As devoted readers of this blog know, Shreyas and I spent most of April and May biking around Türkiye. I didn’t just document this in blog posts and photos – I also drew pictures in the little sketchbook my friend Elisabeth had bought me just before we left. Now that sketchbook is a zine and you can read it here!

I haven’t done a zine with this little writing before so it was a good exercise in really trying to ~ let go ~ and let the pictures speak for themselves. To help this, I really honed my process for scanning images and did a bit more post-production to make them more crisp and dark and I think it looks great. It was fun to rearrange the images on each page, noticing connections I hadn’t at first.

There’s a big bias in the zine towards historical stuff mostly because when we were paying for EXPENSIVE tickets to i.e. the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations and Bodrum Castle/Underwater Archaeology Museum, I tried to draw lots of pictures to help me engage with the thousands of objects. I filtered these down a bit to the best pictures. Some of my favourites are the broken glass, the ivory cosmetic spoon, the panniers, the longan and the swallows.

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A treasure hunt for looking through this zine! Can you find:

• Three cups of tea
• A family relationship
• Three circular objects 
• Two insect species 
• The best (aka most mysterious) road sign

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I drew all of the pictures save the front and back cover while we were travelling, so the images are… not that perfect. Especially the handwriting is somewhat untidy because I didn’t really think anyone would be seeing it. Hopefully it gives a scrappy DIY impression rather than a ‘terrible handwriting and I have no idea what that is’ impression.   

I went through quite a few photos from our trip to draw the cover before deciding that there absolutely had to be a cat on it. We really did see a lot of cats in Turkiye, and had unwanted cats in our sleeping quarters twice (let the record show that I tried much harder to extract them from such than Shreyas did.) We’ve been back in Aotearoa for going on two months now, and I’ve been liking many aspects of routine and having a house, but looking through the photos made me miss some aspects of travelling by bike. I asked Lael Wilcox once if life on a bike felt simple. “No, not at all,” she said, but she was trying to break a world record at the time. For me, bike travel is associated with that expansive, deadline-free feeling, of the tasks ahead being easy to understand, of being able to stop whenever. I didn’t tend to draw or photograph scary motorway crossings, the feeling of desperately needing to shower, or having to push the bike up a hill after a wrong time, so this zine really emphasises the nostalgia… and maybe it’ll convince a few more people to try bike travel?  

The black pen on a white page looks good and is the style of drawing I’m most confident in but I was worried that it wouldn’t stand out much, so physical copies have watercolour decoration on the cover too, which was fun to do. And hopefully it’ll make this zine stand out at zinefest (did I mention I’m going to zinefest?)

As always, all Mostly Good Ideas zines are here. Let me know if you want a physical copy, and if you have a favourite drawing from the sketchbook, tell me in the comments below. 

Read more about our ride through Türkiye: Ankara and Cappadocia, central Anatolia and Beyşehir, Köprülü Kanyon and Antalya, Eastern Mediterranean Coast, Datça Peninsula, İzmir and Eurovelo 8, Bergama-Çanakkale.