My Travels in the Last Five Decades
My first long-distance journey took me to Morocco in 1981, when I was seventeen, riding a moped because, as an enthusiastic stargazer, I wanted to photograph the southern night sky. When I stood at the edge of the Sahara back then, I was completely captivated by the desert. The subsequent live presentation, On the Way to Morocco, was a great success. And with that, I had found my profession early on: traveling, photographing, presenting.
Over the decades, I undertook more than 300 long-distance journeys around the world.
In the 1980s, I traveled almost exclusively through the Sahara in old cars. In the 1990s, I explored East and Southern Africa by motorcycle, followed the Nile to its sources, and crossed other deserts in Africa. In the 2000s, I traveled by motorcycle through every desert on Earth. Starting in 2010, I expanded my focus from dry deserts to polar deserts as well, spending five years traveling extensively in the Arctic and Antarctica, and standing at both the North Pole and the South Pole.
In 2017, I began the journeys for TERRA, a portrait of our planet that took me not only into deserts but also into high mountain ranges, rainforests, steppes, and along the Pacific Ring of Fire and the East African Rift. After the COVID period, I published TERRA in 2022 and soon began traveling again for a new worldwide project that I will publish no earlier than 2028.
Here you will find, sorted by decades, impressions of my travels:
After my moped journey to the edge of the Sahara, one thing was clear to me: I wanted to explore the Sahara further. At first, I crossed it in old VW buses along the two main routes to Niger and Mali, then switched to Peugeot 504s, whose sale in West Africa, together with my presentations, helped finance my many Sahara crossings.
To be able to travel through even the most remote parts of the Sahara, I switched in 1987 to an old Nissan Patrol off-road vehicle, with which I traveled from the Nile to the Niger and made several trips into the Ténéré. The Sahara was still considered safe, but there was neither the internet nor GPS. I got information from other travelers, and navigated using maps and a compass. Tens of thousands of people attended my presentations, hoping to gain tips and inspiration for their own journeys.
After nearly ten years of traveling in the Sahara, I suddenly had to change course at the beginning of the 1990s. The civil war in Algeria and the Tuareg rebellion in Niger and Mali made travel in the Sahara impossible for the time being. So I turned to other parts of Africa instead.
To keep my journeys exciting, I switched from a car to a motorcycle. With support from BMW, I rode with two friends on three BMW R 100 GS motorcycles from Kenya to Cape Town. In 1995, with two other friends, I followed the Nile from Egypt to its source regions in Ethiopia and Central Africa, using a motorcycle with a sidecar and a solo motorcycle.
By the end of the 1990s, the situation in the Sahara had improved again, allowing me and my then-girlfriend Katja Kreder to ride a BMW 1100 GS from Cape Town through all of Africa's deserts.
The new decade began with my biggest project up to that point: The Deserts of the Earth. Together with my new girlfriend, Elke Wallner, I traveled on a BMW 1150 GS through the deserts of Arabia, Asia, Australia, the Americas, and Africa in several stages.
The challenges were different on every continent. In Arabia and Asia, we struggled with difficult border crossings and the thin air of the Himalayas. In Australia, the enormous distances on lonely, often very sandy tracks took their toll on us. In the Andes of South America, we suffered from icy cold and thin air during the southern winter. By comparison, we enjoyed riding on highways through the four deserts of the USA before setting out to cross the Sahara in Mauritania.
For the first time, these journeys also resulted in a television documentary.
For the first half of the decade, I spent a great deal of time on expedition ships, traveling by snowmobile, dog sled, and skis in the Arctic and Antarctic. For my project Planet Desert, I wanted to contrast the dry deserts with the polar deserts. To withstand the cold and ice, I had to equip myself well and rely on the support of guides. On many of the forty trips required, I was accompanied by the photographer Jörg Reuther. From 2012 onward, my wife Elly often joined me as well. For the first time, I used only digital cameras.
In 2017, the journeys for the project TERRA began. For this portrait of the Earth, I traveled through rainforests, steppes, high mountain ranges, and marine regions, sometimes on a BMW 1200 GS, sometimes on skis, ships, horseback, or in an off-road vehicle. I was accompanied either by my friend Jörg Reuther or by my wife Elly.
The new decade began with the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced my wife and me to cancel a trip to visit the Nenets in the Russian Arctic. I used the pandemic period to work on the presentation, television documentary, and photo book for TERRA, which were released in the fall of 2022.
In the fall of 2023, I began traveling for a new project. First, I boarded an expedition ship to visit the penguins of South Georgia and the ice of Svalbard. The following year, I traveled to the Namib Desert, the Pantanal in southern Brazil, and spent two weeks trekking to the Mount Everest Base Camp. In 2025, I traveled through central India to photograph tigers and visited Madagascar for the first time. This was followed by a journey into the rainforests of Borneo.
The photographs from these and other journeys form the basis of a new photography project that I will publish no earlier than 2028.
