The picture is one of a mortar impact on the side-walk in Kharkiv.

With the launch of Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine on 22 February 2022, our lives changed for good.

The war had started back in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the Russia’s back insurrection in Donbas. But somehow, past the initial shock, most Ukrainians had gone back back to their daily lives. This was probably part of the incredible resilience that they demonstrated to the world later on, that enables them to keep going no matter what. The problem is that it also numbs them to deal with issues before they become critical as well. This allowed Russia to wage a war from 2014 that somehow was deliberately forgotten by most, in Ukraine and in the public opinion of most of the world.

24 February 2022 was a tough wake-up. Everyone was immediately affected and a primal feeling of physical danger struck everyone. Yet, Ukrainians had to somehow adapt and live with this. Moving regularly between Paris and different parts of Ukraine, it often struck me to see the difference of perception about a war depending on whether you are afar or living it in your daily life.

When the war started, it was a huge shock for everyone. This is because you are afraid for your physical safety, because all bets are off, because you have no idea what may come next, what tomorrow -if any- will be made of. You understand without fully comprehending that the life as you knew it is gone and that there are many consequences you do not fully seize as of yet. You also understand that some of these consequences you may not understand because they depend on what is going on.

This is a huge difference between those there and the one far away: while the shock of the war is shared, those who live it quickly have to get on with their lives. Although absurd it may seem, a person needs to live, have a job, do something. This, actually is crucial if your country wants to have a chance to win the war. You have to have a functioning economy. This leads to behavior that may sound strange from afar but that just make sense.

The classical exemple is the one of the air alerts, which are materialized by sirens. Those are stern, gloomy reminders of the war. They may happen one, twice, twenty times a day. They may last for a few minutes or several hours. They may be followed -or preceded at time…- by shelling, but most of the time, if you are a bit behind lines, it is not uncommon that most air alert come and go without actual kinetic activity.

If you live far from the war, you picture yourself running into shelter whenever As true as this may be, people do not have hours to loose every day so they make a choice of seeking shelter or not. In my experience, very few actually do after a while. People learn a pattern and will make an unconscious decision about whether they need to act upon an air alert. It comes down to a gloomy unconscious statistical game about whether there is a big enough risk to get hit so that you will interrupt what you are doing: your job, groceries, walking your child to the park.

There are tools that enable you to somewhat make yourself an opinion. In Ukraine, there is an app, showing where the air alerts are active in the country. So if there is one plane in the air in Belarus carrying a couple of missiles, most people will ignore the alert as the occurrence of such activities is frequent and the chance you individually get hit is low. If only your region is targeted and that you read in Telegram channels (the other main tool) that 78 ballistic missiles are flying towards you, then it is another story.

This does not mean that everyone will abide by this rule. The striking exemple was probably when we missed an appointment with a real estate agent with Mila to visit a flat and that she got quite mad that we had not made it according to plan. We pointed out the air alert and the fact that the city had actually been hit pretty hard on that day, to no avail.

From the side, you will probably this person as irresponsible. I would not pass a judgment on her, but I will certainly seek shelter if I feel endangered and feel unapologetic about it. But the fact is that a lot of people will not budge and continue what they are doing. This is undeniably dangerous. You may speak of a boiled-frog syndrome. But it is also this kind of behavior that enables a country to fight off aggression.

To some limited degree, it reminds me of Primo Levi’s It this is a Man, depicting inmates in a concentration camp, conscious that they may well all be killed soon, and yet organizing a sort of trade markets of all sort of objects.

Humans get used to anything, and wars are not exceptions. This is neither good nor bad. This is the way it is.

Serendipity of a shelling provoking a full blackout: you can gaze at the Milky Way from downtown Lviv

Normal abnormal in downtown Kharkiv: air alert is on but life goes on.

Bon appétit and may this evening be calm!

Discuss...

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.

Let’s say that it gave me the knowledge -which is mostly good sense really- and the self-confidence that are often preventing people from going to the mountains by themselves. They feel, justifiably that it may be dangerous, and therefore do not venture beyond well-marked paths leading to the nearest lake or waterfall.

My luck was that I got to enjoy the mountains beyond that early on. When I was young, my father took me to hike most classical summits of the Pyrénées. But instead of taking the classical way, which usually took little more than half of a full day of walking, he always chose a longer and less known variant, which took a couple of days.

We would overnight in the mountains, with all that comes with it: carrying a heavy backpack, find a place to sleep, drink a hot instant soup in the evening, look at the stars in the sleeping back, light sleep, a negotiation in the morning to know who would be the first one to get out of the sleeping bag in the morning and get the water in the nearest creek for the tea, which felt delicious even though it still tasted a bit of the soup of the evening before, packing everything again, start walking with a sensation of cold and the muscles a bit aching, knowing, however, that the bite of the sun would be considerably more painful.

Every hike had immutable rituals: arriving towards the end of the afternoon or in the evening at the trailhead to start walking while others were making their way down, hike for a couple of hours, while scanning the surroundings quickly to find an overhanging rock in case there would be rain during the night (we never carried a tent), the ascent the next day, always in short, changing to warmer clothes and pants on the summit and then the long, mind-numbing descent. And, at the car, the cheer joy to get the can of Coke that I would have hidden in the stream when leaving and drinking it in a few seconds.

It has been a few years that I haven’t been in the mountains regularly I miss it. I go to the mountains more or less every time I get some vacation. But during the lockdown, it was nearly impossible. So when we finally hit the Carpathian mountains for a long weekend around my birthday, it was really thrilling.

I went hiking the Pip Ivan trail, a moderate eight-hour walk leading to the third-highest mountain in Ukraine (just above 2000m). Its particularity is the observatory built on top, which was almost never used as such, as the Soviet Union took over that region. It slowly fell into decay over the years. I knew that, at the very least, should I get lost, I should see my goal. Or at least so I thought.

I made my way to the trailhead on June 1st which is incidentally the first day of summer in Ukraine. As nothing was marked, it took me a while with my rudimentary map and my GPS to find the start of the trail.

Then came this part that I used to dread and that I came to appreciate with the years. This first half an hour when your body is warming up and you are struggling with the steep path and the heavy backpack. What was just pain became a sort of ascetic exercise: building a rhythm slowly, step after step, without pause, until the pain subsides. Then I do not feel anything anymore and can go on like this for many hours.

In the Carpathians, I reached that point when I came on the side of a shepherd cabin making the type of cheese they eat in this region, brynza. The dog guarding the house looked at me with placid eyes and let me walk past without bulging.

The path took an unexpected turn around a hill and got into a wild hollow. A last source of spring water and the conifer forest started, dark and fresh.

It is quite sad and hard to understand for me, but people dropped quite a few wrappers and empty bottles that I tried to collect inasmuch as it feasible. I then crossed a larger stream and got on a shoulder with monolithic rock standing out on the ridge. It reminded me of these strange standing rock formations that I had seen near in Stolby Park (Столбы) Divnogorsk, in Krasnoyarsk region of Russia.

Some of these had been painted with the Ukrainian flag and the inexhaustible initials of many couple of hikers eager to leave a trace of their affection for each other.

It was then that the snow started. The snow still present on the ground, but also a bitterly cold wind that announced nothing good. I quickly took shelter and put my Gore-Tex equipment. Less than five minutes after that, a heavy fog covered the ridge and a sustained snowfall started. What a unique way to start summer! I had to cross a steep path without much visibility and struggled a bit.

I reached a pass and had to orientate myself, with no visibility and only the white horizon. Then it was perfect, the very reason why I love the mountains so much. A pristine path, without any human trace (at that point, the occasional hikers give up, so you find very little garbage). All sounds are nub, because of the snow.

Visibly not completely alone

Here and there, you can hear the flaps of a bird's wing or gusts of winds. Apart from that, there is only the sound of your steps deep in the snow and your heavy and regular breathing. The air is pure and coarse.

At that point, my rhythm is already quite set and I walk like an automat. Then, I suppose helped by altitude and solitude, your mind starts drifting and you become quite meditative. Things come in perspective and you consider them in a new, serene and detached way. You give priority to keeping the rhythm, like an obsession.

On that day, the snow became wind and sun and snow again. The weather was changing quickly and the evanescent reflections of the shade of the clouds on the snow were beautiful.

And there, I saw it, Pip Ivan fortress, appearing like a spectrum in the clouds, a black fortress surrounded by a world of white.

First sight of Pip Ivan Fortess

At that point I had been walking for about three hours. I was ahead of time, but I forced the pace, attracted like a magnet by the fortress. There was about 45 minutes left to walk up a pretty ridge. I reached the fortress, accompanied by a new snowfall and strong wind, almost disappointed that these walls were real. The fortress was falling into decay, but was still massive looking. I rushed into the open area to escape the wind and eat lunch. The staff from mountain rescue team staying at the top asked me where I came from and where I was heading, obviously a bit surprised to see a Frenchman by himself up-there.

When I walked out, the snow fall had ended and a beautiful clear sky opened up, revealing the landscape I had only been glimpsing here and there. It was exhilarating and I walked down at a good paced, with the silence just broken by a helicopter doing rotation of some kind in the area.

A last look at the crumbling observatory

Metamorphosed landscape

I bought some brynza and some pollen when I reached the cabin of the shepherd on the way back.

All in all, it was just a six hours’ hike, but it fell as usual like a much longer inner journey with many emotions, through all seasons.

One reason is that when you live abroad, you are often asked where you are from. If I say: “France”, then I am asked where from in France. I tend to give the name of the city in which I was born, a place that I visited only very seldom for the past 15 years… By the time my interlocutor manages to locate mentally where Pau is, I usually do not get more questions. But then some, reading the hesitation on my face then ask me: “But where is home for you?”, throwing me into a turmoil of thoughts. Then I usually answer: Kyiv. It is not that I feel that I have a special bond with this city; it is simply where I live.

This question became very relevant when my sister’s mother got diagnosed with cancer. At the time, whenever I would fly home, I would buy a ticket to Toulouse, not really thinking about it. I would also, even if only on the way to somewhere else, stop in this apartment that I had known since I was four and stay there an hour, one day, or one week.

My mother was renting her flat. When she died, I had to empty the flat she had lived in for 35 years in the course of two weeks. I had not seen my mother in ten years and I guess I did not consider this apartment as home any longer, even though I had lived my first fifteen years in it. Initially, I had a choc after step-in in after 10-year absence. The power of evocation of olfactory senses always fascinated me. It can transport you instantly back into a place or a situation irrespective of how well you remember that situation/person. In my mother's flat, there was the heat, the smell of cats and books. But there was also something new: an indescribable capharnaüm. The difficult task of emptying 35 years of -physically- dirty memories quickly dissipated the nostalgia I had felt at first. Or, how daunting tasks truly have a cathartic effect on you…

It is only a few years on, when the prospect of my sister’s mother’s death became something likely, that I had a sense that I was about to lose not only someone I loved, but also the place really felt like home. It is quite interesting to think that the place I felt home probably had the worst foam mattress I ever encountered. It does not change the fact that I probably slept better there than in the most luxurious hotels that I was given to try out. In this painful period when my sister’s mother passed away, I felt something close to panic. I had been so naturally at home there, that I had never even thought about it.

With this thought came another one. Home is not just a place, it is also associated with a person. This did not make sense to me at first. I have a very geographic sensitivity and places are very important to me. I can picture memories from different angles, with a different light, in one and the same room. I therefore thought that the walls were enough to keep memories.

With Graciela’s death, though, I realized the truth in the proverb that says: “You miss one person and everything is depopulated.” I came to realize that home can, of course, be associated with a place. But more importantly, home is someone. This person can make you feel at home anywhere. And, on the opposite, you can feel terribly lonely in the most familiar places if you miss that person.

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... After, it was doubtful that we would be get so close again to the southern tip of South America any time soon. After twenty-five hours of plane from Kyiv, just two more hours on a plane did not seem much.

The town center looks a bit like a small pioneer town that you would expect to find somewhere in Wyoming, with a main street and a few others. It is relatively small, surrounded by mountains, on which hotels and houses are built as the town expands. The airport was built on a peninsula on the Beagle, which is the border with Chile and, a few miles further, the famous Cape Horn, the most southern point of South America.

The town is obviously playing on this frontier identity with, on top of it, nationalist slogans spread around town on the Malvinas Islands and with the rivalries with Chile on the border, which is still contested in some areas. There are, however, some very nice and cosy places and stores. We even had dinner in a locally fancy restaurant on an evening when the local chef had invited a colleague from Cordoba and they were proposing a common gastronomic menu.

Obviously, what's most interesting are the outdoors in an arctic climate. Whenever travelling far from home, I have always been fascinated by the tiny differences I can see in nature. In Ushuaia, the first such observation was, amazingly enough, the soil. The humus of the forest was not looking like anything I had seen before.

Forest soil

In some places, fallen leaves were creating a beautiful natural patchwork of colors on the soil.

The few hikes we took around the city (literally walking out of our hotel room) were beautiful. We decided to walk on the shore of Lake Roga until we reached the border with Chile. There was quite a surreal light, a persistent mist and -what I have noticed to be a constant in arctic climate- indecisive weather prone to change in a few minutes.

The border with Chile itself, with a few old decrepit barbwire in the water and a sign warning you not to walk any further

When we drove a bit further, surprisingly going though several police checkpoints -only reinforcing the feeling of being in some sort of frontier, we could see more mountains around us. None of them were very high, but they had wild, rugged aspect, as though very few people had ever treaded these valleys.

All in all, there was really nothing spectacular that occurred during these few days around Ushuaia, but there was a unique feeling of exploring a world's edge and I guess it did have an effect on me.

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...

But then the sheer beauty of the desertic landscape with the silver silhouette of the Fitz Roy behind the Viedma Lake (any Russian origin for this name?) struck me and I knew we would not fly back to Buenos Aires as planned. Got into the airport, a nice cozy small and new airport in the middle of nowhere and we looked at the sunrise while the plane, which had just made a stopover took off, heading to Ushuaia, where I decided we would also go.

Before getting outside of the building where I had arranged a pick up, I looked randomly at a window and picked up a Kara-Kara (a bird looking like a small eagle or a big raven) eating a mouse. I was under the charm. Outside, a few meters from the parking lot, it was the steppe already. I was truly happy, with a smile of my face that did not fade away until very long after.

I had arranged to stay at a place at the end of the world. We drove three hours (2,5h out of which on a dead end, not asphalted. That's where I took the picture on top of this post. The more we drove, the wilder it got, and the more amazed I got.

Then we took a left turn and the very end of the valley opened before us, together with an incredibly strong wind, one that makes Patagonia's legend and turn a lake into a stormy ocean.

Terminus: there is nothing after except endless glacial cap leading to Chile

Three enchanted days at the end of the world and incidentally at the end of the touristic season, with the perks of being the only clients left before winter would set in and they would close the place. It was a crazy Finn who set up this place in this location and patiently grew trees that grew on one side only because of the incessant winds. He groomed these trees and it made the place somewhat liveable. There was even a -very- slow wifi in the living room of the “hotel”.

We took a few hikes, one of which to this incredible lake. It was the only time that my GPS (a real GPS, Garmin 64S), got completely lost and showed me that I was west of Senegal, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

I lost track of time and walked and walked, at time spotting a guanaco and unfortunately not being discreet enough for the cougar. I admired the colour of the fall and this vegetation that was so different.

Once at the lake, I would easily have set up my tent there for ever... It was truly magical, with this typical turquoise blue from the glacier's sediments.

After a few hours there, we headed back down reluctantly, with the impression of having lived a unique experience. The guide, Cristina, was so nice, answering all our numerous questions.

I had to get closer to the Fitz Roy, and that's what we did once the stay “at the end of the world” was over. There, the Fitz Roy granted us a truly magnificent welcome for which I will always be grateful.

We reached El Chalten, this pioneer-hippie type of resort built from 1985 at night. The next morning, we headed for the closest lake to the Fitz Roy, the Lake of the three glaciers. Too many people, but it's hard to beat the crowd.

It's a tricky 7h hike, with a rather easy start and a 1000m+ steep hill at the end. The approach is spectacular and the scenery unbelievable, with the rock taking many shades.

The start

During the hike

At the end, we were at the feet of the Fitz Roy, who decided to be shy on that day, protecting us from the painful bite of the sun.

We just got a peak on the way up.

The Fitz Roy, hiding behind clouds

A hike that I will never forget... To be continued...

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.

When you first look at the dolomites, you first start seeing spires, cathedrals, fortresses. After a second or two, however, you quickly realise that no human would have nearly come close to building anything like this. I suppose this primal urge to try to anthropomorphise everything is intrinsic to human beings...

Speaking of scale...

One thing that I love in the mountains is that everything around you, starting with the weather, can drastically change in a matter of minutes. There are feelings that are difficult to render fully, such as the fresh and raw wind blowing into your face, putting you off balance for a second and hereby, here again, giving you a sense to the perspective, reminding how ephemeral your presence is.

On this trip, I was particularly lucky with the light. It was incredible, constantly changing, putting into perspective the different layers of the landscape, giving it a fugacious and labile character, which enables a human being to get a better sense of the depth and height of what surrounds her/him. In a perfectly sunny day, the white light erases nuances and flattens topography (and you struggle during your hike because of the intense heat...).

#travel #mountains #alps #Italy #Dolomites

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. We travelled to Zugdidi and then to Mestia with mashruktas, these minibuses that are the norm for public transport in the region.

It took us some patience with drivers not willing to leave before their bus was full despite the schedule, long hours in the sun and some scary moments on the road before we made it to a unique place. It was an inn, kept by a family from the valley who had associated themselves with a Norwegian tourist who had seen the unique potential of the remote location, just underneath the majestic south face of mount Ushba (4,710 m). We were secluded from the world for a few days and enjoy it fully, having breakfast in front of the house and hiking a different direction every day.

Breakfast in paradise, with Mount Ushba in the background

We could enjoy magnificent views of the Svaneti mountain ridge to the south as well

We then headed to Borjomi National Park and it was really beautiful there. The season was perfect, although it was very cold at night when we slept outside. There was a beautiful mixture of conifers and deciduous forest, with an incredible contrast between the light green of the young Spring leaves with the dark green of the pine trees.

A few shades of green

We just had one issue: we took our water directly from the eponymous water Spring, very well known around the region for its virtues and slightly salty taste. Little did we know that what you buy in bottles has nothing to do with the water from the Spring, horribly stinky and salty. As we did not bring any water purifier with us, we basically did not drink for almost two days...

The national park was the first one in Georgia and required permits, which we had. Guards control hikers randomly inside the park, armed with shotguns... It was reasonably intimidating.

We also had some nicer encounters

#travel #Georgia #mountains

Today, a real challenge: choose only five pictures of my native mountains, where I hiked many years and took thousands of pictures.

The first picture is the Vignemale. My parents met there, in a mountain hut. It is the highest peak of the French Pyrénées (the higher summits are located in Spain). Actually, it is technically on the border with Spain, although the well-known north face that you can see is in France. The Southern side used to be covered with one of Pyrénées' largest glacier, the Ossoue Glacier. Due to global warming, though, the glacier will be gone in a few years only. I remember when I first did the ascent of this mountain, when I was 11. We walked four hours on the glacier before reaching the ridge to the summit.

The mountain was first made famous but an Englishman, Henri Russell, who fell in love with it. He even resided inside the caves carved near the summit at times. What is incredible about the Pyrénées is its strong history and the characters associated with it. A word was even coined in French for it: Pyrénéisme.

* The Vignemale, probably my favourite mountains of all*

The next picture is part of the Maniportet lakes, Néouvielle massif. I slept there on a four-day hike in 2016. It was the most peaceful atmosphere possible. That is why I love backpacking several days.

You would think that the next picture was taken somewhere in Japan, right? No, it is taken in the Spanish Pyrénées, in an incredibly beautiful park called Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici. It is an incredible place, with hundreds of lakes. It feels as though as you were in a dream there. The next three pictures were taken in a six-day backpacking trip in the fall of 2013. A wonderful and phantasmagoric memory.

#travel #Pyrénées #mountains

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”...

The setting is quite spectacular: you board a ferry in Bodo and head towards the archipelago. During the crossing the shark-tooth-like ridge start appearing on the horizon falling straight into the water. As if geology had created this archipelago yesterday...

This landscape, you find it everywhere, even though there are a few settlements here and there, and these famous rorbu, the fishermen's houses. Even though many of these houses have been reconverted into nice bed and breakfast, some of them are still used and you can still see the cod drying on wooden constructions.

There are not so many roads on the archipelago, but you can still follow some unpaved road without any signs. That's what I did back in 2011. At the very end of one road, that's what I had stumbled upon.

The mountains are surrounded by water, everywhere. There are some places where you may easily feel on a paradisiac island (which it is) with clear beautiful warm water.

This is only an impression, though...

And, as this is Norway, you have a constitutional right to sleep anywhere you want in the wild and thus enjoy some unbelievable landscape that makes you feel like the luckiest person on earth.

And as it is so much up north, the sun never really sets. But wildlife, for some reason, feels as though it is night and you cannot really see them. And this is how I saw a beautiful couple of foxes, playing a few yards away from the tent for quite a while, before disappearing as discreetly as they had come.

To be continued in 2020...

#travel #Norway

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.

The first picture on top of this post is, of course... a fjord. Probably the most well-known emblem of Norway. This high and narrow valleys were carved by gigantic glaciers. The cliffs can measure up to 1500 m. The water inside is a mix of fresh and sea water. There is an unmatchable beauty to this and I can look at them for hours, fascinated by their sheer beauty at every moment of the day.

On that picture, I was looking at the Lysefjord on my last morning in it. Back in 2016, I took a leave without pay when I learned that a family member was diagnosed with cancer. During these three months, I traveled to Stavanger, in the south of Norway. From there, a boat dropped me in the Lysefjord, worldwide known for its natural platform overlooking the fjord, Preikestolen, and a boulder suspended above a 1000m abyss, Kjeragbolten. I walked for five days and walked up and down 160 km around the fjord. I had some very nice and some horrific weather (17 hours of sustained rain without interruption). It was a truly beautiful journey, alone in the immensity of the fjord.

On the same trip I took that picture, not far from the famous Kjeragbolten. It gives an idea of the scale of the landscape.

The fjords were glaciers, but these have not disappeared from Norway. The picture below was taken in 2011 on a road trip taken across the country. I do not remember the exact location unfortunately and there were no GPS in the cameras at the time to remind me of where it was taken. I just remember walking towards the end of a valley and peaking at this tens of meters -if not more- thick ice cap on top of the cliff.

Between two fjords, this landscape was captured in a village which was not particularly known. It was not mentioned in the guide and yet the beauty of the landscape struck me.

And because it is difficult to get tired of fjords, here is a picture taken during a hike on the sides of the very famous Geirangerfjord its huge waterfall. The ferry carrying cars helps apprehend the scale of the landscape.

#travel #Norway