Shoot With The Heart
Seeing the world is a privilege that is part luck and part effort. Of course you can see and even photograph people just right outside your door. You can take them for a coffee and ask ridiculous questions that uncover their psychology and history. You can get bold and ask to meet the rest of their family. You can ask total strangers all around you to help you out or show you something. Doing this all around the world is great fun, but at some point your journey becomes your destination, You need a place to go so you can meet all of those people right?
The other part of this is that sites mean something. They connect people to their past and future. These places elicit the kind of pride that makes each one of us belong and have purpose in the countries and locations we connect ourselves to. These sites often have a way of changing citizens that choose to represent themselves with it.
Those same places can sometimes have a magic to them that changes you as an observer. I remember the first time I went through the gates of the Taj Mahal, or ballooned over the ancient city of Bagan. These locations took my breath away. I was stunned! I was smitten and in love: chest tight and hair on my arms rising in pleasure. I had to sit down and just look. Seeing the city of Angkor in Cambodia was another moment where I knew that at 5am when none of the tour buses were around and all you could hear were birds…that all of a sudden I was the explorer seeing it for the first time. The trip to Angkor was immediately extended from 3 days to 10.
Everyone loves a good road trip. Mine was across the White Sand Desert of Egypt in a 4x4 listening to a heat warped cassette of Billy Ocean’s 1984 album Suddenly - Kaled’s only tape. Sleeping out on the sand or in deserted and dusty 1930 hotels was an experience worth the pain of getting there.
Balancing on the lip of a staircase of rice paddies while smelling the smoke of fires clearing debris was a memory I kept coming back for time and again. Putting my hands on the towering 326 foot, 2500 year old Schwedagon Pagoda in Myanmar encrusted with its 4531 diamonds (biggest is 72 carats), 2317 rubies and entirely covered in solid gold plates was a life highlight everyone needs to do.
One thing I am not a proponent of, however, is bucket lists. Everyone should think about going to see something and having a goal, but too many times I see travellers hitting 3 or 5 sites a day on a tour designed to tick a box. It’s great that people see these places, it’s certainly worth doing that. To feel what those places have to offer you as a person, you have to be open to that message and in my experience, that doesn’t come inside of an hour. You also can’t take a piece of that experience away in the form of a T-shirt or a trinket - my opinion.
At times, it is advisable to risk not seeing something thoroughly by not taking a guide. Just go and take your childish curiosity with you. Let your guard down and let the place take you were it wants you to go. Unleash inhibitions and open your senses up. Only then should you take your camera out and try to capture not only what you see, but the love that you are feeling at that moment.