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.

After years of resistance I finally capitulated and bought a digital SLR body. Upside: my old Zuiko lensen will fit once the adapter ring arrives in the mail. Downside: it’s such a complex piece of work!
Anyway, many hours of messing about and a very enjoyable workshop given by Marcel Kentin (great photographer! check out his site) further and the digital photography world is starting to make sense to me. I’m beginning to grasp that once I get the hang of it this may actually be an improvement compared with my trusty old Olympus OM-2. Here’s a fun picture shot during the workshop in Marcel Kentin’s studio (click photo to see larger version).

Are both quite worth a visit when the weather’s right (and it was

Alle digitale foto’s van de JongEZ studiereis naar Vancouver, Edmonton en Fort McMurray staan op Flickr.

Net terug van een weekje skien dus goede reden om weer eens iets op mijn blog te zetten. We zijn in Les Arcs 2000 geweest, een prachtig gebied tegenover de Mont Blanc, met de bekende “Aiguille Rouge” en veel bos en mooie pistes. Het weer was aan begin en eind van de week uitstekend, tussendoor lekker verse sneeuw, en met zijn tienen (Olaf & Janneke, Olaf, Maarten & Do, Suus, Meinke, Dirk, Mayke en ik) hebben we er erg van genoten. Olaf, Janneke en Olaf hebben inmiddels wat foto’s online gezet, zie hier (Olaf K.), hier (Janneke) en hier (Olaf L.).

There are moments when I suddenly wish there’s a camera nearby. Doing something, walking somewhere or talking to someone when something suddenly catches your eye and you’re captivated. If you’re not alone, you can share the experience, but otherwise: “where’s my camera!?”.
As I took off the 55mm lens from my (dad’s) old Pentax Asahi S1s (just wanted to look inside whether it was still keeping well), the light from my 19 bulb lamp reflected off the many elements inside the lens and just begged to be photographed. Luckily there was Olaf’s digital compact camera within reach. These four shots are the result (I like the first one best).

Now that I’ve settled back into everyday life in the Hague I’ve made a few new headers for this site from the Peru and New York pictures. They should appear at random at the top of this site now and then. See this page to view them right away.

After a very enjoyable week I have returned home once more. Click the above image to see some of the photo’s taken by Ralph (or at least with his camera). Manhattan is a great place to live, provided you have the kind of cashflow needed to survive there, with incredible energy and (what surprised me most) friendly and relatively laid back inhabitants. The city is so big that you don’t ever need to go to the same place twice. The grid structure makes it an easy place to navigate and the seemingly hundreds of metro lines are an easy and effective way of covering larger distances.
Even though we were in Manhattan on 11 September, five years after the event, we hardly noticed anything different at all about the city that day. Apparently the media made it appear as though the whole of New York was grieving at the memorial site, but that was simply not representative of reality. Sure, at the site there was a crowd with the occasional grieve-stricken Manhattanite, but on block down and it was business as usual. More generally, my expectations of a terrorist-attack fearing town were put to shame.
Besides Manhattan we also drove up to Vermont to stay with my aunt & oncle for two days. They live near a place called Middlebury (with its proud College) and it appears to me that they have found the perfect place to enjoy the perfect outdoor lifestyle. Besides fishing and hunting there are vast forest covered mountains in the vicinity good for hiking or skiing and langlaufen in winter. My oncle built a “Banya” (which is Russian for sauna) in the backyard which makes the relaxation possibilities complete.
To get to and around Vermont Ralph and I rented a Chevrolet Trailblazer, which is an awesome SUV as long as fuel consumption is not an issue. Powerfull in the mountains and perfectly comfortable on cruise control on the interstate. What a car.
Some conclusions I have drawn this week:
- Roel has it figured!
- I have to visit my aunt & oncle more often!
- The USA and its population is not half as bad as it appears in the media.
- If I ever have lots of spare change floating around, I have to take Mayke for a shopping spree in Soho, Nolita and on Fifth!

Foto’s van de eerste paar dagen! (Klik foto).