Some time ago I found an old wiro notebook in a drawer. A scruffy wiro bound notebook with a photo of 2 men in a kayak with a bear on the front cover. In that notebook I found terrible sketches drawn in pencil made while travelling in 1991. One sketch leapt out at me. It was a rough pencil sketch of Mt Ararat from a backpacking trip to eastern Turkey. The sketch really surprised me – it was a very basic pencil sketch, drawn using a .5mm technical pencil on a cheap notepad. The sketch is just black and white… To my surprise the sounds and smells of the day came flooding back. Meeting some Kurdish goat herders and their flock near the base of Mt Ararat, about 10km from the Iranian border on a bright sunny but cool, alpine day. Along with memories of driving across the mountain steppe in an old Renault 19 and the smells of chai and coffee in a Doğubayazıt pasta solunu. It all came back come flooding back! Why did it evoke such vivid memories? I’m not really sure to be honest. Maybe t...
Earlier this year a group of us entered the Woodhill Endura 360, a 6 hour endurance race in West Auckland. We raced as a team because none of us were anywhere near fit enough to race for 6 hours by ourselves, and surprisingly we won our classification!
The advantage of racing as a team was that I got to sketch in between laps. Dan, the instigator of our team entry — he entered us without running it past us first — wrote an excellent race report in his usual wry sense of humour. Visit www.inspiring-riding.co.nz for a copy.
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