1. Mentawai Islands in Indonesia

A Shaman on the Mentawai Islands

2. Northern Sichuan-Tibet highway

Tibet in April

3. Uzbekistan

Colourful Uzbekistan

4. Georgia (the country)

Dog in Georgia

5. Lesotho

Typical sight in Lesotho

6. South Africa

A beach in South Africa

7. Madagascar

Malagasy girl and the famous Baobab trees

8. Trek in Nepal

The Himalaya mountains

9. Mozambique

Bazaruto archipelago

10. What’s your favorite place?

I was honored to be interviewed by Virginie Wéverberg, a student in communication at the “Université Libre de Bruxelles”. Here’s the really nice article she wrote on my experience:

Dream your life or live your dreams…

François de Halleux made his choice – The story of a talented travel photographer

by Virginie Wéverberg

It is in the very nice and small restaurant called “Le Hasard des choses”, located within a stone’s throw from the place Chatelain in Brussels that François and I met.

Exhibition at the restaurant "Le Hasard des Choses" in Brussels

The initial idea was to record the interview while we were at the exhibition but we soon realized that it was a far from easy task because of, among other things, the sound of clanking dishes and silverware. His simplicity and his kindness are reflected in his spontaneous suggestion to meet again in a quiet place. Consequently, he nicely agreed to come to my office at the Delvaux headquarters where I am currently undergoing an internship. And I am glad he did: His story is gripping, quite unusual and unexpected for a 28-year-old management engineer, to say the least.

François de Halleux was born in Belgium and studied management engineering for five years in Louvain-la-Neuve. It is during his exchange program in South Africa that he developed a taste for both traveling and photography. Even though he specialized in finance, he knew that he would not like to work for a financial institution and he had always been passionate about the internet “so [he wanted] at least to try to work for one of the big internet companies”. He succeeded in doing so but in September 2009, after three years of good and faithful service at the Google headquarters, which are located in Dublin, he decided to chuck it all in order to fulfil a dream he has had for a long time: travel the world. During his last conversation with his grandfather, the latter told him that his greatest regret in life was not to have followed his passion for Romanesque architecture and to have so heavily focused on his insurance business. This is one of the reasons why François decided to leave his job at Google. He was “starting to think to move on to another job but [he] had this idea of traveling [in mind]. The perfect time to travel was maybe before taking another job.”

He then came up with this daring idea: to fly to Sydney and make it back to Brussels without flying! He only had a few rules to stick to: no flights, no time limit and no fixed itinerary. It finally took him 273 days but he did it! He crossed 22 countries, covered more than 32000 kilometers and more importantly he managed to stick to his objective: he did not take a single flight. Nevertheless, he has been compelled to change considerably the initial itinerary he had drawn on a map.

Map of the itinerary I ended up with, very different from my naive initial plan!

He visited, among other things, the natural beauty of Australia, the heat of South-East Asia in Singapore, Indonesia, Northern Vietnam, the contradictory modern China and the spiritual high plateau of Tibet. He then crossed Central Asia and its mysterious countries: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaidjan. Georgia and Turkey were the last legs of his journey before finally reaching Europe.

Lake Maninjau in Indonesia

Even though the Belgian artist’s dream came true, he thinks about the future and grasps how difficult it is to earn a living from his passion. “It is great as a hobby but it is not enough to really earn money. I think [you need] to find a specific style that defines you [in order] to become a pro. Maybe I will find it one day but for now I don’t think that moment happened yet. Hopefully later. We will see…” He already plans another exhibition and would like to publish a book with his best pictures.

Thanks to his blog completely written in English, people from all over the world were able to follow his adventures and stay updated with all the legs of his journey. Not only can one find magnificent pictures of all the countries he has visited, but also enjoy eco-friendly tips. While traveling, François paid special attention to places where the impact of human activities on the environment is the most appalling. The purpose of his journey was to demonstrate that the plane is not the only way to travel. His award for winning his bet are the thousands of pictures he came back with and the priceless sensation to be totally free. Saint Augustine said: The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page. Thanks to his pictures, we already travel. It is a good start to read the book.

If you happen to be in Brussels, don’t miss the exhibition of my best travel pictures from my trip. It took me a while to browse through all my pictures, select the best ones, and organise everything but it is finally happening!

I decided to print 13 pictures in large format (up to 1.2m wide) and wrote a short story about each of them. It’s really great to see my work materialize and I’m extremely happy with the results.

Exhibition: From Sydney to Brussels without flying.

The exhibition is in a really nice small restaurant, so you can enjoy a meal there while looking at the pictures or just come for a drink as it is open all day long. And if you want me to join, drop me an email and I’ll do my best!

Some practical details:

• From the 29th of October until the 12th of November 2010.
• Open from 11am to 11pm every day.
• Restaurant: Le Hasard des Choses.
• 31 Rue de Page – 1050 Brussels, see map.

Since I arrived back home a couple of weeks ago, a few people have contacted me to ask me questions. I’ve therefore decided to answer these in my next blog posts. My answers will hopefully be helpful to many people.

Several questions were about the photographic gear I used. This also was a really tough problem for me to solve before leaving for my trip last year. Long term travel and good photographic equipment don’t go well together at all for a simple reason: weight. When traveling it is important to pack as lightly as possible. Unfortunately good photographic equipment tends to be very heavy! I’m very picky when it comes to photography and I didn’t want to compromise my image quality by going for a small compact camera. So here is what I decided to bring with me:

Nikon D700 camera with R-Strap

The D700 is a great DSLR that is particularly suitable for demanding travel photographers. It is relatively compact and lightweight (995 g or 2.2 pounds). Another amazing feature of the d700 is its fantastic capacities in low light situations thanks to its full frame sensor. This is great since I chose not to carry a flash with me. The battery of the D700 is also very impressive: I didn’t bring another battery and never missed it. I was able to use the same battery for two weeks in the jungle without charging it!

My D700 with R-strap and camouflage

As you can see on the picture I followed the advice of a traveller I met on my trip and completely camouflaged my camera with tape. The goal is simply to make it look old and cheap and avoid embarrassing questions from locals on its price. I really don’t like to attract attention with my camera and this made a huge difference.

Before leaving I also chose to change the strap of my camera. First of all the Nikon straps are made to attract attention and I hated that. But also I love to wear the strap around me like a messenger bag, to avoid having the camera right on my belly where everyone can see it. The system offered by the R-strap allowed me to do so and not lose time when I wanted to take a picture. Check out their website for more information.

Nikon 20mm f/2.8D lens

Nikon 20mm f/2.8D

A very compact ultra-wide lens. And I really mean ultra-wide, the results on full frame are impressively wide. It’s a great sharp little lens, very useful for dramatic landscape and architecture, but terrible for portraits. The only lens I had with auto-focus.

Voigtlander 40mm f/2.0 Ultron

Voigtlander 40mm f/2.0 Ultron

This small adorable pancake lens might well be the ideal traveller’s lens. It’s extremely small and discrete, but always delivers great results. 40mm is also a great choice on a full frame as a walk-around lens.

Voigtlander 58mm f/1.4 Nokton

Voigtlander 58mm f/1.4 Nokton

For some reason, many of my favorite shots were taken with this very special lens. It has two great advantages that convinced me to keep it: it’s a very fast lens opening up to f/1.4, which is great in low light situations. It also has 9 blades which results in a lovely creamy bokeh (blur), which the 40mm ultron doesn’t have.

Nikon 105mm f/2.5AI

Nikon 105mm f/2.5 AI

I chose to buy this 30 years old lens second hand for a couple of reasons. Firstly the modern Nikon 105mm f/2.8G prime lens is ridiculously big and heavy. Secondly, this old lens used to be a real icon back in the 70s. It is said for example that Steve Mc Curry’s used it for his famous green-eyed afghan girl photo. And I really fell in love with this lens. It is solid as a tank and has a lovely special character.

Giotto’s Rocket-air blower

Giotto's Rocket-air blower

The problem of course with all these prime lenses is the dust that comes on the sensor when changing them. It is a big problem and there is no real solution for it. To minimize the dust on the sensor I used this great air blower.

Backpack

Crumpler Pretty Boy camera backpack

Finally to carry all this equipment around, I was using this handy backpack, with a special compartment at the bottom for the camera and lenses. I love this solution as it is much less obvious than a big photo bag when walking around.

Open Crumpler Pretty Boy Camera Backpack

Three last important questions had to be solved:

• Tripod or not?

Another very big dilemma that I thought I had solved by bringing a very compact Cullmann Magic II. But time proved me wrong and I had to leave it behind after two months to avoid that extra kilo in weight that was killing my back. I also realized that I wasn’t using it much anyways.

• Zooms or fixed (prime) lenses?

For a long time,  fixed lenses have been known to provide better quality than the more convenient zooms. However, today zooms have evolved a lot and the quality of the best zooms is now said to be equivalent to some prime lenses. But guess what problem these zooms have? They are huge, and they are heavy. I decided I wouldn’t feel comfortable at all walking in some village with a huge zoom. And I wanted to avoid their weight, so I went for several small fixed lenses.

• No autofocus?

You might have noticed that only my 20mm lens has autofocus. All the other lenses have to be focused manually. I chose these lenses simply because they had the best picture quality with the smallest size. Having no autofocus ended up not being a problem at all though. On the big viewfinder of the D700, focusing is really easy. The only times where I really missed it where when my subjects were moving very fast. But by sacrificing the autofocus, I saved a lot of space and money, while keeping a great image quality.

Conclusion

Despite doing all I could to limit the weight, all this equipment ended up being… too heavy! So what I’d recommend is to take even less lenses along if possible. Other than that I am really satisfied with the results and think that this for me was really the ideal equipment to bring along on such a long trip.

In 273 days I covered 32938 km crossing 22 countries to finally make it back home without taking a single plane! I’m quite amazed myself that I managed to stick to my only rule without any prior planning. It wasn’t easy though and I had to considerably change the initial itinerary I had naively drawn on the map. A lot more borders than I expected were closed or impossible to cross.

The first reward for my travels are the thousands of pictures I came back with, and since my return, I have been sitting down to choose the very best ones and created this slideshow. Make sure you click the expand button in the lower right corner to watch it full screen!

All in all this trip has been a fantastic experience for me. There are still several things I want to talk about so stay tuned for more news in the coming days and weeks!

Map of the itinerary I ended up with, very different from my naive initial plan!

Arriving in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, is a surprising experience. People most definitely look very different compared to Central Asia. Certainly a lot more European but not totally either. I was for example immediately identified as a tourist and locals spoke to me in English before I even said a word… Georgians speak very differently too! The language is totally unrelated to any other language and has its own unique and beautiful alphabet.

Georgian shopkeeper in Tbilisi

Describing Georgian people really is no easy task. They compare themselves to Italians because they are proud and expressive. Still that didn’t convince me. The only way to get a better idea is to visit the country yourself, something I’m recommending to everyone since I left the country. Because in my opinion, Georgia is a hidden gem waiting to be discovered by travellers.

First of all the history of the country is captivating. Georgia is the second country on earth to have adopted Christianity as a state religion in the 4th century. Some remarkably well preserved churches still date from that period and are a joy to visit. Religion in Georgia is still very much alive too. Listening to polyphonic Georgian songs in an extremely old church located high on top of a hill surrounded by the mighty Caucasian peaks is just magic.

Svaneti landscape in the Caucasus

The Caucasus mountain range is another highlight in Georgia. Higher than any other mountains in Europe, with several peaks above 5000 m, they have seen little commercial development. In the Svaneti region the wild forests dotted with old ruins of watchtowers overlooking the scenic valleys are a joy to trek through.

A Georgian Supra I was invited to with a big bottle of Chacha.

Lastly, Georgian hospitality is beyond anything you could imagine. In the countryside it is difficult not to be invited by Georgians to share a a never-ending meal, always accompanied by countless toasts of a home brewed liquor called Chacha. These traditional meals are called supra and have very specific rules and usually last for a very very long time. As I was hitchhiking in the Svaneti region, the driver and his friends stopped twice: once for a meal and the other time for drinks… It took me seven hours to cover the 30kms!

Go to the photo gallery for more pictures of Georgia.

After leaving Uzbekistan, I went by train to the town of Aktau in Kazakhstan to catch the infamous cargo ship that would take me over the Caspian sea to Baku in Azerbaijan. This cargo ship is renowned for having no fixed schedule whatsoever. When I arrived in Aktau on the 2nd of June, the last time the ferry had left was on the 20th of May! So I basically had to hang out in the town of Aktau -horrible, let’s be honest, with all its soulless soviet buildings-, until I would receive a phone call warning me they were leaving.

Azeri man met on the cargo ship from Aktau to Baku.

Luckily, the phone call came three days later and a couple of hours after that, I was boarding the ship with four other passengers. This ferry is the easiest alternative to cross the Caspian sea without flying ( the second option being through Turkmenistan but I never managed to get that visa). So it was a good opportunity to meet other people avoiding airplanes. There was a friendly Belgian couple and two French guys. All four of them on their bicycles!

Cycling is a very popular means of transport in Central Asia. Most of the travellers I met were in facts cyclists going on huge journeys from Europe to Asia, or in the opposite direction. I even met an Israeli guy who had been cycling for three years! From Alaska to the Terra del Fuego, from Cape Town to Ethiopia and now from Europe to God knows where!

The cargo ship, the second one on this trip already, was relatively comfortable and fast.

Extravagant Baku

At my arrival in Baku, the atmosphere was quite different from Central Asia. To begin with, Baku is unbelievably rich! The streets are very clean, all the old buildings perfectly restorated. Shops in the city centre are almost exlusively expensive fashion shops like Armani, Gucci and so on. And there was even a Mc Donalds, the first I had seen since Chengdu, 3 months before! At this point I guess you are wondering how a town you might never have heard of could be so rich? Well there’s one simple answer and it is oil. Azerbaijan has very big reserves of oil and since the fall of the soviet Regime is emptying them with delight. Amazing how the presence of oil always dramatically changes the living conditions.

Baku is also beautiful, there’s a charming old town surrounded by quarters with big fin de siecle stone buildings. But for some reason, it all seemed fake to me. The perfect cleanliness of the place, the posh dressing style of the locals just seemed to be out of place. So after two days I decided to move on and take a train straight to Georgia, about which I had heard many positive things!

Many Kyrgyz people were frowning at me when I told them I would visit Uzbekistan afterwards. According to them Uzbeks are arrogant and not friendly at all! The recent events in Osh illustrate this in a very dramatic way unfortunately. At my first stop on the way from Osh to Tashkent, I was rather surprised to be welcomed so warmly by the local vendors. These ladies had smiles I will never forget. All of them! “Welcome to Uzbekistan!”, were they saying happily. It didn’t take me long to understand that the prejudices were totally unfounded once again. And these beautiful smiles were not be the last ones I would see in Uzbekistan.

The first vendors met on the road: they just would't stop smiling!

Tashkent was my first stop in the country, and I wasn’t immediately convinced by this big city with its ultra-wide streets that give it a not very human feel. But the Turkmen embassy decided that I should give it a second chance, by making me wait for two weeks for a five-day transit visa that I would finally never obtain. This embassy illustrates the craziness of central asian bureaucracy. It is open two hours a day from 11 to 1pm, five days a week. To get in you need to be on a waiting list, and for that you should arrive at around 6am to write your name down, or bribe the guards if you arrive too late. Once that is done you need to stay to make sure nobody gets before you on the list. Or that nobody starts a new list! Once in the embassy, nobody speaks a word of English and nobody seems at all willing to help you in any way. They first told me to come back one week later to collect the visa. But once I arrived after a week, I was told: “it is not ready, come back in another week”. And whenever you need to enter the embassy, you have to go through the whole list procedure again! After two weeks when it was refused again, I abandonned exhausted and decided to go through Kazakhstan instead.

Thanks to all this time, Tashkent slowly grew on me. I enjoyed the old market area, the magnificent metro stations that take you back in time to the sovietic regime period, and the extravagance of the official buildings amused me. But this was most certainly also due to some of the friendliest people I’ve met on this trip who made me discover a side of Tashkent that isn’t obvious to discover at first sight ( Hello Z, Yulia, Daniel, Olga, Yulduz, Zafar and all the others!). These new friends took me to some surprisingly good restaurants and introduced me to Tashkent’s really funky nightlife. I know no other place on earth where you can smoke a Shisha at 5am on the comfortable cushions of some traditional Uzbek tables with a good plate of plov and modern techno in the background! Neither could I forget the party organised by the Marines at the US embassy, where the soldiers with their black anti-terror t-shirts were drinking beers on loud american hip-hop.

The breathtaking Registan in Samarcand

To understand the soul of Uzbekistan better, I had to finally leave Tashkent and visit the mythical ancient cities of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva. Only there could I realize the richness of Uzbekistan’s history. The architecture jewels in these cities are magical, with sumptuous azur mosaiques ornating their walls. With sunset these enchanting buildings turn to a superb goldish color.

Of course, I’m not the first to notice, and Uzbekistan was the first place in a long time (Halong Bay, Vietnam?), where I saw tourists in organised tours. An amusing sight to witness these big groups of people of the same nationality, being driven from attraction to attraction in air-conditioned coaches, and then staying altogether patiently nodding at their guide detailing the history of each monument. Extremely interesting, I even sneaked in on some occasions. But by limiting their contact with the local population to some bargaining at a souvenir shop, aren’t they ignoring the present?

The docile camels met on our Aral sea trip

Before leaving the country, I met with my Swiss friend Daniel again to witness the Aral sea disaster. And this turned out to be much more of an adventure that I had imagined! Our driver was a friendly, but one-eyed Uzbek and the jeep, a Daewoo Nexia which is of course not a jeep at all. At the first break for lunch, our driver took out a bottle of Vodka to go with the food. We didn’t like the idea at all, but soon realised that if we didn’t join, he was going to finish the bottle on his own. And finish the bottle he did! So there we were with a drunk one-eyed driver in the middle of a hostile desert! Luckily it all went well as there wasn’t much to crash into, except the occasional camel. It actually became amazingly fun when we stayed with a Kazakh family in the desert surrounded by their sweet camels and tons of children. You already heard enough about our driver to understand that we spent the night drinking toasts to the good health of the children, camels, to peace and every other imaginable thing you can drink to!

Uzbekistan certainly adds itself to my ever-growing list of highlights on this trip. Leaving the country was difficult and the people suddenly became much colder when I crossed the border to Kazakhstan, where I took a ferry from Aktau to Baku in Azerbaijan for some new adventures!

During my trip I have seen many environmental disasters. In fact, everywhere I go they seem to have become the norm rather than the exception. There is always a good excuse or reason. In Indonesia, I have driven for two days in Sumatra without seeing the natural rainforest, only endless plantations of palm trees, grown to produce the oil found in our cosmetics and food. I have seen some the world’s most polluted cities in China, covered by a constant dark mist. Even in remote areas such as the himalayas in Tibet, I have found huge dumps filled with plastic garbage as far as the eye can see. And I could go on and on.

But never has any ecological catastrophy been as visually spectacular as the drying up of the Aral sea.

Abandonned ships left in the desert, some 180 km away from the new shoreline.

How did a whole sea dissapear? In the 60′s under the Soviet regime, Russian central planners decided to boost the production  of cotton in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. To do this they created new cotton fields in the middle of the desert much further from the rivers with inappropriate open-air irrigation systems.  Most of the water evaporates before even reaching the fields. Cotton is a crop requiring phenomenal amounts of water, and by deciding to increase its production, the soviets actually knew that the Aral sea would dry up. For most part of the year, the rivers ceased to reach the sea, which started to evaporate.

In the next 50 years, the sea did dry up as expected. All the fish went extinct with salinity increasing tenfold, and the fishing industry dissapeared. What is left over now is a huge desert covered with salt and pesticide residues from the cotton fields. The amount of rain days dropped dramatically, changing the climate of a huge region around the sea. Dust storms filled with salt and pesticides plague the local inhabitants, infant mortality and malformations are amongst the highest in the world. And so on.

Satellite pictures of the Aral sea taken from left to right in 1960, 1970, 1990, 2000, 2009.

But what is even more disturbing to me, is that the cotton production actually continues to go on as before in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. All these disasters are not enough to diminish the production or to at least switch to some less water intensive crops, more adapted to the desertic climate.

There’s a memorial at the former fishing town of Moynaq now located 18 km from the shoreline. It explains the dramatic consequences of the disaster, and presents it as though it was some sort of natural catastrophy for which there is nothing to do… Even more absurd is Bukhara’s natural museum. They have a room dedicated to the Aral sea with some cliche sentences like “Even at the shoreline of a sea, save every drop of water”. Not a word about the origin of the problem though. And guess what the next room is about? Yes, it glorifies cotton production! Connect the dots, as Steve Jobs would say…

The Aral is also one example of a very widespread phenomenon. The dead sea in Israel for example is drying up as well, with all the water from the Jordan river being used to cultivate fruits and vegetables in the desert. In fact because of excessive exploitation, most of the world’s great rivers are drying up and do not reach the sea anymore.

The dry Aral sea

Finally I see it as an extreme illustration of the impact men can have on nature. A warning to the overly optimists who argue that scientists will always find a sollution as an excuse not to make changes in their lifestyle. For the Aral sea, it is too late.

Most of my blog posts so far have been relatively impersonal and were merely describing my travels. Now that I have a little more time to play with ( it’s raining here in Samarkand) I thought I would answer a question that a couple of people asked me already: “Why on earth did you leave your job at Google, isn’t it paradise to work for them?”…

Leaving

Regarding Google, sure not everything is perfect, but for me it wasn’t far from being perfect. I was surrounded by very clever, friendly and open-minded people, I was working on things I’m really passionate about, the work environment was simply amazing and I certainly miss all this as well as the delicious free food, the foosball tables, pool tables and countless other games, the free fitness room and of course the massages!

During the last conversation I had with my grandfather, he told me that his greatest regret in life was not to have followed his passion for Romanesque architecture and to have instead focused so heavily on his insurance business. Now, I have always had the upmost respect for my grandfather and such honnest statement coming from him had a deep effect on me.

So I did reflect on my own life and realized that so far, I had mostly let myself drift through it without much effort: I chose to do business studies after school, mainly because I didn’t know what else to do. At the end of my studies I specialized in Finance and was so bored during my internship at the bank that I had my first reaction: I would not work for a financial institution as I intended to. Instead I chose to work for a company I really admired for having revolutionized the internet in the best possible way.

After three years however, I started to severely need a change from my 9-6 daily routine. Staring at a computer screen 8 hours a day was becoming really hard for me. The prospect of doing this for 40 years was scaring me. What for? Did I really want to be saving my money my whole life for an unknown purpose like so many people do? What kind of stories would I be telling my grand-children later?

It is during my six-month exchange program in South Africa that I developped a taste for both travelling and photography. My grandfather gave me his old manual Nikon FG-20 before I left. And this gift had a bigger consequence on me than he probably realized at the time. The very first roll of film shot with the camera yielded two of the most successful pictures I ever took: the picture of two lions in love that on its own was viewed more than 40.000 times on Flickr and the picture of the smiling giraffe that has been used for a big nation-wide marketing campaign in Belgium (and is about to do so again!). Unfortunately the zoom of that camera broke down on the second roll, but a new passion was born for me. And more importantly, I realized after this experience in Africa how much my encounters with the local people and with the many different travellers I met on the road had broadened my mind and made me understand our world better.

The picture of the lions in love taken with my grandfather's old FG-20

Add to this a growing concern about the environment and that was enough to convince me to take off. Since my early childhood I have had a deep fascination for nature and animals ( ask my poor parents, they’ve seen all possible animals in our house!). Constantly witnessing the degradation of our environment without reacting was feeling increasingly wrong. But I do not believe that trying to make people feel guilty like many ecologists are doing is the solution. I wanted to witness environmental damage for myself, and see what I think I could do when getting back home. To minimize the ecological impact of my travel, I decided I would not take a single plane to go back home from Australia. And hopefully it would convince other people to avoid planes on their journeys too.

Only time will tell whether it really was a good idea or not. But for now, the only thing I can say is that it feels right, and has felt so ever since I took the decision. And that’s a great feeling, believe me!