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.

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!

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!

I’ll focus heavily on my photography during the trip, and I’ll make sure I update this website and blog. So expect it to become more interesting than it has been so far!

Departure date: 7th of October 2009

“The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
- St. Augustine