Today I received a package from Canada:

Yay! An award!!

My weird beard had previously won “Best Short Mountain Film” at the 2010 Banff Mountain Film Festival – so they sent me a check and this beautiful glass trophy, which looked even better held against the light:

When I first got an email confirming the win on November 7th, I sent them a wordy but heartfelt reply:

…

You see, it took me a year to walk 4646 kilometers through China, and after that it took another 4 months to edit the footage into a 5 minute video that got a couple of 100.000 hits on the Internet.

As time goes by, the dude in the video seems more and more distant to me. But it makes me happy that there seem to be so many people out there who enjoy looking at this old walking fool; burned or freezing, bald or hairy, mad or happy or just plain heartbroken, I guess it is a chapter in my life that I would never want to miss.

…

Thank you Lana, thank you Banff, thank you Alberta, thank you Canada eh? And thank you world!

…and I would like to especially thank all the ones out there who didn’t think it was totally conceited to make a video of my own face and put it on the Internet! :)

Thank you guys

…

I guess that about sums it up:

Thank you guys!

Soundtrack: Rohff – “Sincère”