News

I've been working on a new website for a while but this weekend I continued the Morocco travel report, which now has two new parts about the first days of our car trip in the south. There are mostly pictures of the great landscapes we drove through and of Aït Benhaddou, Morocco's famous kasbah.

"In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government". I never thought I'd live to see the day when an American president would admit to something like this (and there is plenty to choose from), but Obama said this in his speech to the muslim world today. Truly amazing, even though they're only words.

Marrakesh was the nicest city to stay in in Morocco and had the most impressive monuments, but it lacks the pleasant culture shock effect of Fez. Read all about it in part 4 of the Morocco travel report (I link to the index now coz it's starting to look good :) ).

So I've put up pictures of 10 of the 20 days now after being back less than a week. The rest will be a bit slower in coming but not much. From now on it's all picture of nature and kasbahs, and though the first half of the trip was great we thought the 8-day car trip that I'll talk about in the next parts was even better.

Here is part 3 of the Morocco pictures about the empirial city of Meknes, the Roman ruins at Volubilis and the holy town of Moulay Idriss.

Here is part 2 of the Morocco pictures about Fez, the country's most fascinating city.

We're back in Belgium since yesterday! It's been a great trip, one of my best trips in fact, but the last few days (after we returned the car) were a bit too much so we're glad to be back home.

I promised to put up the pictures quickly this time and I deliver: here's part 1 of the travel report already with pictures of our first three days, spent in the northern towns of Tetouan (a world heritage site) and Chefchaouen (our favourite place in Morocco).

There should be a new part every few days. Up next: Fez!

We're four days into our car trip so far and it's been fantastic already, wonderful views along the way - especially the mountain passes - and beautiful kasbahs, especially Ait Ben-Haddou which was the highlight of the trip so far, just like I expected it would be. We first visited it in the evening but it was cloudy so I woke up at 5am next morning, saw that the sky was clear and went back again to make lots of beautiful pictures in the early sunlight. I did the same next day to climb the little mountain near Zagora, that way lazy Lotte can sleep late while I get some exercise.

Two days ago we arrived in Merzouga on the edge of the Sahara near the Algerian border. We walked and climbed the lovely dunes there and last night did a camel trip including a night under the stars. Unfortunately it was cloudy and almost no stars to see, luckily I'd already tried out the star map my little sister gave me the night before and actually found Saturn and the constellation of Leo (my sign incidentally). I hope to get more stargazing occasions in the remaining days. We're now starting to head back west towards Marrakesh and plan to visit the Todra and Dades gorges along the way and hopefully visit a silver mine.

Since Lotte is following a Moroccan cooking course today, I'm using my solo time to back up some of the photos we made so far. Which gives you the chance to view them...

Morocco 2009

Aaah, finally found a decent internet connection. Yesterday we arrived in Marrakesh and were very amazed to find a very modern, clean and seemingly prosperous city. This feels more like Barcelona than like what you'd expect here. Also, mostly modern looking people. You see more women with head-scarves in my area of Antwerp than here, for example. Very touristy feel to the place though, even though only a small percentage of the people walking around are actually tourists.

On the train yesterday I made a great plan for a tour around the south of Morocco by rental car. We're leaving here friday morning and it will take about 7 days, filling most of the rest of our journey. It will take us over the highest pass in the Atlas, through the Draa valley, past all the major kasbah's and castles, into the Dades Gorge and over small roads in desert area right to the edge of the sahara for a desert excursion. So I'll probably be offline the whole week, dunno.

Btw if the swine flue catches on in Europe we're not coming back and will just settle in Marrakesh :p

A quick update just to let the home front know all is well. We spent the last two days in Meknes which we liked a lot. Today we visited the Roman ruins of Volubilis. Tomorrow we head to Marrakesh. We're changing plans completely and will probably rent a car there to tour the south, as traveling there without your own ride seems too hard.

Hello from Fez where we just arrived. I gotta keep it short and probably won't be updating a lot during this trip, BUT I'm gonna put up the pictures quickly afterwards as promised. We already visited the small cities of Tetouan and Chefchaouen (VERY nice place) and yesterday spent all day hiking in the Rif mountains near Chefchaouen, so our legs are hurting today but not in a bad way. The next few days we'll be in Fez.

We're off to Morocco today. As always I'll be updating the home front here. I've finally done some preparing the last two days and I want to do the following things:

• Tetouan
• Chefchaouen
• Fez
• Meknes
• Volubilis
• desert trip
• hike in the Dades and/or Tondra gorges
• A 3 to 4 day trek in the high Atlas
• Marrakech
• Casablanca

I haven't counted how many days all that would take but probably more than we have. When time's up we can quickly get to Casablanca from anywhere though so no worries.

I put up part 7 of my East Africa report, about our three-day safari in the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro crater. There are more than 100 pictures of lions, hippos, giraffes, wildebeests etc, as well as a few clips, and thanks to my new album editor it was fun and easy to make :)

I've written the online album editor and am very pleased with it (and with myself and most of all with jQuery). From now on I just have to upload pictures and then the website makes thumbnails, lets me drag them around the album page and add and edit blocks of texts, headers, youtube movies or anything else between them, resulting in a photo report made directly in the browser.

To try it out I'm making part 6 of my East-Africa travel report (20 months late), here are two screenshots of the editor in action...

Update: you can now read part 6 of my East Africa report with 42 photos and 2 clips, though it's all mostly about painful bus rides. The next part will be much better, about the Serengeti safari! I'll try to finish that this week.

There are temporarily two PHOTOS links in the menu, the right one is for the new reports (only Africa atm). Later I'll make one link for the big travel reports and one for all other pictures.

Well that went quickly, all code's been redone in CakePHP and jQuery instead of Rails and Prototype+scriptaculous. You won't see any difference since I kept all the content and design, but you'll notice that this site is much quicker now.

So now I'm gonna make a new photo album system that'll work both for simple galleries and for travel reports. When I get back from Morocco in late May, I want to put up the pictures within a week, and then I'll start catching up on the East-Africa and South-East Asia trips.