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.