(Or maybe I am travelling again...)
We're moving!
This whole site is being moved to a shiny new server - as are all my sites, in fact.
Apologies for the bumpy road ahead, but at the end of that road things will become fast and smooth.
Once the site at the new server is ready, this message will automatically disappear!
Meanwhile, you can see how the move is progressing at the
status page.
This web site is devoted to my travels, and what I learned while travelling (or preparing for a trip): travel journals, photography,
and even a section devoted to Turkic languages. The map below nicely illustrates my incurable travel itch.
On this site:
- Marjolein’s Travel Blog
Blogging about and during my travels - from wherever I can find an Internet connection and a spare hour or two.
The first blogged trip is my 2004 trip all across Asia, following in Marco Polo’s footsteps along the great
Silk Road: through Syria, Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and China.
This trip, September-October 2005, was be Asia again: China, Tibet and Nepal overland;
posts are not quite complete yet but the rest will appear later.
This trip, in September 2006, will be to North Korea (DPRK) with a week’s extension
in Beijing; the itinerary is available as well as some preparation posts.
Annyŏng haseyo is "hello" in Korean,
Nĭ hăo is the same in Chinese.
It was impossible to post from the DPRK ,but I tried to catch up a bit once back in Beijing.
In the spring of 2007 a long-standing wish was fulfilled: to visit Yemen.
The first time I wanted to go, civil war flared up again, and all trips were canceled. This time
it was quiet although we got police protection in some areas, and could not go to the Sa’ada province
in the North. We had a wonderful trip regardless. Just a few months after our trip things became hairy again,
and one of our drivers was killed in a suicide attack. Several areas are still out of bounds now:
it seems we’ve been quite lucky.
Another trip in 2009: Central Asia keeps pulling me back, Tajikistan had been beckoning for years,
and I really wanted to go back and see more of Iran as well. All of that combined in one (very busy!)
5-week trip. Almost no time to write, and Internet cafes few and far between, so it will be a while
before the whole story is complete, but I'm working on it!
On the site you can choose which trip to view (click a map!), or view anything from any trip.
- Contact
Want to drop me a note? Any questions? Then hop over to the Contact form to send me an email.
Spammers are not welcome, of course: if you want to spam me, you'd better find another method!
Soon to appear here:
Trips and photographs
(still elsewhere for now)
- Greetings from...
- A number of quick-and-dirty electronic postcards from several of my travels for those I could not send a paper one.
- Pittsburgh - a photographic impression
- In 1999 I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the USA for a conference. At the end of the week I had a day off and made some pictures with a little throwaway camera. The results were better than I expected from a piece of plastic, and the best ones can be seen in Pittsburgh - a photographic impression; choose the pictures one by one from the thumbnails, or view them as a slide show.
- Self Portrait
- On my trip through Central Asia in 2001 I also made a self portrait!
- Centraal-Azië 2002 - Central Asia 2002
- In 2002 I made another trip through Central Asia. Here’s a detailed journal. Mostly (still) in Dutch but when I have some time more pages will be translated in English, too. If you don’t read Dutch, you might want to browse it for the pictures. More pictures will be added later, but my scanner broke and I am broke...
Languages
- Learning Turkic Languages
- Largely unfinished: my efforts at “Turkic for travellers” - with pronunciation where available! - with side-by-side comparisons of Turkish, Turkmen and Uzbek.