Postscript: OP Yusuf Hashim the Traveler Extraordinaire! - a Haibun

                                                                                  Attribution: Yusuf Hashim

Image 1: OP Yusuf Hashim the accomplished Photographer at Lake Myvatn, Iceland

The Rhyming Poem
Colors of Spring hovered with scant memories
Obvious tinge of regret and impacting freely
Summer no help but compounding the warmth
Looking forward to Autumn's golden brown

A savior to life's hunger for fruits of all kinds
Autumn adequately fills void to address the bind
Likely a respite to face the harshness of Winter
Yearnings for a White Christmas as did last year

The Prose
To the privileged members of our blogging community with time and money, and an insatiable urge for spectacular photography and a penchant for adventure thrown in, here's something. Just received in Yusuf Hashim's FB posting datelined Sept 01,2016 on what's the latest!

Yusuf Hashim traveling to Svalbard Airport, Longyear 
from Oslo - Gardermoen  Norway International Airport.
Yesterday at 12:35am Gardermoen, Norway 
· 
Yusuf Hashim says:
Busy summer. From Tuscany to New Zealand, to the Serengeti, to UK to visit the grandkids, then to Iceland, and then sailing in Greenland, then back to the UK, and now in Oslo enroute to another sailing gig in Svalbard near the North Pole. Then I'm off to Taiwan in October for the Crossing Bridges meet, then a short rest before flying to Punte Arenas in Chile to board the Sergei Vavilov for a cruise in Antarctica and the Falklands, to recce a planned safari to Antarctica for 30 Jan to 10 Feb 2018 ...I will do Patagonia as well in April. Come join me. Life is good ..... but short

Hank's little note to Yusuf:
My, what a mouthful! Your plate is full, overflowing in fact, right through to early 2018. Wonder what you had been having for the past 70 years to make yourself prim and fit to take on the onslaught! Keep the good flag flying and the bubbling energy intact. This is just overwhelming!

Pretty obvious then that a peek at the Grid Magazine #54,#55 and #56 (here) can reveal everything else one keeps asking about life on the fast lane 'off-road'  Wishing you the best, OP Yusuf!

P/S Hank has taken the liberty to grace this posting with a sampling of the great snapshots of your previous 'exploits' done through the years!

1. All snapshots are attributed to Yusuf Hashim

2. All narration in italics are attributed to Yusuf Hashim

Image 2: Yusuf Hashim, the Pilot in a Red Bull fighter aircraft

Hank says:

Fantastic! Keep at it OP Yusuf Hashim. You have your pilot's licence. Not clear here if you were at the controls! Given your many talents we can expect anything from you!

Yusuf Hashim replies:
Ha ha Hank, there are dual controls on both the front and rear cockpits. I am not rated for aerobatics so I wasn't permitted to touch the stick and pedals during aerobatic manoeuvres. The captain only allowed me to take the controls briefly, on the more civilised parts of the flight. Quite scary really, because the controls were so light and twitchy, compared to the controls of the Cessnas and Pipers that I am rated to fly

Image 3: Yusuf Hashim says  -  The young man at Namib Desert.crossing the Tropic of Capricorn in Namibia. That's me many years ago when there wasn't any grey matter at all to ooze out of the hair, moustache and beard follicles then.

Image 4: Experiencing the Aurora Borealis. Yusuf Hashim says  -  This was a 20 seconds exposure so I had time to run in front of my camera and do an Aurora dance

Image 5: Yusuf Hashim says  -  This is a group photo of the fun people on my Iceland PhotoSafari at the amazing Skogafoss Waterfall in Iceland .

Image 6: Yusuf Hashim says  -  I shot this big fella while hiding downwind in a clump of trees. We were camping in the bush, protected by an electric fence, when I saw this big fellow came sauntering by our campsite. Breaking the rules and throwing caution to the wind I got out of the safety of the protected campsite, and hid in a clump of trees downwind of this bull elephant to shoot this picture with a 70-200 lens.

Image 7: Yusuf Hashim says  -  I'm no birder, but here's a Maribou Stork at Lake Ziway in the Great African Rift Valley, shot with the EF 300mm lens, handheld from about 80 meters. This is a massive, vulture like, bird with a wingspan of 12 ft , height of almost 5 feet and weigh around 9 kg.

Image 8: Yusuf Hashim says  -  Ideally you'll need a long lens like a 300 or a 400 with a multiplier, but this photo was shot with a 70-200 at a distance of about 10 meters. As we are using small land rovers with only two persons inside, we can get really close to the animals and you can get awesome shots like this one of a sleeping Lion King in the Ngorongoro Crater without falling over each other. — at Serengeti.\

Image 9:  Yusuf Hashim says  -  This magnificent pair of 'White Rhinos' nonchalantly crossed my track as I was driving through their territory. They are not actually white, but they are called white rhinos because their mouths are wide compared to the black rhinos whose mouths are rather more pointed for eating shoots and leaves, while the white rhinos have broader mouths because they eat grass. — at Serengeti.

Image 10:  Yusuf Hashim says  -  The guys and gals having fun taking selfies in Iceberg city. The icebergs come in all shapes and sizes and I never grew tired of watching and photographing them. They are simply beautiful and many of them are immense, with the part above water being as high as a 30 storey building.

Image 11:  Yusuf Hashim says   -  This is the 3 masted Barquentine Schooner I have hired (This is a snapshot of the schooner from one of an earlier expedition) It has Cabins with en suite bathrooms. It will be our floating hotel and Arctic Safari ship . It is a three mast barquentine schooner specially fitted for sailing in the waters of Svalbard. A barquentine is a sailing vessel with at least three masts, all of them fore-and-aft rigged, except for the foremost one, which is square rigged.

For Walter's at  d'Verse's MTB -   the reason for rhyme