Monthly Archives: August 2018

bad man good man

Posted on

I went back to the museum today, to get my “antiques” looked at. Turns out it cost me 5 euros for photos and almost 50 euros for the certificate for the items. It didn’t feel good. I walked back to the apartment where I was staying, and on the way there I came across a […]


pictures you don’t like

Posted on

Went to the Palace of the Shirvanshahs today. It had basically been turned into a museum: The whole place looked like it had been thoroughly reconstructed, so I was happy to find that this little mausoleum in the back still showed some scars of time, some traces of imperfection: The tentacles were always there, reaching […]


my antiques

Posted on

Remember how I had tried to mail some of my written diaries and my SD-cards home two months earlier? I had failed that time, and now I had returned to try again. I gathered my things – the diaries, the SD-cards, a book I had finished reading, and some gifts from my friends that had […]


tentacles

Posted on

So there I was in Baku. One of the biggest cities in the region (2 million), one of the lowest-lying cities in the world (-40 meters), and the place where all the money was in Azerbaijan (a ton of oil-money). Turns out Baku has some pretty cool tall buildings, like these here: They are officially […]


Baku

Posted on

Today, on the 25th of August, Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, was coming to Baku. And so was I, Christoph Rehage, Puller of the Caboose. We would probably not meet, though. The Caboose and I were very busy. I left the hotel at about nine in the morning: It had been good a good […]


cow overrules everything

Posted on

Imagine being a mouse and sleeping in the exhaust pipe of a parked vehicle. That’s what it felt like for me last night. It wasn’t that good. I slipped quietly out of the truck repair shop: And then I was in the semi-desert again: Sadly, there was no other way but the highway: Sometimes I […]


Donald Trump’s origins

Posted on

I woke up after a surprisingly good night in the tent: I walked for a little while, and then, right before the little town of Alat, I saw my first oil well: Its bobbing head reminded me of chicken, and it was strange to think that this was what Baku had been built upon. The […]


58 phone cards

Posted on

After what can only be described as a perfectly peaceful night, I woke up well-rested and thanked Ildar, the owner of the restaurant “Tabriz”, for his hospitality: Then I continued along the old highway, thinking that it would probably last forever: But of course it didn’t. The old highway ended somewhere in a fenced area. […]


bridge to silence

Posted on

If you look at the map, you can see how the river winds through the city of Salyan, and that there are several ways to cross it. For reasons that are not quite clear to me in hindsight, I ended up walking towards a bridge in the west. It felt good at first. The road […]


almost

Posted on

Sometimes I wonder. Not about the walking or the writing of my private diary. Not about the picture taking. But about the online thing. It takes a lot of time. I was in Salyan, but I really wasn’t. I was busy updating the blog: One time I went out and had some potatoes: Another time […]


out from the empty halls

Posted on

The hotel had a strange atmosphere to it. It was almost completely empty, and whenever I walked down the hallways, I could hear the echo of my own steps: It looked like it had been refurbished just recently, but the mattresses on the beds felt like they were decades old. The rooms had air-conditioning, but […]


delete this photo!

Posted on

Finally a shower. Finally a bed. Finally some rest. I stayed in all day and sorted through the footage I had taken. I imported all of them first. Then I imported the GPS tracks. I matched up the GPS-data with the time codes of the photos and wrote the information into the metadata. I found […]


got til it’s gone

Posted on

The ramp from the new highway to the old highway was closed: Of course, I thought, of fucking course. I didn’t feel like dismantling the Caboose again, so I started looking for a hole in the fence. And there was one: Once I made it to the old highway, I ran into Sarah from Spain: […]


1-0-0-0-0

When I woke up under the bridge, I felt like crap. There had been jackals during the night. And mosquitos. And people in cars trying to cross the barricades. It had been a horrible night. So I left the bridge: And I walked for a little bit under the empty highway: Then, after 2,5 kilometers, […]


why do jackals suddenly appear?

Posted on

The sky was overcast, and yet the morning seemed to radiate with optimism: Maybe it was because of my pink thingies that I had bought. Speaking of pink thingies, when I saw this little party store I went in and bought some additional thingies: Walked past a park with a statue of the late President […]


authentic Haiwaiian shirts for sale (just not here)

Posted on

I wanted a goddamned Hawaiian shirt: a short-sleeved, collared, printed shirt. Possibly with some flowers on it. With palm trees. Or with some goddamned pineapples. So I went to the bazaar: Well, actually I went to two bazaars, first the old one then the new one. Neither of them had anything that came even remotely […]


welcome to the club

Posted on

The road out of Lankaran was amazingly well suited for walking – the asphalt was smooth, trees stood on both sides, and there was almost no traffic: Sometimes there were little rivers to cross, but I did so easily on bridges: And under the cover of the clouds, it wasn’t even hot: The only downside […]


lights down clouds up

Posted on

I had gotten a room right next to a hookah bar, a place where people came to smoke the water pipe. They apparently also liked to roam the hallways and do some karaoke in the bar, so it had turned into a rather eventful night. When I woke up in the morning, everything was black. […]


sunken beauty

Posted on

I had stayed in a pensionat right on the Caspian Sea beach, and it had turned out to be awesome: The people were friendly, the rooms were simple and sort of clean, there was a bit of green between them and the beach, and there were little kitten to play with. The whole place was […]


putting the foot down in Azerbaijan

Posted on

I don’t know why people say blue when they mean sad. I think of blue water, blue flowers, and the blue sky. When I stepped out of the door this morning, the sky was of a light and friendly blue: The road was very quiet: I passed a beauty salon: And I passed my first […]