Landscape
Burleigh Heads, Queensland
Australia
September 2019
I visited my family for a month and I barely took any photographs, at least not analog ones. On one of the last days we went to Burleigh Heads to walk around the headland, watch the surfers and look for whales. The afternoon sun was setting low and hard in the western horizon. I took this with my back to the ocean, looking into the end of the day, knowing soon I’d be flying in that direction, back to Germany.
San Francisco, CA
November 2018
Four days in San Francisco, or was it only three? We flew from Berlin for our friend Dan’s wedding to Erin. The airline lost my bag and Vic had to lend me something to sleep in and some make up for my jetlagged face. We ate as many tacos as we could, Tyler drove us to see the ocean, the wedding was joyful and sweet, and afterwards we flew to New York to pick up the belongings I left there in storage in 2016.
The Great Wall, Beijing
China
June 2018
We met some other travellers back on the hike at Tiger Leaping Gorge who told us about a family outside Beijing who were helping people visit a more remote and unrestored section of the Wall. Wanting very much to avoid the crowds that we knew would be thronging the restored parts of the Wall that are easily accessible from Beijing, we jumped at this chance. We arranged to meet the father of the family at a bus stop outside Beijing, and he drove us to his farm where his family gave us an incredible vegetarian home cooked lunch. The father then dropped us off at the start of a trail that led up to the Wall. He equipped us with a tent, sleeping bags and sleeping mats, and we carried our own snacks and water. We hiked up to the crest of a hill with panoramic views and set up our tent directly next to a stretch of the Wall. The Wall follows the tops of hills in this area as far as the eye can see. We had a beautiful evening there enjoying the views and the company of some South African teachers who were also overnighting there. The next day we walked for three or four hours along the Wall until we found the path down that led us back to the family farm. The views of the layers of mountains in all directions were so beautiful, and the Wall itself is an incredible structure and engineering feat.
Ani Gompa nunnery, Tagong
Sichuan, China
June 2018
We walked to this small village on a hill crowned by the Ani Gompa nunnery and its large stupa. It was about two or three hours by foot from the small town of Tagong. It was a beautiful walk through fields of grazing yaks. Unfortunately the clouds were very low on our days in Tagong so we didn’t see the mountain peaks that we knew were all around us. As we left Tagong by minivan in the direction of Kanding, we drove through a high mountain pass that was covered in snow despite it being summer.
Somewhere on the edge of the Himalayas
Sichuan Province, China
June 2018
Right now the name of these mountains and lakes escapes me. Three Sisters? Four Sisters? Our guide dropped us here to eat the lunch of bread, momos and fruit that we’d bought at the market in the morning. A storm rolled in as we finished eating and we returned to the car across wet fields, leaping small streams, drenched in our rain coats.
Litang
Sichuan Province, China
June 2018
The air and the light here at +4,000 metres felt so different to anywhere I’ve ever been. It’s cold and bright and sunny and open. Litang is magic. People are dressed so beautifully, both the nomads in town for the market and the locals who live there. I just walked around in a daze. The nomad men wear big hats, cream coloured belted robes over their shirts and trousers and tall black boots and sit astride their motorcycles, some offering baskets of caterpillar fungus for sale. Everyone is gorgeous, with cheeks worn red from the wind and sun. There are yaks walking the streets and being grazed in the hills around the monastery. The city is situated in grasslands surrounded by mountains. We met some school kids who were learning English in school, and they invited us to come to their school graduation the next day. They photographed us like we were celebrities and we added them all on WeChat to share photos and emojis. The last photo here is a sky burial site, a funeral practice where the body is placed on a mountaintop, exposed to the elements to decompose and to be eaten by vultures.
Xiangcheng
Sichuan Province, China
June 2018
Tibetans have really cool motorcycles, no? Xiangcheng, elevation 3,200 metres, is a small and necessary overnight stop on the bus route between Litang and Shangri-La. I’m so glad it is, because it’s a special, quiet, beautiful place in the mountains, overlooking grassy fields, not really a destination in itself so it has a strange frontier feeling. We didn’t have any accommodation booked and we spent a very long time walking up and down steep streets trying to find a place to stay. The elevation made my backpack feel twice as heavy and I had to stop to rest a few times.
Tiger Leaping Gorge
Yunnan Province, China
June 2018
At a maximum depth of nearly 4,000 metres this is one of the deepest canyons in the world. We came here because there’s a two-day hike along the top of the canyon which we read about in our guidebook. I was really scared of doing this hike, and I spent hours leading up to the arrival in Qiaotou reading the few English-language blog posts I could find when I used my VPN on my phone to google things. I read them over and over, trying to judge how scary it would be. It’s famously steep and slippery in the rain, and there’s a section that is called the 28 bends that is just uphill switchbacks for hours. I kind of pretended to myself in the lead up to arriving in the town where the hike begins, that I was game to do this hike, because I knew how much Nico wanted to do it. But over breakfast on the day of the hike I cried into my oatmeal (not joking) and said I really didn’t want to do it. My toes and heels were covered in blisters from walking in the rain in Dali and I was scared. I hate heights, a lot a lot. So Nico set off to do the hike, and I agreed to find my way to the endpoint of the hike. I walked the low road for a while, I hitchhiked the next part, and then I got picked up by the son of the people who ran the guest house at the end of the hiking trail. I got to enjoy a glorious two days in that guest house eating delicious home cooked meals and drinking beer and reading and meeting other travelers and looking at the mountains and the canyon and the Jinsha river and drawing. Knowing I wasn’t hiking just made it even sweeter.
Yuanyang Rice Terraces
Hunnan Province, China
June 2018
Magic place. Pure magic place. We stayed an extra day because it was magic. I have a purple flower pressed inside my diary that was given to me by a young girl here.
Luang Namtha, Laos
May 2018
In Luang Namtha we borrowed bicycles for the day and cycled out into the rice fields around town to visit smaller villages. We saw women washing their clothes in the river, we saw where the villagers make their intensely strong whiskey, we cycled at dusk past families burning their rubbish in the rice paddies, we sat in a hut in a field to try to escape the burning sun for a while, we chatted with a teacher in a local school who stopped us as we were going past on our bikes because he wanted to say hello and practice some English. The next day we said goodbye to Laos, and hello to China.
Nong Khiaw, Laos
May 2018
Oh boy I am so behind. Photos from 18 months ago in Asia. Better late than never. Here we go.
We spent a couple of days in Nong Khiaw. It was our experience in small towns in Laos that due to lack of interested people, most of the hikes we would have liked to go on were simply much too expensive for us, because there weren’t enough people to split the costs. So we ended up finding our own non-guided walks to do. In Nong Khiaw we had read that the hike to the top of the mountain in the village was a must do at dawn. So we set our alarm, despite the fact it rained all night, and got up in the dark and hiked up through slippery paths for an hour or two as it gradually got lighter. It was, until that time, the hardest hike I’d ever done. Not only because it was dark and steep and constantly uphill, but also because it was so muddy and slippery and many trees had come down in the storm which required climbing over or under. I was rather proud of myself for managing it. At the top of the mountain, the dawn had already come, and we were higher than the clouds. All we could see was clouds in every direction. Suddenly, some clouds shifted we saw the green peaks of another mountain. We stayed for a few hours at the top as the clouds and fog shifted around, revealing different peaks in all directions, until all the clouds were gone and we had an incredible view of the surrounding mountains, valleys, town and river.
Hill End, NSW
Australia
February 2018
One Saturday afternoon whilst gazing out my studio window lost in thought, I noticed smoke in the distance, glowing red where it touched the horizon. For the first time in my life I called the fire brigade, knowing this was peak summer, peak fire season in the bush. Turned out the fire was 18 km away, which is little comfort when you live in a town that's at the end of a single lane road through the bush, an hour's drive from anything. But also comforting, because that's still a long way, long enough to be able to have a plan to get out early. So I hiked up to my favourite look out and watched the smoke for a while, and for the rest of the weekend I constantly monitored the NSW Rural Fire Department's Fires Near Me website. Blackened leaves fell down on the town, but nothing worse reached us, and the sunsets were especially beautiful for a few days.
Hill End, NSW
Australia
February 2018
Hill End was a magical place to walk around, with beautiful dusty light, gum trees stretching over dirt paths and goats and kangaroos weaving in and out of the bush,
Johanna Beach, Victoria
November 2017
No beach I've ever seen looks more like another planet than Johanna.
Maine, USA
July 2017
Woke up to this outside the cabin.
Black Spur Drive
Victoria, Australia
May 2017
Mountain Ash trees and giant ferns line the beautiful Black Spur drive in the Yarra Valley.
Paradise Beach
Victoria, Australia
March 2017
More camping, wish I was always camping.
Great Ocean Road
Victoria, Australia
March 2017
I always stop the car for photographs when the light is magic.
Twelve Apostles
Victoria, Australia
March 2017
One of the best sunset views of my life—like the edge of the world.
Johanna Beach
Victoria, Australia
March 2017
My favourite beach in Australia, full of rock pools to explore.