Other Travels (being rearranged)

This section of writing and photos from different places started as a simple attempt to use photos and words together. It has since become more complicated.

 

I am not a particularly ambitious or adventurous traveler but I am interested in what I see. To make these writings work requires a lot of post-travel effort in terms of research.

 

Other sections are more collections of photos with little commentary. At some point I hope to rectify this. There are also travels - to India and Hong Kong - for example which have not yet made it onto these pages.

Women in the Kumaon Hills near Almora in Northern India replenish their drinking water suppliers from the intermittent flow at this tap
Women in the Kumaon Hills near Almora in Northern India replenish their drinking water supplies from the intermittent flow at this tap

I would like to think I am a socially concerned traveler. My interests in social justice, equality, exclusion and poverty travel with me. Recently I've become more interested in the 'marks of empire' - particularly those of the British Empire and processes of colonization, liberation and the post-colonial.

 

That sounds a bit po-faced and the experience of difference and similarity, human history and geological history, the development and threat to unique biodiversity, and the pleasures of food, wine, sun, people and changing scenery move me as much as any need to analyze and explain.

 

And the process of traveling is in itself revealing and funny and stressful and sometimes just a pain in the ass. There is a difficult tension between being 'at home' and 'going foreign' and also a tension between taking on degrees of 'foreigness' and unfamiliarity or staying on the well-beaten tourist trails.

 

Sometimes it feels like I need a turbo-booster to get me out of the gravitational pull of home and the familiar. And then returning I need a depressurization chamber to gradually get over that sense of incalculable loss at not being somewhere else.

 

Because travel keeps opening up possibility. Every country seems to be a place one might live, particularly when colonial settlement and the British Empire have figured large. These are not always comfortable feelings but to me the pull of new worlds, possibilities, settlement, land and the ineluctable fact that the lands were already settled, known and peopled is part and parcel of traveling.

 

I really appreciate feedback.

So far in this section there are pages on:


New York

Washington DC

Amsterdam

Scotland

France