NO PHOTO, NO PHOTO

“Why can't I take a photo of the gates of Tiananmen Square?”, I pondered silently to myself during a recent tourist excursion to Beijing, China. A police officer lacking any personality and devoid of emotion approached me as I hoisted my camera to my face, attempting to take a quick shot of the North gates and the enormous painting above them. He sharply told me I wasn't supposed to take pictures of the building while shaking his hand in front of my waiting lens. I quickly looked around to the left of me and then to the right and noticed two billion camera flashes fading the paint in the same exact spot of the building I was pointing my camera at. I turned back to the officer and said “Pardon?”, thinking maybe the waxy yellow buildup in my ears prevented me...

ACROSS IRELAND YEAH

It was a dark and stormy morning as I hauled my bastard bags underneath a bridge and waited alone. My tour bus was supposed to show up at 8:00am, but half an hour later it still hadn't arrived, leaving me cold, wet and wanting to burn my backpack and all the heavy items crushing my spine. Lulu and Juan, both from Spain, arrived to wait for the bus too, dragging their bags through the puddles, which ended my anxiety of having been waiting on the wrong street. While we were reassuring each other that this was the pickup spot, our bus tour guide Keith jumped out of nowhere and pointed to a big green bus parked in an alley across the street. We glanced over at huge smiling leprechauns and the words Paddywagon painted across it - that was the bus we would spend the next...

It was time to say goodbye to the fantastic Himalayas and the brief serenity of life on a houseboat in Kashmir. Goodbye to the five a.m. amplified chanting of Muslims that carried across the lake - goodbye to the glorious morning sun peaking over the mountains at six a.m. while I sipped my steaming Kashmir Tea and ate cookies - goodbye to the hundreds of eagles that soared high above the lake during the long hours of dusk - goodbye to my enormous Indian meals that were cooked with care for me, three times a day - goodbye to gawking at beautiful Indian woman dressed in vibrant sari's as they were slowly carried in water taxi's past the porch of my floating hotel.... Back to congested, muggy, dusty streets of Delhi.

Abraham, my personal guide, host, and water-craft...

I thought I would do a single day exploration of the Angkor temples, thinking it was just one or two piles of rocks I'd be looking at, but I needed a three day pass to see all of them and I still don't think I spent enough time. The sun was beating down hard and climbing the insanely steep stairs of each temple was exhausting with the heavy camera equipment bag stuck to my sweat-soaked back. There is one hundred or so temples that were built between the ninth and fourteenth centuries and left for the jungle to swallow and for people to pilfer. Some of the temples have massive trees that have grown around and through the stone and now support some of the structures. It's fascinating to see the thick web of roots cascading down over the walls of the carved stones. Piles of rubble...