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Why I Travel
For me, travel is as much a journey of the mind as it is leaving home in a physical sense. It's about waking up in a distant land far from the comforts of home to sights, sounds, smells and experiences unfamiliar but often glorious. It's experiencing the exotic with all of my senses and witnessing the amazing diversity among the occupants of our planet. It's continually rediscovering how and why we're different, yet how much we have in common and can learn from one another. It's about extensively researching and eagerly anticipating a trip, then discovering it's the inevitable unplanned experiences and discoveries that far surpass my expectations. It's about serendipity and astonishment, absorbing and understanding, becoming lost and being found. It's breathing, tasting, feeling, and hearing in new ways, and it's learning to see the world with eyes wide open. |
"Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving." - Terry Pratchett
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Beginnings
I first traveled abroad when I was 22. It was a month-long right of passage camping adventure through Mexico with a friend in my 1971 Volkswagon camper. We took a borrowed map, cooking implements, sleeping bags, not much money, and no real plans. The adventures began as soon as we crossed the border. A monster hurricane forced us to quickly flee our beach campsite at Mazatlan and we spent the night huddled in a concrete bunker owned by an exotic reptile exporter (his many snakes were inadequately contained in an adjacent building, and escaped). My VW broke down repeatedly on the remotest of roads, we picked up a colony of hitchhiking ants in San Blas that never left, and I became violently ill after eating street food in Tasco. But there was a captivating mystery in the charm of old Mexico, and a quality of light and color I'd never seen before. There was magic in discovering the 1st century ruins at Teotihuacan, the Temple of Quetzacoatl and the ancient Pyramids of The Sun and The Moon. |
Never had tamales, mangos or shrimp tasted so good, and never had I slept better than in my string hammock swaying between palm trees. I learned Spanish as I negotiated the price of tortillas with a Mexican woman at her roadside stand, and began to love this new way of being. I made friends with strangers who were of a different race, culture, socioeconomic class and world view. They welcomed me into their country, invited me into their homes, fixed my fuel pump and flat tires, treated my illness, and found me shelter from the storm. I felt connected in ways that mattered, and never had I felt so alive. I returned home in time to resume college classes in the fall, changed in ways I couldn't quite comprehend. Everything around me looked too civilized, too predictable, too clean, too ordinary. A wanderlust had taken hold of me, and it's never let me go. Click here to read more . . . |
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My Photography
I first became seriously interested in photography when I was in college. It wasn't my major, but I was attracted to the young photography instructor who taught classes out of his Silverlake studio. Before long, I was smitten. Not with him, but with the fascinating world of black and white photography. I bought a Belkin enlarger with savings I didn't have, and fashioned a darkroom in the bathroom of my tiny walk-up flat in Venice Beach by laying sheets of plywood over a claw-footed bathtub for the trays of developer and fixer. |
I screwed a red safelight bulb into the overhead fixture, and used black tape and heavy paper to seal the window and door. Many evenings after coming home from work, I'd close myself in with rolls of film I'd shot the previous weekend, and after long hours of breathing chemicals and watching my images slowly take form in the dim light, I'd emerge lightheaded and elated well after midnight with an energy that defied sleep.
Over the years, photography has remained a passion for me and having opportunities to combine this interest with travel has been one of my greatest joys. |