⊕

At about 5:30, half-asleep and emerging from a tent smelling of maple-bacon, I caught this view.

The best photo I have taken has to be the one shown above, which I took in September 2019. I was travelling with a friend from San Francisco, down to L.A. and then back up again. We had rented a Nissan pick-up truck, or really I should, as a self-respecting Aussie, say Ute, which was of course a novelty for us compared to the “euro shitboxes” one mostly sees back at home. We were around the Yosemite / Death Valley area and had found a lay-by off a forest road which was in an isolated spot, perched up on the gentle gradient leading down to Mono Lake in the distance.

⊕

The peaks of Mount Ararat, the symbol of Armenia, float off in the horizon. On a clear day they can be seen from the capital, Yerevan. Though look carefully and you will see the border fence which now places it in Turkey.

Already preceding my entry into Armenia, had I heard accusations and assertions about this place. It was on the train journey to Kars, a town in Turkey, near to the border with Armenia, had we been conversing with a Turkish man who, when we told him we were going to Armenia, made sure to explain that we would hear much about the Armenian genocide, but that it simply wasn’t true. After all, the Ottoman Empire was a powerful entity, he stressed to us, surely if they wanted to exterminate the Armenian people, they would have done so thoroughly and without any half-measures?

⊕

Horses hanging out while it snows in the wintry valley.

Georgia is a land of stunning geography but one of the highlights for me was our tour starting in the capital and driving the Military Highway through the Caucuses mountains up to Gudauri, which is a ski resort town. This road is steeped in the history of the region, having been used by invaders and merchants since at least the first century BC.

Many Linux users settle on whatever their desktop environment their distro provides. Then there are others are endlessly tinkering–that was me. However, for the last couple of years, I’ve settled on what I think is a happy middle-ground between the flexibility of a tiling WM like sway and the usability of GNOME or KDE.

⊕

The Dogu Express reaches its penultimate stop, leaving enough time to buy and drink a quick Turkish coffee on the platform.

In November of 2022, I headed to Ankara for a two-week adventure through Turkey and the Caucuses with a friend that I have known for many years. It had been a trip months in the making, though it started with a humble suggestion during a Discord chat one evening. Both being relatively early into our careers, we did not have the luxury of spending money on long-haul flights to the U.S., a week’s worth of hotels in an expensive state as well as the petrol needed to get us around. Nor did the idea of staying in Europe and going to museums sound all that excited to us adventure-seekers. So instead, it was more a question of how far we could go for the least money and luckily, through browsing on Google Flights, we found short-haul flights to Ankara that fit the description well. So our destination had now become Ankara. But ask any Turk and they will tell you that there isn’t much to see in this city. Therefore, we decided to take the night train across the country and continue this journey into the Caucuses, which I’ll probably describe in a further blog post.