Bivouac in front of the North face of the Vignemale, in the French Pyrénées
Backpacking in the mountains just makes me happy. I have been in the mountains since I was quite young. Undeniably, the fact that my father repeatedly took me to the mountains during my childhood contributed to this.
This question is an important one for people who travel and live abroad, like me. The knowledge that you have some roots somewhere is what enables you to get very far feeling very comfortable. I think about this question a lot.
Just a few minutes after landing in El Calafate, the decision was taken: there would be no return to Buenos Aires as we had originally planned. Instead, we would head further down south, to Ushuaia. I used the island of 3G connection there to book the new tickets. This thought, which had not occurred to me looking at a map from Kyiv, now seemed obvious...
A guanaco with the lake Viedma and the Fitz Roy behind
This was an unforgettable trip. Initially, when we had arrived in Buenos Aires, the plan was to spend a couple of days in the capital, then head to El Calafate for three days and then fly back and probably head north. The tickets were bought. We flew during the night to El Calafate and landed at six in the morning after four hours of flight...
When it comes to spectacular mountain landscapes, the Dolomites in the northeastern part of Italy, are probably one of the most striking I have been given the chance to wander in. These pre-Alps limestone reeds are not particularly high, but they are usually nearly perfectly vertical. This give to the Dolomites a unique look, almost human-made, architectural.
Spectacular Svaneti
I would not say that I know Georgia well. I travelled there only twice, one of them for less than twenty-four hours. The first time was a business trip, on top of which I added some ten days of vacation. We headed to the Svaneti region, as the Tusheti, reportedly wilder, was not yet accessible from Tbilisi due to the high passes still blocked with snow.
View from Chaussenque's gap, Néouvielle
Today, a real challenge: choose only five pictures of my native mountains, where I hiked many years and took thousands of pictures.
This was one of the most beautiful places I probably visited. An archipelago, north of the Arctic circle, at the end of the world, with settlements with such surrealistic names, such as “Å”...
There is a growing practice online with the lockdown that people share pictures of their trips with others to help themselves and others to escape mentally. I like that and considering that I was lucky enough to travel quite a bit and like taking pictures, I thought that I would the same -hopefully- every day, one location at the time, with no more than five pictures (here is the real challenge...).
I decided to start with Norway, the country that impressed me the most, which I nonetheless divide in two parts, already bending the rule that I just set. Here are five pictures of memorable trips in this incredibly beautiful place.
As the lockdown is settling in, you start shifting from the euphoria from the beginning to a sort of strange state, as if in a limbo. You start to really feel the lack of social interactions, but also simply going out. So when then fires make the air unbreathable, when the smog is so thick that it smells as though your neighbor is preparing a barbecue 10 feet away, when IQAir tells you that you are living in the city with the worse quality of air in the world at the moment and that the Mayor of Kyiv advises not to open windows at any time, the term lockdown starts feeling strangely real...