Last November, I had the chance to travel to Siem Reap with a client to shoot for about a week. I had been to Cambodia a few years earlier on a longer Southeast Asia trip and therefore wasn’t in too much of a rush to run to all the tourist destinations on this business trip (I wouldn’t have had the time anyways). Yet, I made it to Angkor Wat and many other Angkor sites twice within a week and was able to combine it with the shoots we did. It was an intense but great week. I even shot like half a roll of film.

We traveled to Slovenia last November by night train. Arrived in Ljubljana, we picked up our rental and toured the country for a week. Its small size is really convenient as you can pretty much surround the country in just a few hours. We visited Ljubljana, Koper, Piran, Soča Valley, Lake Bled, Celje, and Maribor. The photos below are from Piran, where we witnessed some serious flooding, and Lake Bled. The highlight of our trip was a dinner and night at the hotel restaurant Hiša Franko, which is situated pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Our room was beautiful and very spacious and the meal was among the best I’ve ever eaten.

Every summer for many years, we traveled to Sardinia for our family’s summer vacation when I was a child. It must have been around fifteen years that I last joined. Last September, I went back with Seraina for a week. We drove to Genoa by car, boarded the ferry and arrived on this beauty of an island the next morning. The beaches were just as beautiful as I’d remembered them.

Once again, it’s almost spring by the time I’m posting last year’s flashback. A ton of things happened in 2019. One thing was that I did not do a lot of photography work, taking less jobs but also not really working on personal work. Mostly, because I was really busy with what has become a full-time job by now: sourcing, roasting and brewing coffee for the small coffee roastery I started with my brother Dennys: Drip Roasters.

We visited Paris during the record-breaking heat wave last summer. The day before we took the train from Bern to Paris, we received a reminder by email to bring enough water. We were pretty much boiling in the city when it reached an all-time high temperature of 42.6° celsius. Two days later, the temperature dropped by 20-ish degrees. Despite the heat, we had an amazing time, drank too much wine and Chartreuse and ate too much great food.

A few months ago, Seraina and I travelled to Istanbul. We had been looking forward to this trip for quite some time, even before we had planned it. I had been to Istanbul once before, close to ten years ago and I had really liked it back then. We stayed at an airbnb in the Cihangir neighborhood, which is situated between Taksim Square and Karaköy. The area was great, the apartment was beautiful and cozy, and good coffee was nearby. We were expecting great food in Istanbul and that was what we got.

Bombay was the final stop on our trip to India. Still recovering from food poisoning, we took a flight from Kochi to the megapolis. We spent a lot of our time in Bombay with our friend Priya, whose place we also stayed at. She took us to lots of street food (and other) places, which was challenging since we were still recovering and not feeling all too great. Yet, we were glad to explore new dishes we hadn’t tried or not even heard of before. Bombay definitely felt cleaner, more modern and also more Western than Delhi or most of the other places we’d prior visited.

Leaving Rajasthan, we took a bus to Ahmedabad. We had a flight to Kochi the following day and only had about half a day to spend in Ahmedabad. We used it to eat lunch at a branch of Swati Snacks, which was surprisingly awesome, drive around the city on tuk-tuks, visit the Gandhi Ashram, where we met lots of green parrots, and ended the day with a great Gujarati thali in a rather fancy setting. The next day we flew to Kochi and I got food poisoning.

On we travelled to our next two Rajasthan destinations: Jodhpur and Udaipur. Palaces and forts everywhere in both cities, this being the land of kings and all. Jodhpur, the «blue city», wasn’t as blue as expected, yet very nice. Except for a trip to Mehrangarh Fort and a visit to a market, we mostly moved about in a rather small radius around our accommodation, which was situated close to the Toorji’s Step Well in a really nice area with many shops, cafés and restaurants nearby.

We left Rishikesh a little too late, had to wait a little too long for the taxi to arrive and there was too much traffic, so we missed our overnight train to Jaipur. Stranded in Haridwar, we managed to find a travel agent who booked us on the next train back to Delhi and on the first train to Jaipur the morning after. So we ended up in Delhi one more time and got to spend the night at a hotel instead of a train, which wasn’t too bad after all. Jaipur was the first of our three stops in Rajasthan.