an interminable bus trip to Paraguay with our bicycle and spent a few weeks cycling there before ending our South American sojourn in the genteel urban settings of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

From here we switched continents.  We had talked for years about driving a 4-wheel-drive through Africa, and now it was time to put the dream into action.  We flew to Zambia where we spent several weeks working at Olive Tree Learning Centre, Terri's school that she helped establish in an impoverished shantytown in 2006 and which she has been supporting and growing ever since.  A group of Japanese students from Terri's former school flew down from Switzerland to meet us and do a service trip for which they had raised a large amount of much-needed funds, followed by a wildlife safari to incompable Chobe National Park across the Zambezi River in northern Botswana.

Afterwards we flew to Cape Town and started searching for vehicles, preferably already fitted out for overland exploration and camping.  Just as we were starting to despair, we got tipped off about a vehicle for sale in Johannesburg, and flew up to inspect it.  It was love at first sight, and so Stanley (as in Henry Morton Stanley) entered our lives.  

Most of the rest of 2016 was spent driving Stanley around southern Africa.  We explored Kruger National Park, then cruised through southern Mozambique before being turned around by civil conflict further north.  We drove back to South Africa, survived a potentially deadly car crash and then (after repairs) drove north into tragic but beautiful Zimbabwe for a month.  We popped out into Zambia and then turned east into Malawi before returning to Zambia, where we explored the north before heading down to Livingstone and spending more time at OTLC.  Finally we headed south across the wildlife paradise of Botswana before popping back into South Africa.

We took two-month break from Stanley from late October to mid-December, doing some tour guiding in Greece and some road-tripping through the Balkans before flying to Madagascar and its enchanting, endangered lemurs.

It wasn't until nearly Christmas that we were back in South Africa, picking up Stanley after some expert improvements had been made at Blinkgat, the camper manufacturer who had first put Stanley together a couple of years earlier.  We spun down through Swaziland and into KwaZulu-Natal, where we welcomed in 2017 in a wonderful wildlife refuge, Bushbaby Lodge.

2016 new countries:  Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Madagascar, Swaziland.

2016 year-end country count:  130

2017
The year started with some of our favourite bits of Africa.  We drove south through KwaZulu-Natal and the Orange Free State and drove across the breathtaking mountainous country of Lesotho before getting tired of the rainy season and bolting north towards Namibia.  Namibia was incredible, and we had many unforgettable nights camped out in the depths of the Namib desert or the semi-desert just inland of it.  All good things must come to an end, though, and what ended this idyllic period was a summons home to Thunder Bay, where my father was trying to recover from aggressive thyroid cancer.  We drove across the Caprivi Strip for one last visit to OTLC in Livingstone, then bolted back to Windhoek to store Stanley until we could return.

The next few months for me were a blur, as my father's recovery stalled and then a terminal decline set in.  He died at the end of June, and most of July was spent cleaning out the house where he had lived for 46 years (and where I had grown up and returned to for three decades after leaving home).  At the end of July my mother and I drove to Ottawa with a U-Haul of family heirlooms, and I flew off to Bali to rejoin Terri.

We spent the rest of the year in Indonesia, doing a lot of scuba diving and (in my case) learning how to take underwater photographs of the strange and wonderful creatures that live on tropical reefs.  I was also hard at work finishing the manuscript of my Silk Road cycling book.  In mid-November I crossed to the next island to the east, Lombok, and spent three weeks training to become a scuba instructor.  It was an intense course, but I passed the exam and set off immediately with Terri for jobs in Raja Ampat, the legendary diving area off the western tip of Indonesian New Guinea.  The job wasn't all it was cracked up to be, but it taught both of us a lot, and we got to dive almost every day with manta rays, which is a priceless experience.  We said farewell to the year on tiny Arborek Island in Raja Ampat, after a whirlwind 365 days.

2017 new countries:  Lesotho, Namibia

2017 year-end country count:  132

2018
Terri and I said goodbye to Arborek early in January, glad for the experience but keen to move on.  We stopped off in Ambon for some memorable muck diving, then returned to Bali for a month of heavy rain and occasional diving.  I was still hard at work writing, and in early February I finished the first draft of my manuscript, just in time to fly to New Zealand for 2 months of exploring with Terri.  We covered much of the North Island of the country, more than a quarter century after my first visit there in 1992.  We hiked, biked, paddled and drove around many of the incredible natural sights of the country, and were amazed afterwards at how much we had seen.

A very brief sojourn back in Bali, and then we were off again, flying to Namibia to pick up Stanley.  We had had some serious problems with Namibian Customs about Stanley not having the right paperwork (we thought he did!!) and so we had to move him to storage in South Africa.  We decided that we should explore Namibia in greater detail while we did, and we ended up spending six memorable weeks in the Namibian desert, camped out under the stars, looking for elephants and zebras and giraffes.  Eventually we drove down to rainy Cape Town and put Stanley into storage there.

While we had been in New Zealand, I had accepted a job offer to teach in Tbilisi, so when we returned to Bali, I packed up my possessions and flew to Canada to visit my mother and then, at the end of July, on to Tbilisi.

2018-2019:  The Tbilisi Years

I had always enjoyed Georgia during my three previous trips to the country (2009, 2011 and 2015), so I was looking forward to living there full-time.  Terri and I spent the late summer and autumn exploring the beautiful mountainous regions of Tusheti, Khevsureti and Mtiuleti, with fall break in the enchanting western region of Svaneti, then loaded up our expedition van (Douglas the Delica) as the Christmas break began and headed off on a three-week skiing roadtrip.  We welcomed in the New Year in a small homestay in the frosty mountains of the Goderdzi Pass area.

2018 new countries:  none (first time since 2005!)

2018 year-end country count:  132

2019

I've just written a long blog post looking back on this year, so I will be brief about this year's travels.  There were a number of (generally disappointing) ski weekends north of Tbilisi, a week in France skiing with my sister Saakje and her partner Henkka in March, some fun camping weekends in the spring and then a summer of mountain exploration in Kyrgyzstan and back here in Georgia.  This fall we drove around Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh (now renamed Artsakh) and today (in a few hours) we are flying to Panama for a Christmas get-together with my mother, Saakje and Henkka.

2019 new countries:  Panama

2019 year-end country count:  133

I hope that the 2020s will be just as active, if not more so, in terms of exploring new corners of the globe.  With a new and much longer-range installment of Stanley's Travels coming up starting in September, 2020, I hope to add a lot of the countries that are still missing from my collection.  I still have roughly 90 countries left to visit; I would love to have that total down closer to 30 when I'm writing the next installment of the decade-in-review.

A 2018 Retrospective

Tbilisi, December 20

The Earth has almost completed another lap of the sun, Christmas vacation is here and it's time once again to cast an eye back on the year that has just passed.  I like taking the opportunity to catch my breath and remember everything that happened in an eventful year.

Raja Ampat and Maluku

Manta flyby

Village children on Arborek at one of our Science Saturdays

A shadow puppet play about manta ray conservation

2018 began on Arborek Island, a small island in Raja Ampat, an archipelago of small islands off the western tip of New Guinea in far eastern Indonesia.  Terri was working as the project manager for a small group of volunteers, while I put my newly-earned PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor rating to use as an instructor.  Raja Ampat is a beautiful area with some of the best-preserved coral reefs and highest biodiversity anywhere in the tropical Indo-Pacific, and we were lucky to be located next to some of the local hotspots for manta rays.  The diving was fabulous, if a bit challenging thanks to raging currents, and we saw a career's worth of manta rays (both reef mantas, Mobula alfredi, and the much larger oceanic mantas, Mobula birostris).  The work, though, was frustrating, particularly for Terri, and within a week we had decided that we would leave after a month.  The Christmas period was particularly challenging, as many of our local Papuan staff disappeared without warning, leaving us short-staffed.  We also didn't get to do many of the community outreach programs that are a key part of the program, as local schools were closed for the holidays.  It was fun at times, but we were relieved when we finally put ourselves aboard a speedboat back to Waigeo in early January.  

At stunning Pianeymo

Ho-hum, another manta :-)

The crew bids us farewell on our departure

We spent a couple of days birdwatching once we were off Arborek, spotting both the Wilson's and the red birds of paradise in one action-packed morning of hiking with a local guide.  I had seen them before, in the summer of 2014, when I travelled through the region, but it was a first for Terri.  

Click here for more photos from Raja Ampat

Red bird of paradise

Wilson's bird of paradise

                                      

We then stopped off for three days of fabulous muck diving in Ambon, the capital of the province of Maluku.  The weather was awful, as the rainy season was at its height, but we still managed to spot lots of new species of tiny critters, although not the very rare psychadelic frogfish which we had hoped for.  Ambon is a treasure trove of rare species, and I would love to go back the next time I find myself in Indonesia, as well as venturing out to the Banda Islands (the sea was too rough and the weather too poor to contemplate doing that on this trip.)  On January 17th we flew back to Bali, glad to be back in our familiar, comfortable surroundings.

Click here for more photos from Ambon

A beautifully tinted weedy scorpionfish (Rhinopias frondosa)

Coconut octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) in Ambon

Striped bumblebee shrimp (Gnathophyllum americanum)

Bali

I spent three separate stints in Bali in 2018.  The first was a month in January and February, as the rainy season poured down on the island.  I spent a lot of time indoors, writing, but also ventured out diving now and then.  An American man whom we had met in Ambon, Austin, came to stay for two months in Terri's rental unit and he and I did some great muck diving in Tulamben while Terri was off to New Zealand in advance of me.  We spotted tons of new species of nudibranchs, thanks to the eagle eyes of Komang, our fabulous dive guide, who also gave us excellent photography tips.  I managed to finish the first draft of my book about cycling the Silk Road as well, which was a major accomplishment for me for the year.

Click here for more photos from Bali in January/February

The second stint in Bali happened in April and May, after New Zealand and before Namibia.  Again diving was the order of the day, although I started my stay with a four-day bicycle mini-tour all around Bali.  When Terri got back (a few days after me), we did lots of diving, and I started reworking the first draft of my manuscript.  We had some great days of diving in Tulamben, as well as just across the street in Lipah, where we found tiny Costasiella sp. sapsucking slugs that we had never spotted before; once we knew they were there, we saw them everywhere.

Click here for a blog post about my cycle mini-tour of Bali

Click here for more photos from Bali in April/May

I spent a final two frantic days in Bali in early July, packing up my life after our Namibia trip before heading to Ottawa and on to a new life in Tbilisi; it had been 11 months since I moved to Bali, and they were amazing, life-affirming months that were good for the soul and for my writing.

Lake Buyan

Seahorse

Taringa halgerda

Eubranchus sp.

Thecacera sp.

Ornate ghost pipefish (Solenostomus paradoxus)

Hypselodoris infucata

Paddleflap scorpionfish (Rhinopias eschmeyeri)

Emperor shrimp (Periclimenes imperator) riding atop a Tyrannodoris luteolineata

Maree in Lipah Bay, our local dive spot

Halgerda willeyi

Doto greenamyeri laying eggs

Costasiella sp. sapsucking slug

Carminodoris estrelyado

Discodoris boholiensis

Wunderpus photogenicus, the wunderpus

Chelinodura hirundina

Dasycaris zanzibarica, the Zanzibar whip coral shrimp

Costasiella sp. sapsucking slug

A big gathering of Stylocheilus striatus sea hares

Costasiella kuroshimae, the "Shawn the Sheep" sapsucking slug

New Zealand

Terri is from New Zealand, and as long as we had been together (eight years and counting!) we had been tossing around the idea of visiting New Zealand.  Finally, in February and March of this year, we made it happen.  We restricted ourselves to the North Island, but even so we had difficulty fitting in all the places we wanted to see, and all of Terri's friends and family whom we wanted to meet.  It was eye-wateringly expensive, but well worth it.  We hiked, biked, paddled and drove all over the North Island, seeking out rare native birds, wild beaches and campsites.  We circled the island, up to the Northland, then down south along the east coast and back north along the west coast.  It was great fun, but the best way to follow what we did is to read these blog posts:

The Northland loop

Down the east coast

Up the west coast

For more photos from our NZ travels, click here

While we were hiking along Ninety Mile Beach, I received a job offer from an international school in Tbilisi, Georgia.  Terri and I spent two days talking it over as we hiked, and I decided to accept the job, putting an end to three years of footloose freedom but helping restock depleted financial reserves.

Terri and 4 of her 5 grandkids on the farm near Wellsford

Hiking the Mangawhai Heads trail

Hiking Bream Heads

A lost little blue penguin

Ninety Mile Beach

Kayaking with Gavin and Michelle

Terri's sister's family in Upper Hutt

A takahe, one of the world's most endangered birds

Kakas

A prehistoric looking tuatara

Paddling the Whanganui River

Hiking the Tongariro Crossing

Looking down on the crater lakes of Tongariro

Terri cycling the Timber Trail

Mount Taranaki

Terri and Jess, her friend from Leysin days

Terri and her good friend Ross and Debbie in Hamilton

Namibia

In early May, Terri flew to Zambia to visit her school there, the Olive Tree Learning Centre, and to help out a party of volunteers from Canada and Australia who were spending time there.  We rendezvoused in Johannesburg airport and flew together to Windhoek, Namibia, to pick up our beloved Stanley, who had spent the year in storage there.  We had to move Stanley to South Africa for complicated reasons related to customs duties, and we had been regretting not being able to spend more time in everyone's favourite country in southern Africa back in 2017.  

Our trip through Namibia this time was absolutely fantastic, the culmination of Stanley's Travels.  We had finally worked out the optimum way to camp wild, completely off the grid, and so we did as much of that as we could.  We drove out to Swakopmund, then turned inland to Damaraland, an area we had briefly touched on in 2017.  This time we stopped and camped wild in a fantastic, unpopulated landscape, sparsely inhabited by springbok, gemsbok and giraffe.  Every night we had a campfire under the stars, cooked over the coals and stared up at the stars.  I tried my hand at some astrophotography, and loved learning an entirely new type of photography.  I had found an old macro lens while cleaning out my father's house, and spent a lot of time taking photos of tiny, colourful wildflowers.  The coastal desert of Namibia, too dry to support permanent human habitation, is one of the great outdoor wildlife adventure spots of Africa, free of the pressure of exploding human populations everywhere else on the continent.  Terri and I felt unbelievably free and close to the spirit of the San hunter-gatherers from whom all humans are ultimately descended, between our campsites in the middle of nowhere and our visits to San painting galleries in the middle of nowhere.  Our drive up to the Marienflusse, right on the Angolan border, was the highlight of the trip for me.  One day, in a couple of years' time, we will be back, this time to cross the border and drive north, all the way to Europe, before returning south to South Africa along the east side of Africa.  When we do, we will be ready, after our experiences camping and driving in the middle of absolutely nowhere Namibia.

After the Marienfluss, we returned south, via the wonderful Hoanib River and its legendary desert elephants and a return visit to amazing Etosha National Park, eventually passing south through Windhoek and heading regretfully south, via the epic Fish River Canyon and the lovely Richtersveld, into South Africa.  We left Stanley at a storage place outside Cape Town, ready for his next adventures whenever we leave Georgia.  Africa is definitely in our blood now, and we will be back again and again, between Stanley and the Olive Tree Learning Centre.

We flew out of cold, rainy Cape Town on the last day of June, bound for Bali and new adventures afterwards.  

Click here for photos from Damaraland

Click here for photos from Kaokoland

Click here for photos from Etosha

Click here for photos from south of Windhoek

Click here for photos of Namibian wildflowers

Somehow I seem to have neglected to write a blog post about Namibia; I shall have to remedy this grave omission soon!  Namibia really is one of the great travel destinations on earth, and we loved our time in this astounding country.

Sunset colours on the Brandberg

Half moon

Hartmann's mountain zebras near the Brandberg

Ruppell's korhaans

Another delicious roadside picnic lunch

This is what the road ahead should look like!

Golden grasslands of Damaraland

Wildflower colours

Outback pancakes

The best way to spend an evening:  campfire and starlight

In the shallow waters of the Hoanib River

Giraffes wandering past our campsite

More golden grasslands

Wildflowers

Passing motorists trying to fix Stanley, who wouldn't start

Outback campfire fare in our beloved potjie

Namaqua chameleon

The track along the Marienfluss

Looking across the Cunene River into Angola

Braaing boerwors over a campfire

The Hoanib River flowing through the Khowarib Gorge

Dancing from pure joy in the Khowarib Gorge

One-hour exposure of the night sky near the South Pole

Stanley and the Milky Way

Desert elephant in the Hoanib River

An attempt to capture the Milky Way

Secretarybirds in Etosha

Wisdom

Play-fighting elephants

Finally got the Milky Way!

Black rhino and gembsbok

Me and Stanley on the Etosha Pan

The best astrophoto of the trip!

A Damara dik-dik, an elusive creature spotted at last by Terri

Sunset heron near Etosha

Terri's birthday on the Orange River

Wildflowers in the Richtersveld

Ottawa

I spent most of July in Ottawa, visiting my mother and catching my breath after a whirlwind few months of travel.  I didn't do much other than read, sort through gear in preparation for my move to Tbilisi, rewrite my manuscript (an almost complete third draft), play cribbage with my mother and go out to various cultural events like the Ottawa Bluesfest (where we saw Blue Rodeo, Colin James and a number of lesser-known but equally talented acts), Shakespeare in the Park, Chamberfest and Music and Beyond).  It was great to catch up with my mother, a wonderful person who did so much to make me who I am today.  At the end of July I flew off to Tbilisi to start a new chapter in my life.

Georgia

I arrived in Tbilisi, dumped my gear in my new house and then flew to Leysin for a flying visit.  I picked up winter gear that had been sitting in my sister Audie's basement for three years, visited a few friends, then headed back to Tbilisi.  Terri arrived a day later and I dragged her, sick and jet-lagged, off for a four-day hike in Tusheti, a magical mountain region in northeastern Georgia.  It was a tough but rewarding hike over the high Atsunta Pass into the Khevsureti region, past ancient stone villages studded with high defensive towers, past meadows of wildflowers and beautiful mountain vistas.

After that I was at work.  It was certainly a shock to the system, returning to the classroom after three sabbatical years.  I am teaching physical science, geometry and physics.  The workload is certainly lighter than I had in Leysin (for one thing it's not a boarding school, so there are no residential duties), but it's still mentally tiring to return to the discipline of work after so long.  

We got away for a couple of great weekend trips in September, first hiking from Juta to Roshka (linking the Kazbegi region to Khevsureti and thus joining up with August's hike), then going back to Juta on my birthday weekend for more hiking around the spectacular Chaukhi massif.  

My 50th birthday came as a bit of a shock, but Terri did her best to soften the blow with amazing food, a lovely weekend in Juta and (best of all) a present of a unicycle.  I can now ride it reasonably well, but it was a long, tough learning curve.  I can't believe I'm a half century old now; I don't feel like it (at least not most of the time!).

In October we headed off to enchanting Svaneti for a week of hiking; you can read about it in more detail here.  

When we returned from this trip, we at long last were able to buy a Mitsubishi Delica van after more than two months of searching, allowing us to explore more of rural Georgia on weekends.  We have visited Uplistsikhe, Tbilisi National Park, Tianeti and other areas close to Tbilisi.  As well, on our long weekend in November we drove down to Armenia to poke around the Debed Canyon, an area full of very old, very impressive stone churches.  All this has whetted our appetite for further exploration of this ancient, historic, culturally fascinating country.

Last Friday school let out, and we have been out skiing, first in Gudauri (the best-known Georgian ski area, just north of Tbilisi), and (starting tomorrow) in Goderdzi (near Batumi and the Black Sea) and also in Tetnuldi (up in Svaneti).  We can't wait!!

Photos from August adventures

Photos from September and October

Svaneti Photos

Fall Photos

Ski Photos

What 2018 brought, and what 2019 promises

We are here for at least another 18 months, with summer 2019 having Kyrgyzstan pencilled in for some serious hiking, along with more hiking here in Georgia.  I can't wait to see what else 2019 brings (including, I hope, a publishing contract for my Silk Road book!).  Terri and I would love to welcome some of you to Georgia to explore this intriguing mountain nation.

2018 was a wonderful year, and a year of two contrasting halves:  frenetic movement in the first half, then a more steady, measured pace through the second half.  Freedom in the first seven months, then wage servitude for the last five months.  Tropical heat for much of the first half of the year, then a return to the seasonal rhythm of the temperate latitudes.

I enjoyed crossing paths with so many friends and relatives over the course of the year.  In no particular order, we met up with our new diving friend Austin; my friend Eileen; Terri's daughter Selena and her husband and grandkids; Terri's dear friends Gavin and Michelle; her cousins Steven and Toni, Mark and Gary; her delightful Aunt Lois and Uncle Phil; her brother Trevor; her childhood neighbour and friend; Terri's sister and most of her nieces and nephews; her Leysin colleague Jess; Terri's dear friends Ross and Debbie; our Leysin friend Thomas; my former student Ardak; Terri's friends (and epic travellers) Lilian and John; my Yangon friends Reid and Beth; and our new friend Brian.  There are many more who have slipped my mind, but as I get older, meeting up with friends and family becomes steadily more important.  

May 2019 bring all of you, my dear readers, peace and tailwinds and as much adventure as you want.  

Tusheti wildflower

Tusheti defensive towers

Tusheti wildflower

Butterfly and thistle

Tusheti mountain scenery

Thistle and beetle

Tusheti wildflower

Tired but elated atop the Atsunta Pass

On the descent into Khevsureti

Wildflower near Juta

Crossing the Sedzele Pass to Roshka

Camped beneath the Chaukhi Massif

Roshka wildflower

The green, green hills of the Caucasus

Chaukhi Massif

More wildflower and beetle action near Roshka

Barbecued mtsvadi, the best food in Georgia!

Yours truly at 50

Part of the wonderful half-century celebrations

My new unicycle!

Gergeti Trinity Church

Birthday weekend above Juta

Chaukhi Massif yet again

Terri hiking up to the Chaukhi Pass

Autumn colours in Svaneti

Looking down on Mestia

Me in Svaneti

The iconic peak of Ushba

Svan tower and fall foliage

Typical Svan defensive tower

Lamaria Church in Ushguli, Svaneti

Enchanting Ushguli

Hiking near Zhabeshi, Svaneti

Fall colours near Zhabeshi

Terri and I below Mt. Ushba

Becho waterfalls, Svaneti

Cycling through an ancient oak forest in Tbilisi National Park

Armazi Fortress

Ancient Uplistsikhe, near Gori

Me in Uplistsikhe

Georgia-Samoa rugby match

Birtvisi

Drying persimmons, Debed Canyon

Me with beautiful khachkars, Debed Canyon

Odzun church, Debed Canyon, Armenia

Odzun church, Armenia

Haghpat church, Armenia

Haghpat

Me with a MiG-21, Mikoyan Brothers Museum, Sanahin

Interior of Akhtala Church, Armenia

Terri and I in Gudauri

Terri ripping up the pow in Gudauri

Ski tour in Gudauri

The turns that we earned by skinning