After I mentioned my loss of 3+ years of photos in my post on Thursday, Kyle and I got to talking about just how much we miss some of them. See, he took a three month trip around the world in fall, 2008. All photos lost. It's those in particular that I feel so sad about not having because they really were beautiful and because his trip was just such an incredible whirlwind adventure. Since he'd planned this big trip before we were together, and I just wasn't able to tag along, I've always loved those photos as a connection to the time when he was away. It was hard for both of us to be apart for so long.
Anyway, we were talking about those photos and suddenly it hit me that he'd submitted a handful of them for a photo exhibition a couple of years ago in Korea. We did a bit of a frantic search and, sure enough, they were still sitting in Kyle's "sent" email folder almost two years later! These eight beautiful pictures may just be fragmented snippets of his trip, but they give him something physical to hold onto from his time there, long after we thought they were gone forever.
I wanted to share Kyle's photos with you, but thought it would be so much better if he shared them with you himself! He was more than happy to talk a little bit about them and make his debut guest post before he heads off to L.A. for the week on business (boo.)
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From Kyle:
I started in Thailand, spending a few days in hectic, boiling, exhaust-choked Bangkok, before disappearing into the wilds on a rattling old bus, later making my way to some of the islands that shimmer off the Thai coast. I went to India, started with the great throbbing vein that is Delhi and then spent some time out in the desert before heading south to the leafy streets of Pondicherry. The last two months of my trip I spent riding the rails in Europe, having started in Greece and taken an overnight ferry to Italy, where I caught the spine of the country and was poured out into the continent.
Ayuthaya, Thailand
In Thailand, I was more than happy to get out of Bangkok after just a few days. As soon as you leave the city, Thailand opens up, and it becomes immediately clear why some people go and just sink into the country, never to return. It's an impossibly beautiful, alluring place, and there's a wildness about it that's incredibly appealing. The landscape is flat but bursting with vegetation, with abrupt karst mountains jutting out of the ground at intervals like giant, gnarled knuckles.
The heat slows things to a languid crawl by day, but as the sun starts to go down, everything bursts to life. Cicadas and bullfrogs scream at each other; tiny lizards dart through seams of rock to lap at little trickles of water; roosters start screeching hours before daybreak and don't shut up until either baking sun or pouring rain drives them back into stillness. And you see little scenes like this: a horse, far from any farm or barn, browsing lazily in the grass in front of a centuries-old temple.
Rajasthan, India
This was the camel I rode into the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, India. When I started in town with the camel driver leading his camel by the nose through the streets, I felt self-conscious, an obvious, sunburned tourist doofus galumphing his way through an India he didn't know or understand. By the time I got out into the desert, though, the whole experience had turned into something else entirely. All I knew was the seasick but steady motion of the camel as he plodded over the dunes and the wind whipped across my ears. I passed farms filled with families coaxing life out of the arid ground. I met these kids:
Rajasthan, India
It was refreshing to see such expression of pure joy in India, a country still wracked by a level of poverty I had never seen before. To be completely honest, I didn't love being in India a lot of the time. I got sick, I got tired of pushy shopkeepers trying to get me to buy overpriced fabrics I'd never use—the typical tourist complaints—but it was the poverty that really made it a difficult trip in some ways.
Jaipur, India
These kids broke my heart when I first saw them. I took them for child beggars of the sort who scratch on the windows of every stopped car in the big cities, maybe orphaned, which would account for the babies they each had slung on one hip. But when I talked to them, I found out that they just wanted some ice cream from a nearby cart. I obliged.
It's hard to talk about India without sounding like a naive idiot. I realize that these children probably had far bigger troubles than where their next ice cream cone was coming from, and I saw firsthand the sheer scale and degree of the poverty in which so many in India grind out a life. But through it all, something got knocked loose in me, and the more time that goes by since I left—over three years ago now—the more I want to go back. I hope next time, whenever that may be, I'll be able to do quite a bit more good than buying kids soft serve.
Paris, France
There are a lot of places Natasha and I want to go together, but lately we can't stop talking about Paris. It's the only place I've ever been that lives up to every cliché but actually turns that into a virtue. It's also the only place that's almost impossible to write about without seeming at least a little pompous—the second I start to write about taking a stroll down the Champs-Élysées or hunting for old records by the Seine, I feel like I should be wearing a scarf and filling a moleskin notebook with what I call "musings" or whatever. But I can't help wanting to hold Natasha atop the Arc de Triomphe as the sun goes down and the lights of Paris come up.
Malmo, Sweden
Maybe it was just the fact that I was there in late fall, just ahead of the first snow, but I found Scandinavia to be the opposite of Thailand: where Thailand was wild, noisy, and alive, like one enormous, heaving organism, Scandinavia was ordered, silent, and still. This isn't a condemnation of either place, though, not by a long shot. That's why I love travel so much. It makes the world a larger place—a vast, varied place containing a seemingly impossible diversity of landscapes and cultures—while making it smaller in the ways that matter. You start to feel like the vastness of existence can be captured by experience and memory, and even as you realize that maybe that isn't quite possible, you're left with something that enriches and even redefines your life. I don't think I ever really mourned losing all my other pictures because I've never thought for a second that I won't have another chance to take them.
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