As you might have learned, I’m in Paris, after more than one year of travelling around the world. Over 80 000 km if you count the plane trips. 372 days and four hours.

Being back doesn’t feel too bad. It might be because of the two friends who came to get me at the airport (her and her), or the numerous picnics, evening beers, wine parties that ensued with my friends in Paris. It might also be the fact that I’m still in a “travel” state of mind because I’m staying on a friend’s (him) couch, that I’m doing nothing except seeing people and minding my own buisness. I’m landing smoothly. Next week I’m going in the south, at a barbecue with other travellers I met around the world. And then, back to Bordeaux, to live a few days with my parents, because there’s no better motivation to go look for a job and a place than living again with parents. Then I’ll look for a job in graphic design/motion design/web design in Paris or elsewhere around the world. I’m not afraid to travel (as I might have shown). I’d like to start working again in November. If you know people who might be interested in working with me, well, contact me.)

There’s one more week of answering the same answers to my friends, because they always ask the same questions. So yeah, do you know how I got Dengue Fever in Vietnam? Japan’s really nice but it’s expensive… I don’t have a favorite country, it’s different everywhere, depends on the different experiences. Some are human, some cultural, or some downright bizarre, yet not all were perfect.

But these posts are not all. I forget vegan soups with mutton in Mongolia, coming back to the hostel, drunk and lost, in a foreign city, night train rides with a chinese soldier sleeping on my shoulder, discovering a new subway, a new currency system, a new Hello, Good-bye, Thank-you and No-thanks-lady-I-won’t-buy-it-and-that’s-definitive in a new asian language every few weeks, or learning to express myself in Spanish… also, there’s the ability to know where to find stuff in your backpack in the dark, or being able to pack it in less than half an hour, knowing who’s the liar and the one you can trust when you meet people, sharing so much with interesting, funny, surprising people that you might never see again (except maybe on Facebook), eating horrible-looking things while knowing what it is, or eating delicious food while not being able to know how to order it again, sleeping in a new bed every day and waking up to a new horizon every morning, digestive problems due to bad curry or not-so-fresh chicken hearts, vacation days in the travel, where you do nothing all day (except late postcards),weeks that stretch for years because nothing happens or days so packed with new things happening that they look like weeks, the girls met on the road and the complications ensuing sometimes, and people, locals, those who seem invisible to some tourists, those who seem always up to bad things to some travellers, but mostly those who can be your best friend for a day. All of this I’ll miss, and much more still. And I know they won’t ever leave me. And perhaps in some time I’ll rediscover them when I’m back on the road.

While I’m not travelling this blog will be way less active. Only postcards will be published for sure, perhaps a few more pictures… but I don’t know if I’ll have more to say. I might also add some AdWords ads on the articles now the micro-sponsoring project is finished… my next travel projects are not for today (I’ll have to learn to drive a motorbike before).

So I thank you my friends to follow my adventure around the world, to leave me comments. If you’re travelling and you find the advice on this website worthwhile, please tell me! And if you were just looking for dreams of travels, please help yourself…

… and happy trails!

PS: and I just learned that this website of mine was on a french teen-girls mag named Muteen… the scan’s here : twitpic.com/2p7im2 (in French). Merci Muteen, merci Benjamin-who-fond-the-scan! And cheers to Nico & Johanne who are also on it!

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You might know that my trip ends in a few days.

One of the big things during this travel was the making of pictures. Photography if you prefer. Or the collection of pictorial aides to remember, or a visual recreation of reality through photosensitive archiving technology.

You’ve got to know something first. When I talk about my relation to photography, it’s a whole history of broken cameras.

That’s why I never bought a digital single lens reflex : it’s only for wankers or people who use them professionnaly (and I’m neither), it’s heavy, fragile, and in three years I’ll want the next one with 15,2 megapixels instead of 14,7 right now. Fuck megapixels. When you buy a $1000+ tool you want it to last a lifetime or two, not three years. But well, that’s the fashion of the time, disposable technologies. Some things still can’t die, like Leica cameras, that is some sturdy toys (alt-tab, MS Office, new document, save as… “santa letter wishlist 2010.ppt”) and anyways nothing’s better than film, except of course the new Canikon that’s just been announced and that will be the Death of Film, and it can film HD Video and transmit it on Vimeo (regular video are uploaded to YouTube after going through CuteCatFilter), also you can use it to print buisness cards and as an ashtray. Professional use, I said. Then for the wankers you’ve got the overcompensating entry level camera that looks like you’re In Charge but that gets stolen at a market in Mongolia, or falls on a stone in India or drowns in Pisco Sour in Chile because it’s a hard life being a crappy level entry Digital SLR that even Peruvians won’t steal.

Besides that, people who know me say I’m such a nice guy.

So yeah I was saying, my relationship with photography is on a bed of broken cameras. I know my cameras will have technical issues, will fall or will decide to take a day off, but still at the end of the day I’ll have some pictures I’m happy about.

During the course of this trip I owned and used five cameras. Two suffered from bad technical failures, one from a mild electrical problem that goes to prove that too much electronics in a camera is bad news for you. I left with a digital camera, a compact, the Ricoh GRD II, that I had bought second hand for this trip. It worked very well for some time then, when the waranty expired, it decided to die. It conquered me though, the ease of utilisation and the sensor weren’t unlike using a film camera. Almost. But not quite the same though. I also had a Canon Canonet QL GIII which hasn’t had any problem, also I love it because it’s very compact. And I had my favorite medium format camera, a Yashica Mat 124G, a nice TLR whose lightmeter started getting troubles and who wasn’t as fun to carry around as I thought it would be.

So I replaced my Ricoh GRD II with a Ricoh GRD III, its immediate successor. I bought it in Guangzhou, China, so it wasn’t very expensive. Less expensive than in Hong Kong, and waaay less expensive than in Europe. The sensor is a bit different on the new one, but it was a matter of weeks until I could use it with greater ease than its predecessor. Fast and simple, and with a wide engle prime lens.

When the Yashica started not working I didn’t want to replace it with another medium format : film is hard to find, the thing’s heavy and not practical to carry around on strolls around the countries of the world. Even though I loved it. So I sent it back, from Bangkok, with the Canonet. And I bought a very good film SLR, the Pentax LX, with a rare 40mm “pancake” hypercompact prime lens, which makes it just a little bit bigger than the Canonet but better, basically. The Pentax LX is one of the most famous unknown best pro film 35mm SLR. And it’s black, so it looks very, very sweet. The problem I discovered one week later is that it eats batteries in a week. I was already out of Bangkok and couldn’t bring it back though, it would have been too simple. It’s a technical problem I couldn’t address at the Pentax Repair Center in Tokyo because it took too much time and money to repair it. So I sometimes had to Use The Force to mesure the right exposure for my shots. Nothing’s better than the Sunny F/16, yo.

And all the films, what did you do of them, do you carry them around? Nay my beloved. I sent them back in bunches and no package has been lost so it’s perfect. And now they are waiting for me in fridges around France until they will be developed in the travel order : Russia, Mongolia, China… and so on. I’ll see if I publish it here on the net as soon as I get them, or if I’ll wait to have something to show. But yeah, that is the super projects for the future.

And now, here’s about thirty pictures chosen among the best of the digital pictures I liked. I used a lot the square format but I grew out of it, then I abandonned black&white to go play with colours. Look for turquoise blue skies.

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So yeah. 365 days today.

And I’m currently in New York City. As it’s my birthday I’ve got other things to do than blog!

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A week in New Orleans can go so fast, between Café du Monde beignets, Abita Purple Haze at the Spotted Cat, Po’Boys at Guy’s on Magazine, Satchmo Fest on Frenchmen, grilled oysters at ACME, new friends who host me and with whom I go to the pool or see the latest Steven Soderbergh, and most of all the wet heat that never leaves you… Will summer ever end?

Anyways who wants it to end? Not me, if it means I’ve got to go home. I’d prefer stay among the gosts of New Orleans.

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While I was in Peru, I stopped in Nazca, a little city which lies near a desert famously known for the famous lines that had been traced hundreds of years ago by the civilisations living there.

And so I got to do a plane ride to see the lines from above ; as they are quite big you cannot see them from the ground.

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I don’t have lots to tell about this series.

La Isla del Sol, during a full day, with a surprise encounter with my friend Marie, who’s a french traveller I met in Patagonia, then again in Tihuanaku for Willkakuti, and then on a beach of the island, by surprise. Also, her brazilian friend. And all the little girls who sell souvenirs.

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Since I was a kid I dreamed of seeing lake Titikaka. I don’t really know why, but it’s a big lake in the mountains, so that must be the reason.

If you ever go to Copacabana, the city on the lake, don’t miss the trout. It’s so good.

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Sorry, this entry is only available in Français.

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I took the highest train in the world. Where? in Bolivia of course… Between Oruro and Uyuni, to be exact. In the middle of the Altiplano. Between mountains and lakes and wild animals and about nothing else.

As I couldn’t get a seat in the Economy class, I chose the last one in Executive class. Executive means lots of tourists. I was seated near the Brazilian guy who bought the penultimate ticket, and we talked about politics, about how Bolivia and Brazil got new constitutions recently and about how it was revolutionnary and emancipative for the common people and the indegenous peoples and about how the promised reforms had been stopped because of some crisis or some globalisation. So I spoke to him about the big conservative wind that’s been blowing over Europe for the last few years and that it was quite different from the progress from the 80’s (at least in France).

Brazil, he told me, is the country of the future. The sad thing he said then, is that in the future, Brazil will still be the country of the future.

And then the sun disapeared over the faraway horizon.

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Ok yeah I’m late. Like, 18 days without writing, my fan-mail piling up on my cyber doorstep, so yeah. No I’ve not been married against my will and I’m not honeymooning in a forgotten corner of South America.

I just arrived in Colombia after two weeks of non-stop travelling. For the last two weeks I’ve slept in busses and crummy hotels (but cheam crummy hotels) near bus terminals, never more than one night in one city, travelling without anybody with me, travelling fast, making the distance. And there’s a reason for that, I’ve got to be in Medellin on the 23rd, to catch a plane to leave the north of South America and go to the south of North America. One day in Lima, and I left Quito without buying a Panama hat (I’m really sore about it and hope I can find panama hats in Colombia). Anyways. I’m now in Cali, Colombia, with five days to reach Medellin (7 hours away), everything’s great.

But I didn’t want to talk to you about that.

Almost one month ago, I was at a special festival… in Tiwanaku, Bolivia (also written Tihuanaco), for the summerwinter solstice on June 21st. And Winter solstice is quite important, I mean, even for us in the western cultures they put christmas over the pagan solstice (you never really thought the Jesus was born on christmas day, did you?) and we’ve also got a new year 10 days later. Fundamentally, we celebrate the winter solstice. I celebrated Willkakuti, the Aymara New Year, in the pre-colombian and pre-inca ruins near the Lake Titikaka. There’s worse ways of spending a night, and the following morning.

Tiwanaku, two hours west from La Paz, near the Peruvian border, has got the most important ruins in Bolivia. I won’t give you the details because I don’t know them and won’t insult you by copypasting the Lonely Planet, but basically it’s ruins that predates the Incas. The Tihuanacota culture is now extinct, but it inspired the Inca culture so it’s not that bad. There was a huge temple from which some stones are left, and a stone gate, the Puerta del Sol, through which the first rays of the new year sun pass every year on winter solstice. But let’s not get too fast. The temple complex is quite mysterious, because we don’t know lots about the culture at that time.

At the present time, Aymara people have their cultural celebrations there, namely, Willkakuti, their New Year. The Aymara people is one of the indigenous people of Bolivia (pueblos originarios in spanish, but the translation is a bit like, “original people, yeah, they have lots of originality”), the Aymara language is one of the official tongues of the new bolivian constitution, same as Quechua or Spanish. The Aymara New Year starts at the sunrise on the day of the solstice. The days are starting to last longer, the cycle has started again. It’s a good occasion to grab a drum and a quena and to go make some bolivian music in the streets, or grab a bottle and a girl and go dancing Morenada or Caporal in the streets to the sound of the bolivian music. So that’s what I did.

If you want the longer story, read it in French. I don’t want to translate everything, 1700 words is quite a lot and I’m not paid (yes I am through micro-sponsors but still). So yeah. I arrived iN Tiwanaku in the afternoon, made some tourist friends there, and then we went for a drink as the night fell, and the music started to play on the stage, and eight hours after that I was dancing with a crazy bunch of bolivians to crazy bolivian music and it was quite fun. At 4 in the morning, it was quite cold. Dancing and alcool and more dancing (and more alcohol) helped while we were dancing, but when we stopped to go wait to access the ruins for sunrise, it was quite cold.

Once near the temple complex we still had to wait for sunrise, after all it’s why we were there, all 2000 of us. So I took pictures of people playing bolivian music with drums and quenas and red ponchos and their checkered rainbow flags (the traditionnal flag of the indigenous people). Inside the temple, priests were conducting ceremonies but I couldn’t watch that. Too many people around.

Then there was a rumor : Evo Morales was in the temple for the sunrise! Evo! Coca grower, Aymara speaker, president of Bolivia! In a reelection campain this year!

And then an old indian guy with a red poncho starts speaking with me, dancing with me, calling me padrino, and then asked me to buy him a flag with the checkered rainbow, so yeah I offered him one, and he was so happy to wave it around! Aymara pride!

Then another rumor! The sun has risen but is kept behind the clouds so we cannot see it. The eldest people in the crowd cannot remember a solstice sunrise with so much clouds. Some people say that the Sun God has a message for Evo, other people think it’s quite bad and then, around 8 or 8:30, Evo left. And the sun rose. The first rays were a bit late to go through the gate of the sun, but we could conduct the rest of the ceremonies, like raising the hands, palms facing the sun, to get the awesome power of the new year. So yeah, I did that.

The legend then tells us that I was invested in the all-powerful energy of the Aymara Sun God. But then the truth will have to be debated by my biographers.

Meanwhile, have a happy new year 5519.

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