Kiteboarding is echt verslavend. Na een paar lessen van Adriaan heb ik gisteren bij Oostvoorne m’n eerste volle slagen gemaakt (en de nodige wipe-outs). De foto is van Terschelling afgelopen woensdag, m’n eerste succesvolle waterstart. Klik op de foto voor nog een paar foto’s en foto’s van Adriaan aan z’n kite.

Lekker dagje strand met Adriaan.

My parents invited Mayke and me to join them on their orchestra tour of Budapest last week. Budapest has changed lots since my last visit (about 8 years ago), the city seems to have turned into a fun culture-rich and fashion-aware modern capital. Highlights were (of course) the thermal baths (Gellert and Széchenyi) and the impressive statue park with impressive socialist statues, and excellent restaurants! (Dio as top-pick).

A daytrip by car to Eastern Eger, a small town surrounded by vineyards, was also rewarding, although the weather was less cooperative that day. The Hungarian motorways are top-notch, the coutryside is beautiful and they make good wine!

Click on the photo for some impressions.

Xuly, Marc, Floris, Luuk en Yoshi laten zien hoe het moet op de trappen van de Muzentoren en in het skatepark op het Malieveld.

Spent the past three weeks travelling around Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh together with Mayke. India is a very special country, full of contradictions. A lot of beauty that goes seemlessly together with a lot of grime. It took a while to get used to the busy traffic (incessantly hooting at everything that moves) and the unavoidable cows, cowdung and litter. Once we got the hang of things we started to fall in love with this beautiful country though. See some photo impressions here.

Jan recently gave me the assignment to take some photographs through 2 lenses, holding one lens back-to-front in front of the other. The back-to-front lens is supposed to act as a loupe. I gave it a try and here are some results. Thanks Jan, I like it! Want to borrow an old lens?

Karen & Cobi’s wedding in Abbadia a Isola was the perfect excuse to spend a week in the countryside between Siena and Florence. I’ve posted a couple of pictures here.

This year has had a promising start with two weeks of Kenya in January and more recently two weeks of snow in Austria. The first week was in Kirchberg (Kitzbühler Alpen) in the great company of fifteen friends including Mayke, which was a week of great fun, great weather to begin with but not so great weather later on with some rain-skiing (enjoyable for those that enjoy getting wet and going slowly). Fortunately Olaf K. and I had a second week lined up in Saalbach-Hinterglemm which turned out to be a week full of fresh snow. Halfway through the week we were joined by Adriaan, who turns out to be an absolute powder addict.

His powder addiction brought us mostly off-piste and often through woods, which occasionally also gave rise to (minor) complications involving ski-throwing, sliding, stumbling, hanging onto trees, sliding through barbed wire, wading through mountain streams and skiing on what looks initially like snow but turns out to be soil with a thin layer of snow to cover it up. I personally discovered a new turning-method by jumping into a tree and swivelling your ski’s round – great if you need to turn around but the slope won’t allow you to. Adriaan discovered a new way of going past fallen-over trees, which involves a summersault over the tree in question. Best executed by starting off with a jump over another fallen-over tree higher up.

All in all, great fun, rounded off with a day of head-deep powder in Kaprun (and unfortunately for Olaf a rock that got slightly too friendly with his snowboard) and a fun-in-the-woods filled Easter Monday in Zell-am-See. The homeward journey also turned out to involve lots of powder, on which we felt very comfortable thanks to the previous week of powder-only skiing.

Click here for all the photo’s.

Mention Kenya today and everyone thinks of riots and mayhem. Judging by the media, Kenya is not a place you would want to be for your relaxation around now. Last January, Mayke and I faced the choice whether to trust the media and cancel our visit to my sister, or trust my sister’s info and get on the flight. We chose to fly and arrived in the Kenya as I’ve always known it, only improved in some ways (more modern mostly). Everywhere we went we met people who were strongly opposed to the violence and basically just wanted to get on with life. Which is what most people seemed to be doing: try to go about business as usual. Unfortunately, a small elite of power-crazed self-centred ugali-for-brains doesn’t seem to care about te country one bit and has chosen to fight out their differences at the expense of the 99% innocent standers-by.
It was a strange sensation to on the one hand have a thoroughly enjoyable time with my sister, her husband & new-born daughter around Nairobi, a few days in the Masai Mara and a few days at the coast, while on the other hand you witness first hand the complete drainage of tourists and the subsequent closing down of most tourist-related businesses. A heart-wrenchingly large number of Kenyans that work in sectors such as tourism are all losing their jobs and income because Mr Kibaki and Mr Odinga are both too selfish to put their own people first. One can only hope that sense will come to them soon and Kenya will return to the beautiful and peace-loving nation it’s meant to be.
Check out some photographs taken while our media would have us believe the country was in flames.