dense igran of Asfalou

After eating lunch in our Asfalou language and cultural madrassa, I often walk through the fields of beans, alfalfa, & wheat to find a spot to sit and draw. This usually involves negotiating the low dirt ridges that channel the irrigation water through groves of olive trees filled with noisy birds, and finding the shade of a tall date palm to sit in, then finding room on the ground between the buzzing ant hills. I'm hoping this place burns into my head.

between the Atlas and the Sahara

Home for these first months in the Maghreb has been a farming village by a small river draining from the High Atlas Mountains capped with snow in the background. A system of irrigation ditches helps maintain a narrow strip of lush fields growing wheat, alfalfa, olive and almond trees and date palms.

Above these fields about 600 people and their livestock live in low houses made of clay mud blocks or concrete. Surrounding this and other nearby villages is a barren yellow and red landscape of rocky ridges stretching to the high dunes of the Sahara.


Daytime sounds of motorcycles or trucks passing through, donkeys braying, and the lone muezzin calling out prayer times gives way at night to the silence of wind and stars.

Morocco or bust!

Jma el Fna, Marrakech

A disorienting few days being quickly ushered through piles of policies and paperwork in Marrakech culminated in a long, windy road trip for more orientation and training in Ouarzazate. Going over the High Atlas Mountains was a good match for what was happening in my head. The road increasingly turned back on itself as we climbed ever higher. I had to grit my teeth to distract from the growing nausea, but the sights through the window compelled me to keep looking. The smooth, newly upholstered, gendarme-escorted bus seemed to make the the dizziness worse.

For several days after arrival in North Africa, we were semi-sequestered in calm, non-threatening hotel resorts. Instead of the immediate confrontation usually suffered upon arrival in a foreign country (which somehow leads to quickly getting one's bearings and adjusting to the new smells and sounds there), we were cared for and protected... and I kept failing to feel prepared or properly oriented.

But the excitement over the next two years, and the distant mountains and desert held my focus enough to make it through the dizzy period.

crossing the Tizi-n-Test Pass, High Atlas Mountains

arrival in the dessert

India Sketches II

A few more outtakes from the journal I kept after my hard drive crashed... It slowed me down and helped me start drawing again.

a Jodhpur market, 27 Jan.

pigeons over Agra, 12 Jan.

Taj Mahal, 13 Jan.

Hanuman shrine, Orchha, 10 Jan.

Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, 31 Jan.

India Sketches

A few outtakes from the journal I kept after my hard drive crashed...

chai walla, Calcutta, 27 Dec.

taxis, Calcutta, 26 Dec.

the Ganges, Varanasi, 2 Jan.

stray cow, Varanasi, 31 Dec.

shots of Nepal

In liu of blogging on the go, a few photos...

Bhote Koshi valley entering Nepal, 4 Dec.

Kathmandu kids, 6 Dec.

a Janakpur market, 14 Dec.

pee stop on the highway, 15 Dec.

Nepali roadways are LOUD, 17 Dec.

Tibet sketches

Some bits from the sketch journal I turned to after my hard drive crashed in China...

yaks being herded through Zoige, 8 Nov.

Langmusi, 5 Nov.

Labrang Monastery, Xiahe, 2 Nov.

central Tibetan Plateau from the Lhasa train,  27 Nov.

prayer chimney, 3 Dec.

China sketches

Some bits from the sketch journal I turned to when my hard drive crashed in China...

Beijing Bell Tower, 9 Oct.

construction boom, all over China...

Outdoor tea garden, Chungdu, 24 Nov.

Beijing to Delhi overland

After that last post from China my hard drive crashed and we had to go to sticky internet cafes to log on. While perhaps I should’ve been able to write in those places like Jenifer did (hereim.tumblr.com), over time I diverted that energy to an old fashioned sketch journal (and figured out how water soluble colered-pencils work along the way). We did make it to Delhi via Tibet and Nepal 19 weeks after landing in Beijing. I hadn’t expected we’d be able to stay on the ground the whole way due to the logistics of Tibet, but I’m endlessly thankful for having done so after all.

Also along the way we confirmed and finalized plans long in the works to join the Peace Corps for service in Morocco! So, over the last month we wrapped up lose ends and visited family in the States and arrived in Marrakesh via Casablanca this week. Whew, what a whirlwind!

It's hard to say how much access we'll have here over the next 27 months, but I really do intend to give this blog another try!

In the meantime, I’ll load a few of those sketches from Asia, the memories and dreamlike effects of which I’ll no doubt be digesting for the rest of my life.

Independent travel in China

Independent travel in China

From a month into China...

Obviously, all of our visas came through without any more problems. Subject as they seem to be to snap changes in regulations, especially in sensitive areas of Western China, I was relieved. But it means we are skipping out on Xinjiang Province, since a required tour group is way out of our budget right now...

That said, the major challenges to traveling independently here have amounted to our massive language barrier, and the way China's tourism infrastructure is oriented to tour groups.

Stop into a tourist information center looking for public transportation out to a major sight in the countryside, and we're only information on signing up with a group tour instead. So we go off to try to figure it out for ourselves, and public transportation information is generally only written in Chinese. Buying an inter-city train ticket can mean standing in long crowd-lines until reaching the ticket agent, trying hard to communicate by phrase book while squeezed in on both shoulders by other impatient travelers, and realizing it's a heavy travel week and the next available ticket is five days from now.

Tickets become available only 3 to 10 days ahead of the travel date (depending on the route and time of year), and travel companies buy in bulk -meaning that sometimes the only way to get a seat is to go through a privately run travel agent and pay their commission charge on top of the ticket price, a source of some frustration among the Chinese.

All in all, it hasn't been too hard now that we've gotten out of Beijing and into smaller cities, figured out how to buy from the train station ticket counter, and most importantly, gotten past the major holiday week called Golden Week, known by some as "Hell Week" now that so many people here go traveling...

The photo is of Beijing Xi Zhan (West Station), the largest rail terminal in Asia

Visa adventures

I'm going down to the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan in the morning to pick up our visas and passports (hopefully), and I just completed our Indian visa applications for a submittal appointment Thursday morning. I really hope it all goes smoothly since there isn't much time left for me to be sent away by a bureaucrat to come again another day...

As this isn't a very interesting or geographical post, I'll just refer back to the second one I did for this blog back on July 10, 2008, in which I said that the blog will be maintained whether or not I have anything interesting to show or tell. (I'm going to try to return to that plan, since I've missed the simple journal aspect to doing this) The only likely barriers to regular posting should be periodic lack of internet access. The other good reason to cycle back to July 2008 is that I'm back in the same place mentally -departure is coming fast, so to-do lists are clouding up my mind.

New direction, new view

So, having finished an intensive summer full of design classes and a street photography course as well as final preparations for going abroad again, I feel exhausted, dizzy and excited.

Since classes began in June I see typefaces everywhere -ones that have always been there, good ones looking good and bad ones looking bad, but now my eyes are tuned in to them. Everything looks richer. As for photography, I feel like Iv'e peeled back another layer -we'll see if it shows.

At the same time, the oven buzzer has finally gone off on applications long cooking for overseas work. We're watching the crust brown as we wait for formal placement documents. Interim travel plans have ripened simultaneously, so the first bite will be a 19-hour flight over the Arctic (I think -it's the shortest route) to Beijing (via Shanghai).

move along now...

A lot is going on now in life that is very exciting -especially regarding the nexus of my own geographic and visual lives- so I need to find a way to make this blog relevant again and stop seeing it as just a journal that I'm badly behind on...

Home in Kemmerer

Finally in Kemmerer to visit with the folks, as always it feels like home again. I've never spent more than ten days at a time there but it's all so familiar for being so far out there... 

the Great American Desert

Independence Rock graffiti

Independence Rock

sunrise on the Oregon Trail

on the Oregon Trail

Oregon Trail marker

On the road through central Wyoming the desert is so unbelievable. It's so easy to imagine walking along with a convoy of covered wagons and cattle, carrying all you own in the world having left everything you know to start a new life... But to start it by making your way across a wilderness unlike almost anything left on earth today is so much to fathom.

so, as I was saying...

We headed west along the Oregon Trail, among others. The museum we stopped at in Casper reminded me again what fun little dioramas can be...

Out of the Emptiness and onto the Oregon Trail

shade in Douglas, Wyoming

a jackalope in Douglas, Wyoming

drive-up liquor window in Douglas, Wyoming

Casper, Wyoming

We emerged from the huge emptiness of the Powder River Basin at Douglas, situated on Interstate 80. The town provided the first shade all day in the form of cottonwoods and a tall jackalope.
From there we picked up the route of a number of trails responsible for the westward expansion of the US, including the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the Pony Express and the Santa Fe Trail...

Wyoming power!

coal train

Black Thunder Coal Mine in the Powder River Basin

natural gas refinery near Glenrock, Wyoming

The Black Thunder coal mine in eastern Wyoming's coal fields is one of the largest coal mines in the world, scraping enough coal off the earth's surface to send 25 miles of full trains out around the country every day (or 8% of all the coal used in the US). This place explains how so many of the trains we saw crossing the grasslands here headed to distant power plants measured well over a mile whenever we bothered with the odometer.

Wyoming has been through so many booms and busts in its short modern history, and right now its energy extraction economy is certainly booming.