About 6 days it took us to get from Reykjavik to Blönduós travelling over the highland road called “Kjölur” which traverses Iceland starting at Geysir and ending at the fjords of the north. 7 spokes it cost us to travel 420 km over mainly unasphalted roads.
Kerlingarfjöll
But what an adventure! We had beautiful weather, allowing us splendid views on the Langjökull Glacier in the West and the Hofsjökull in the East. We also enjoyed some soothing hot springs at Hveravellir and treated our eyes to pure Icelandic beauty (steaming fumerolles, boiling mud potts and amazingly coloured mountains) at Kerlingarfjöll. Not to mention the everlasting beauty of the deserted inlands with cristal blue lakes now and then.
Yesterday it started to rain though and it hasn´t stopped until now. Well, one has to admit: that’s Iceland too! And to be honest: it´s not too bad having a rest day in the rain, when you are sitting with your sore butt (hihi) in a hot tub of about 39 degrees just after having eaten some Icelandic pastries.
This picture was taken in the gardens around the Temple of Heaven in Beijing early in the morning. Beijing is one big mess of cars, people, bikes and the general “Chinese-loudness”. But if you have the courage to get up early enough in the morning and walk through the different gardens scattered over town, you will find many people doing Tai Chi or meditation exercises, alone or in a group. It’s very peaceful to look at and it sure opens up a new vision on Beijing.
The man in the picture had been doing some Tai Chi before and was now resting on this trunk. It seems that he is talking to someone, but he was alone (or at least in our eyes, maybe he saw something we didn’t see).
Vera & Jean-Christophe
By Vera|Comments Off on Picture in the Picture: Early morning solitude
While rumbling through our photo-files we found this picture, which is not of very good quality, which is probably the reason why we didn’t publish it in the first place (it looks like some ISO-problem, due to bad settings – or better: not verified settings – definitely a sure indication of who took this picture ) but it sure deserves a place within “Picture in the Picture” where “quality doesn’t matter, but the story behind the picture does”.
Anybody still has a bike he needs transport for?
So this is a sure example of something that is very common in South-East Asia: overloading! And this is the proof, that they not only like to overload buses (yeah, yeah, 50 seats, but 120 people, what’s the problem sitting on a bag of rice for 12 hours???) but also mini-vans, cars and basically any means of transport.
So anyone still interested in transporting his/her bike? There is still a loooooooot of space left!
Sometimes, when nostalgia hits (for example when we make the big mistake to look at too many of our pictures or read old posts on our travels, which makes us realizing that we want to go travelling again. Yes, we are nostalgic of that freedom and we miss all the nice people we met on the road) we can luckily rely on the project “Playing for Change” to cheer us up.
Playing for Change is a multimedia movement created to inspire, connect, and bring peace to the world through music. The idea for this project arose from a common belief that music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people. No matter whether people come from different geographic, political, economic, spiritual or ideological backgrounds, music has the universal power to transcend and unite us as one human race.
With their project the initiators recorded musicians and artists from all over the world and then assembled those recordings to make absolute “feeling-bloody-good-songs”!
For us, when we listen especially to the song above, we always end up dancing in the living room forgetting about our blues!
Vera & Jean-Christophe
PS: Our good mood is especially improved by the cute accent of the first French singer: Lez donte werie my brozer…
A lot of people asked us “So? What’s it like to be home again?”. A question, we can’t really answer, as in one week, we will be on the road again for 3 months. In the meanwhile, “being home” is like a 100% full-time job, preparing our bikes for the next trip, taking care of administrative stuff and route planning. As for Jean-Christophe, he is having a hard time, changing and preparing the website for our future trip…
So on the 31st of July we flew home after having been away for exactly one year. We were thinking that a lot of things would have changed, but very rapidly we found out that, no, in fact everything is still exactly the same. People still complain about their jobs, road works in Germany are still going on (we are seriously wondering if anybody still remembers what the goal of those road works is since they started 4 years ago…) and the grass is still green. Now this is normal, because while we were experiencing so many new things and learning a lot, “life at home” just kept on running.
But when we scratched a little bit under the surface, we quickly get to see, that indeed some things changed…
