Mountains.

They are rather large, they have rather steep roads, and they look rather charming in the right light.

I grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, which means not a lot of topography surrounding me. Don’t get me wrong, JoBurg is plenty hilly, but mountainous it is not. There is enough up and down to make the average cycle journey a rather difficult experience, but there is nowhere near enough elevation to speak of anything as mountainous.

Maybe that is the reason I am so enamoured by mountains. It may also be my affinity to cars, and the obvious connection that mountains tend to give us the best starting point for a great driving road. It may also be the challenge that mountains allow us to put ourselves through. It could be on a bicycle, or on foot, but scaling a substantial stretch of upward elevation has its payoff. That payoff is the obvious joy and pleasure one gets from having surmounted the vertical obstacle, even if one chose to make the mountain the obstacle to begin with.

There may also be something a bit more primal inside of us, that calls us to the mountains. I don’t know. All I know is that I find mountains absolutely fascinating, and I have a rather large affinity for them.

A wall of mountains, Tiger Leaping Gorge, Yunnan, China.

The photos in this set were all taken while my wife, Claudia, and I were on an 8-month cycling trip in Asia in 2018. As is mostly the case with these #setsof10 images, none of these images are particularly amazing in my eyes, they are more a documentation of some of the mountains we cycled past, across or over during this trip.

Mountains, this is them.

The tip of a mountain peeking through the clouds in Kyrgyzstan.

Below is a gallery of the rest of the photos from this set.