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Ethan Martin
Ethan

 

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Ethan Martin

Welcome!

Welcome to my travel blog. It's all old news now that I've stopped traveling, but feel free to look around anyway. Note the page tab up top titled "The Actual Route" for a map of everywhere I went.

Also! Here is link to my currently active blog as a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia.

On the right you'll find all sorts of handy links. There are links to photo albums from most of the countries I visited over my year of flightless travel, there are links to the twelve articles I published in the Exeter News-Letter over the course of a year, and there is a blog archive categorized by month and year.

If you're interested in specific countries or regions, a rough guide for sifting through the archive is as follows:

East Asia (South Korea, Russia, Mongolia, China): September - December 2010
Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand): December 2010 - February 2011
Central Asia (western China, Kazakhstan): February - April 2011
Near East (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey): April - May 2011
Europe (too many to list, plus Morocco): May - August 2011

Alternately, use the search bar at the top of this blog to look for blog posts containing any keywords you're interested in. Thanks for visiting!

We've come to this, my final article in the Exeter News-Letter. Click here or look for the link on the right sidebar. It was a good year of travel, and a good year of articles.

Also worth noting is the 'Go and Do' sidebox on the page. It will let you know the details of a presentation I will be giving at the Portsmouth Library in April regarding my trip and travels.

Coming to This

My penultimate column was published almost two weeks ago. I'm only posting this so late because I spent the last two weeks in a windowless room devoid of any time cues or outside contact. I was not in jail. I was participating in a sleep study because I'm poor because I spent all my money on the trip that this blog has documented.

As always, the link can be found on the right hand side, or by clicking here (or above). Enjoy it or suffer it while it lasts, either way, there's only one more coming.

Coming To This

Column number ten out of twelve has been published in the Exeter News-Letter. It chronicles my brief visit to Azerbaijan, and especially the walk I had around an old tank graveyard with, among others, the incomparable Jamie Maslin.

A new link has been added to the right-hand sidebar for your future browsing convenience!

Coming to This

My ninth travel column has been published in the News-Letter. Don't be afraid. Go ahead and click here.

As usual, I have added a link to the right-hand sidebar as well.

I suppose this might be as good a time as any to state the obvious and announce that I probably won't be posting much more on this blog as my trip is now well over. I might throw the occasional thing up, and I'll continue to post when I have new columns published - probably just three more to round it out to an even twelve over a year.

In the meantime I'm working on the finer aspects of being unemployed, pursuing international work opportunities, thinking about peddling my travel presentation to likely venues throughout the area, and writing a worthless novel as part of NaNoWriMo.

Thanks for reading!

A Talk at the Library

On Tuesday the 25th I'll be giving a talk at the Exeter Library about my trip. If you're in the Exeter Area, you should come out since nothing else happens around here on Tuesday nights.

From the library's promotional release:

The Flightless Journey of Ethan Martin

6:30 PM - 7:30 PM  Oct 25, 2011

 Join Exeter resident and world traveler Ethan Martin at the Exeter Public Library, as he shares his photos and stories of his 1 year, 30,000 mile trek through roughly 30 countries on 3 continents.  Ethan grew up in Exeter, studied English at UNH and lived in Utah, Turkey and Korea.  He has always had a love of traveling and made it his goal to travel by land and sea, across Eurasia to the Atlantic.  In September of 2010, using monies he had earned teaching in Korea, Ethan began his journey, leaving Korea by boat and continuing on by ferry, train, van, bus, horse, foot and hitchhiking.  Within a year, Ethan had accomplished what he set out to do and extended his flightless trip with a celebratory transatlantic cruise.  Ethan will be telling tales of his trip, of the cities and the countryside, the people he met, books he read while traveling, as well as sharing some of the logistics of and the reasons for his overland trip.

 The presentation is free and open to the public.  It will take place in the meeting room of the Exeter Public Library.

I'll have some photos and and a little Google Earth tour of the places I talk about. Hope to see you there!

Coming to This

Yes, the daily retrospective photo has come to an end. I think we all knew it was going to happen sooner or later, and hanging out in the woods for ten days without the Internet was as good a time as any to quit.

However, I am continuing to write monthly travel columns for the Exeter News-Letter. Yet another installment has been published and can be viewed here. I even took the initiative to write my own headline and send in a few pictures along with the article. Click on the main photo to check out the sketchy dentist office I didn't patronize.

In other news, I will be giving a talk about my travels at the Exeter Library on October 25th. The show starts at 6:30PM. More to come on that.

To Olkhon Island

This is the ferry plying its way across Lake Baikal to and from Olkhon Island. We arrived after a bumpy van ride with an ugly but supremely happy-looking young Russian couple, a doughy Asian woman, and some guy sleeping in the front.

Neither the lake nor the island made a great first impression. As you can see, the sky and the water were both gray and cold. I snapped some pictures from a rocky outcrop, being most impressed by the sharp shoreline behind  this shot. We watched the ferry slowly making progress and a couple dozen people, some on foot, a few in vehicles, boarded for the quick trip to the largest island in the world's deepest lake.

Irkutsk

October fourth, our first full day off a train since the day before we got on a train in Vladivostok. That's like five or six days. Exploring Irkutsk, which I think can be described as a generally unattractive city with some very pretty buildings, we strolled through a plaza by the circus, quite close to our under-construction hostel. There, men had horses and camels and other beasts for photo opportunities, little go-karts for children to tear around in, and there were legions of audacious pigeons with no qualms of snatching food out of peoples' outstretched hands.

I really like this photo for the soft color palette, the full extension of the pigeon's wings, the geometric shapes of the background, and the borderline-disgusted What-The-Fuck look of the girl.

Train, Day the Last

I'm a day late again. I know this. That's why on this post, you get to see not just a photo from last year's today, but a video too.

Three days on a train is a long time. You can sleep, read, listen to music, drink vodka and beer, eat, play backgammon, cards, and nap. There really isn't much more. I didn't mind it so much, but the nights were slightly stifling. Sitting in the dining car for breakfast, this is how Adam felt about the heat in the bunks at night.

He may well be loading his imaginary gun to blow his brains out.

Looking out the window in Siberia is beautiful, but even that can get old since there are days worth of the same view from the windows. Most of the variety comes from the time of day and quality of light. This is a brief video of early morning somewhere east of Lake Baikal, our last day on the three day train from Khabarovsk.

A Brief Stop

This is the Chernyshevsk-Zabaikal'skiy train station, located riiiight about here. The statue is the man the station and town is named after, Nikolay Chernyshevsky. We had a quick break here last year today at around 8:30PM local time, which was hours ahead of the official train time which is on Moscow's clock.

For three days, the only time Adam and I got off the train was at brief stops, between 5 and 25 minutes, at various stations such as this one. Generally, we'd get off and stretch on the platform a bit in our shorts and flip-flops, blending into the other passengers comfortably dressed in track suits and sweatpants.

Here's another photo of the station, from a more distant perspective with the tracks and entire building in view. Maybe it's an old photo, previous to some renovations or just not well shot, but it sure looks a lot shittier than it does in my picture.

Russia, Train 2, Day 1

I like long train rides, and last year's today was the beginning of the longest train ride I took the whole trip. We left in the morning and rolled past golden hills and blue skies. Fall isn't really the most popular time for tourists to ride the Trans-Siberian, and we were going the opposite way of most tourists anyway, so it was a relatively quiet ride on our first day, perfect for a couple beers in the dining car, contemplating the passing fields and hewn cabin villages.

Couchsurfing Khabarovsk

Marjana was the first person I ever couchsurfed with. She lives in Khabarovsk with her husband who later taught us how to play backgammon. It was a good thing we had arranged to surf with her, otherwise Adam and I would've showed up to town, been tired as shit from a lack of sleep on the overheated train, and probably just wandered aimlessly around town until we were fed up with being dirty and tired and clueless and we probably would've had a terrible time.

Fortunately we got to have a rest, a shower, and a tour thanks to Marjana. We went into town and saw the American Corner where she works. It's an office in a beautiful old library filled with all sorts of American comforts like flags and books in English. She brought us to an auction in a run-down orphanage, and also helped us work out our onward train ticket which would've been a huge mess if we had had to do it on our own.

Original post for more details.

All Aboard

I'm a day late again. And a dollar short. Oh well, here is a photo from a year ago yesterday.

This is a Russian man named Igor who speaks no English. He wandered into our compartment looking for conversation and drinking buddies. He spoke for hours, it seemed, and all we could do was say "da" and smile and wonder what the hell he was talking about.

Igor was intent on smashing down any language barrier by constantly repeating things he said until we pretended to understand. The only thing I did grasp was "vodka", a word he uttered just before disappearing to fetch us a bottle.

Nice enough guy, I think, but I was still relieved when another compartment mate of ours got on. This guy spoke English and eventually our English-only conversation cut out Igor enough that he decided to wander back to his own compartment.

The rest of the evening involved more vodka.

A Day on the Town

If you want to be an ass about it, I know it's already the next day and this is late. Just relax, there's a time difference or something.

We managed to drag ourselves out of bed and walk around the city, which is pretty small. We started at the end of the Trans-Siberian Railway, what would really be the start for us. There's a decorative locomotive sitting on the platform, and this post with the kilometer marker. It's a long ride to Moscow.

We moved on to mingle amongst a bunch of old people on land for a few hours off their cruise ship (traveling by cruise ship, pff, who does that?), walked past Yul Brynner's birthplace, hung out at a festive section of sea side and rode a funicular up and down a hill.

Funicular.

The San Francisco of Russia

The San Francisco of Russia. That's what the proverbial "they" call Vladivostok. It's the harbor, the hills and the diversity. Really, Vladivostok is apparently one of the most diverse cities in Russia, being so close to other east Asian countries and about half the world away from the extreme racism supposedly found in European Russia.

Last year today we stepped off the ferry and waited our way through customs, bags sniffed by a spectrum of mongrel drug dogs and intimidated by stern women in crisp uniforms who were decidedly unsexy.

This day was also the night of finding ourselves in a sort of speakeasy cinema pub located in an unlit nook behind an unmarked door down a dark alley off an obscure parking lot reached by an unassuming driveway tunnel that we were led to by a waitress-turned-tourguide whom we fortunately over-tipped in our new-country naivete.

I'm On a Boat

Sometimes people get confused when I say I traveled from Korea without taking a plane. "Did you go through North Korea?" No I did not, that place is fucking nuts.

I left on a boat, and went to Russia. This is the room of bunks Adam and I had shared with two other people. It was really comfy and a surprisingly nice boat. You could buy bicycles made by Hummer or Porsche in the lobby, and there were colored fiber optic lights and a big open deck.

We met some other American travelers and some Russian girls coming back from studying in Japan, and hung out in the otherwise empty nightclub.

Train to Donghae

Adam and I took an evening train to the port city of Donghae on the evening of last year's today. I should have appreciated the beauty of the the countryside more, but I was preoccupied with dealing with a last minute phone crisis until the sun had gone down and a genial but bad-breathed trainmaster decided to chat up us waygooks and show us cell phone videos of his wife driving in their car.