Oh Portugal. How much I loved hitching, cycling and hiking on your roads, your dunes, and cliffs. Wild nature, and wonderful people. Amazing hospitality and what an experience to do all this without money! Just going around the bars and restaurants asking for left-overs, and many times the food would just appear right in front of me. Eating fruits of trees and finding veggies all along my path, and people inviting me over.

From North to South, literally from the furthest border to the most opposite side, by walking and hitching and staying over in Vila Nova de Cerveira, Viana do Castelo, Porto, Espinho, Mira, Coimbra, Talasnal, Tomar, Lisboa, Seixal, Alcácer do Sal, Carvalhal, Sines, Porto Covo, Vila Nova de Millfontes, Almograve, Odemira, Zambujeira, Azenha, Odeceixe, Rogil, Aljezur, Sagres, Salema, Lagos, Silves, Benafim, Vilamoura, São Brás de Alportel, Tavira and Vila Real de Santo António.

Highlights are numerous, and I am still writing my stories. But one of my personal favourites was Vila Nova de Millfontes, the second town on my unplanned hiking trail. I arrived in the morning, after walking for 6 hours by moonlight over the highest dunes I had ever seen. Coffee and breakfast was given by a nursery, and lunch was provided by some Bulgarians with a restaurant. But my path was blocked by a river and the bridge was far, and I wanted to cross in a more traditional fashion. So I decided to wait at the harbor for a local to bring me across by boat, which happened, without much waiting involved. His ex-wife was Dutch, and so he liked me. My first time hitching on a boat!

Recapping my experience, I finally had time to publish my photos. Not all of them, as I lost half of my photo-collection after being deprived from my computer, money and phone in the beginning of my way. But that reality was not as bitter as it may appear, as that triggered a set of events that changed my perspective on life tremendously. Ah, where life brings you when you simply surrender and trust!

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Magic in your life, hitch, play and fly. A flute maker finds you on your way – after a long night of  sleeping cold along the highway – and he brings you further. You allow it, you surrender to the magic of the moment and you meet … your love.

She was dancing in the moonlight – in front of the bonfire on the tones of the flute you received, the flute that ‘has a life on its own‘ and that ‘will take you on an adventure’. Together you started a story that appeals and inspires, a story that truly can be called the magic flute trail…

Thanks – and I will never forget the beautiful Kira smile.

Camping on one of the most touristic hot-spots in Europe, waking up, looking up and seeing the Eiffel Tower enlightened by the beams of the early morning sun. The first European Hitchhiking Day was an amazing success.

I am generally not so easily thrilled by gatherings as they ordinarily tend to be much of the same, but this event was very remarkable. As a hitcher, to be among more than a hundred fellow-hitching-creatures is simply beyond imagining.

I hitched together with Julian, while we were followed by a camera-team from the Dutch news (video) for the first two rides.

We were dropped at the Eiffel Tower meeting point just 6 hours later. Yet another 6 hours further we were with a hundred people who all had hitched from different parts of Europe. We played games, exchanged stories, made music and danced into the night, while camping just in front of the Eiffel Tower. Aah, life. (more photos)

Silence, dunes on our right, fields of green left, birds flutter, rabbits and hares jump of our trail as we reached the end of Terschelling. A man appears, grey bearded, with a walking stick, asking us, how do you do?

He is a bird-watcher and a forester. His barrack used to be where we are now, but 10 foot higher. A storm equalized the dune-landscape last year. No need to moan. The island moves all the time. New land is formed just ahead of us, and who knows where the next dune will stand?

(more photos)

There is so much to write, so many things have been hapening lately. Been away to Denmark, there is a new collective photo-website, I am helping to organise an (un)conference on hospitality exchange, have been on an adventurous trip to Enkhuizen (fun!), friends are visiting from all-over, work is steady and the house in full progress. And then there is also a new movement for Apathy… More to come soon!

Today a year ago I celebrated my birthday in Bern, Switzerland. Now that I have paused traveling I am excited to hear from friends who are themselves still on the road, or who just started traveling.

For example, whereas friend rouge is chasing German girls in South-East Asia, Ammasaisha is meeting guru-ground all around India. At the same time Leimac is having tons of fun with going his long way down by sand-boarding volcanoes in Latin America while Lasersurge sails the ocean, having been traveling for three years now. Or what about Chris, who is in Africa for over a year already?

Traveling inspires. Meet or be a traveler and you know what we mean by that: people that are out there, ‘away from home’ and creating their life by consciously dreaming – whatever that may be to us.

Special mention I would give Dani. He quit his job, took his bags and moved East. He is now in Tokyo creating great photography.

Everywhere Published!

While traveling last year I discovered this great thing called photography, and it really hooked me. I started to see my surroundings with new eyes as I developed a new dimension of looking at the world.

So I noticed the many colors around me and I got intrigued by water, light, ducks, birds, scenes, children and the cuddling waves of water. A whole new world opened up for me and my camera became a natural extension of my experience.

Little did I expect when I also started uploading my photos, but recently I got selected for a travel magazine and one of my Istanbul shots got actually published. Today I found the paper version (pdf, 17 mb) in my new mailbox and I can say this much: photos really do look better when printed. Yeah!

“Every week again I push my own borders”, says a lady who is cycling from Amsterdam to Abcoude, a tour of nearly 15 kilometer and who I just met. “Every week I change the route somewhat and I just try to cycle a bit more. Maybe one day I will go as far as you!”

The lady was impressed when I told her I came cycling from Huizen, my home-town, which is actually only twice as far as Abcoude. Even in Holland, where there are more bikes than people, you are apparantly looked upon when you travel ‘large distance’ by bike instead of by car or public transport.

In other words, traveling is so relative. I could have told her why I was here or about my travels in the past year, or about a friend who is touring the world on his bike, but the lady was more than impressed because of the small trip I made that day.

And similarly to traveling distance, will I be able to keep this way of searching and freshness as when traveling: to look in the same open way at those things that are familiar to me as towards what is new?

My Romanian bike-accident is already five weeks away and I am happy to be able to cycle longer distances again, and to discover new things in old places.

It would be impossible to summarise Istanbul. There are only impressions, feelings and thoughts. No matter how many different perspectives you would acquire, there are simply too many different paths and lives here, to give a conclusion so sound that its people find their own stories back in it.

A city this huge just makes you realise there is yet more to explore. Never enough, there is always another corner and another road, another family and another party. Life of the Istanbul wo/man seems never-ending and no words can really grasp what this city is about.

Highlights, this is one of the few things what you might be able to offer. I recently made one small effort for this purpose. With the photo-essay “Live it and you will love it” I offer a viewpoint of what Istanbul-life for me is about, how I perceived the city, and how I see the people and culture here. I hope it offers you a good snapshot of Istanbul.

I find this country and this city one of the most social I have been so far. People meet each other everywhere and nobody seems lonely. True, there is a lot of poverty and people who just try to survive but somehow they always receive a lot of support from each other. Here I see people interacting with each other continuously. Meeting on the street, a random passer-by, somebody who waits for a bus or sits next to you on the boat, they are all excuses for a conversation.

And when they find out you are not from here, they become very curious and want to know where you are from, what you are doing here and how you like it. Imagine that in a city such as London, Amsterdam, Paris or Barcelona. No way that someone would even show the slightest interest in your life or imagine people talking in the bus or whilst queuing!

Here, though, the person you start talking to will respond with genuine interest, without hesitation. Imagine how it feels to have the freedom just to talk to anyone you like. What therefore might be one of the biggest paradoxes of this massive town with more than fifteen million people: there are no strangers here, only people you still have to meet.

Istanbul, Sunday morning. Church bells wake me up. A familiar sound as I grew up in a large town with well over twenty churches. But hold on, aren’t we in a moslim country?

Istanbul is pretty much well-known for its diversity; it always has. It is a very cosmopolitan city with people from all different identities from all over the world, while at the same time there are currently still over thirty different original ethnicities within Turkey.

Still, politicians in this country see it as their life-goal to make everyone believe there is just one Turkish identity. Nationalism is an important asset of power and to challenge this is still uncommon. You are free to believe in whatever religion but you must not emphasize other parts of your identity, such as speaking in another language than Turkish (Kurdish for example).

In this sense Turkey is not very far from other countries that have led a top-down approach of enforcing one national identity, in particular France. Over the course of more than two hundred years France has almost successfully gotten rid of many different identities and traditions that find their roots in the many French regions.

And for me personally this is a sensitive issue. One of the main reasons why I originally left the Netherlands was the rise of nationalism and subsequently the growing disrespect for people that are considered to be different. I felt very powerless against this stream. It left me frustrated. Among other elements it was this feeling of frustration that made me leave 3,5 years ago.

But thankfully there are still people who challenge this ideology of one national identity. Also in Turkey. People that challenge this idea keep on emphasizing what Turkey still is between the lines; that the country is actually made up of more than thirty different etnicities.

And they emphasise that all people should have the right to express themselves in their own chosen way  such as language, clothes, sexuality, religion, dance, food or any other cultural-political element, as long as they permit others to do the same.

For the past two weeks I worked as a photographer and followed a political candidate for the upcoming parliamentary elections (22nd of July  2007) who is of this line. The candidate supports the idea that there is not one Turkish identity but many. He even turned this into his main issue. He is therefore also supported by different Armenian communities and many other minority communities in Istanbul.

These weeks have been quite fulfilling as such. Not only have I learned how political campaigns work in this country – also have I learned more about photo-journalism.

And wow, that can be quite a tough job, as you have to be on the spot and focused most of the time however boring it sometimes can be (even more since you don’t understand what they are talking about). All in all, these past weeks have revealed to me a new or rather different scope of politics, campaigning and photography.