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...
NZ Herald Travel ran a feature on the Kōpiko trip. Here are a couple of shots from the print version, but you can read the online version here.
I found it pretty hard to write to be honest – I had 9,000 or so words from my daily blog posts of the trip – but the article required only around 1,100, so that was tough! I worked as an editor on the Urban Sketchers website for a number of years editing other artists work down to size so thought it would be easy. I discovered that it's a lot harder to edit your own content – I guess you're more invested in it.
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