I Believe in Travel

I have to say something that may seem rather obvious: I believe in travel. 

I believe wholeheartedly in the lessons that are to be learned while exposing yourself to cultures other than your own. No, like really, I'm not sure there is anything more impactful and profound that one can simply opt to expose oneself to, in the world. 

I think the ability to swallow whatever gross food is in your mouth without puking is a skill. I think that being disconnected from cell service and the internet and the ability to remain calm and collected through your disconnect is a skill. I believe that communicating where shared languages are slim is a skill, and remaining comfortable despite the struggle is a skill. I believe tolerating stomach ailments and bug bites among a slew of other traveler injuries is a skill. Skills that are learned only by putting oneself through initially uncomfortable situations. 

Cramming into a microbus, ordering meals that you have no idea what they are off a menu, eating things you're served that you good and well know you hate, blisters, headaches from translating, or altitude, name it all, you're gaining skills. You are actively becoming.

I think that putting yourself in wildly uncomfortable situations is perhaps the only way to truly learn perspective, culture, way of life, and individuality. The thing is, if you're trying to learn about something fundamentally different from yourself, the only way to do that is to try another way. Try. Live like other people. Eat like other people. Dance like other people. Work like other people. Speak like other people. Wash your clothes like other people. Fumigate for bugs like other people. Treat illness like other people. Prevent illness like other people. Drink like other people. Study like other people. Dress like other people. Bathe like other people. And above all, spend time with other people. Travel naturally gives you a chance at all of that. 

Travel. 

Sometimes I think about my identity, just who am I, who am I to myself and who am I to others. I realize that without travel as a part of my life I would be nothing. Not so as to say I wouldn't matter or have anything to offer the world; simply so as to say that 'traveler' is a part of my identity. Travel helped me discover who I am. Travel helped me grow up. Travel helped me heal. Travel helped me learn, and find joy again. It was all thanks travel. 

I vividly remember being asked in my interview for the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University by Professor Terry Eiler what I like to take pictures of most. Unsure of exactly how to answer, as a seventeen-year-old, the first thing that came to my mind was travel. I told him that I mostly liked to take pictures while on family vacations. I liked to take pictures of new places and things and people. I felt confident in that, because, well because it was very much the truth. 

He shortly followed by telling me that that was great and all, but that I had to like taking photos all the time. If I would succeed I needed to love to take photos everyday. And that challenged me. A lot. Clearly- because it's stuck with me even six years later. 

Photography, for me, was a way to open a door to a place otherwise unseen. Photography equaled foreignness to me. The value of photography was purely exposure to culture. Foreignness. I learned in the School of Visual Communication that even your next door neighbor's culture is foreign. We're all just a little different, and worth learning from. I took that as a beautiful and a simultaneously frustrating lesson. 

I began to travel around Ohio, a place foreign enough to give me the confidence to shoot, and yet a culture similar enough to paralyze me. My work improved, I was learning, but I felt boxed in, trapped from the expression I knew I was capable of with a camera in hand. Trapped in social fear that only finds its way to swallow me in my own culture. 

So, too, I began to travel abroad more and more. And that was my niche. It always had been. Abroad was like home to my photography. Foreignness. Home to my art form, my expression, my eyes, my words, my thoughts, my dreams, and my passions. 

Being foreign has acted as a veil for me. It has hidden the spotlight I see myself in, in my own culture. When I leave the States, I feel the most comforting sense of anonymity. I can do anything, I am invisible. No one knows me. And therefore I can act as a non partial photojournalist and anthropologist. Travel gives me that, and it always has. Travel gives me the power, and strength, and opportunity to be who I am. 

I honestly never feel more myself than when I'm abroad. 

Travel. 

My freshman year of college presented me with a lot of pain. Pain in every manifestation imaginable. I would say that it stacked up in one of my three worst years of life ever. Easily. 

Without even questioning the decision, the summer following, I boarded a plane to Mexico. All of the pain and hurt I'd been facing were left behind in that Texas airport along with my cell service. Mexico had a whole list of new challenges for me to tackle. 

Mexico had poverty shoved in my face, Mexico had food I disliked, Mexico had illness, and blisters, Mexico had bus routes to memorize and Spanish phrases to learn, Mexico had smells that almost made you lose your lunch. Mexico had rare and weak wifi signal. Mexico had heavy rains that drenched my shoes, babies coloring on me and ruining my clothes. Mexico had babies in diapers that exploded on my white t shirts. Mexico had challenges. Challenges that were immediate. Challenges that demanded my attention for survival. Raw survival. Health. 

It was only those demands that relieved me from all that had filled my last year. 

I got home stronger, more independent and self reliant. Something had clicked, something had changed. I had seen beautiful, challenging places. I had seen the world and how others lived in it. There was more out there than what was at home. There was so, so much more out there to see and overcome. There were challenges that waited to be conquered all over the globe. There were beautiful people and places to see and learn from. There was more to life. I just had to get away, get away and explore it. 

Fast forward five or six months and I was looking to fulfill my internship requirement abroad, in any capacity I could, in any country. In search of foreignness. The veil that I now knew supported my images.

I found Nepal. 

I will be the first to say that I have no words for what Nepal gave me that summer. I will never have adequate words to express what Nepal gave me, in challenges, in lessons, in friendship, in love for a place. Here I will rather queue you to thatonetimeinnepal.blogspot.com 

It might not have all the answers for what Nepal meant to me, or what it has retrospectively meant to me as my life has continued to be shaped by that experience, but it does have some expressions and feelings and memories put down into words. 

I grew up in Nepal. I don't think there is any denying that. 

It took me a mere 125 days from leaving Nepal before I made it to Morocco. I had caught the bug. Foreignness. 

thatonetimeinmorocco.blogspot.com

I've been reflecting on Morocco a lot lately. Somehow it feels related to the work I'm doing here in Peru. I will forevermore be grateful to the people who opened up their homes, their minds, and their hearts to allow for my studies in Morocco. Our work rocked on the boarder of what was socially comfortable there, and from the challenges our work posed I was able to learn so much. And in the meantime convert from a vegetarian to a pescatarian. Travel changes you. 

117 days after returning from Morocco I departed for Spain. The travel bug is real... that's all I can say. 

thatonetimeinespana.blogspot.com

By the summer of 2015, photography felt dead to me. It had been murdered in cold blood by the hours of critique and competition that acted as a poison, all brewed up by school. I hated what others made photography feel like; it was cut throat, eat or be eaten, and so I turned grey, 18% grey to be exact. I just stopped shooting. Shooting was work. It wasn't fun. Shooting was a misery of struggle and never being able to take an image that was deemed good enough. It was always falling short. 

And so, the summer of 2015 I took a break. Travel was about me seeing and doing and touching. I took photos but only a few and only when I really wanted. I took that summer to observe culture, without my camera as an excuse, and in the meantime I realized that what I loved so much about travel wasn't merely the ability to capture stunning photographs, but I loved to travel because I got to see the world and learn about other cultures and people. 

I followed my time in Spain with a solo female backpacking trip. Yes it is important to add female in there. 

I hit Turkey, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and England all completely on my own. I explored and filled my mind with museums and castles, my belly with Çevapi and croissants, and my eyes with views of the Mostar bridge and the Blue Mosque. I fed my soul. I took the time to be alone and learn who I was and who I wanted to be. I was only 21-years-old, but I had already pulled myself out of the darkest hole imaginable and come out on top of the world. 

Seeing the world has been proof to myself that I love myself. Travel has proven to me that adventures are worth living for, that there is good, and beauty, and joy out there, if only we have the strength to seek it out. 

Seven months after I left London, I landed in Belfast. And Belfast taught me so much in so little time. Killing my camera with a water bottle accident my second day, again I was set to see the world without hiding behind my lens. Belfast showed me love and pain and sacrifice and perseverance. Belfast showed me raw human emotion, and challenged me to see beyond my experience, to relate my studies, my studies of human lives and peace and joy and love and forgiveness, back to my future goals. Belfast made me want, earnestly, to participate in the human experience. To give back. Belfast made me want to understand pain, and understand forgiveness. Belfast made me want to dedicate my life to healing. 

Travel changes you. Talking with people of all walks of life fundamentally changes who you are and who you want to be. 

Without the raw nature of foreignness I'm not sure I ever would have had the profound epiphanies I've had. Travel and culture takes you away from what you expect, from what you are accustomed. Travel challenges you, makes you persevere, makes you strong, and independent. Independent. Empowered. Free. Travel makes you free. Travel makes me free. 

Travel taught me to believe in myself. Travel taught me I can do anything I put my mind to. Travel taught me to stand up for myself. Travel taught me to ask questions. Travel taught me to take risks. Travel taught me to be confident. Travel taught me to love myself. 

Despite all the pain and worries and sorrows that travel has thrown in my face, travel has never let me down. Travel has always taught me a lesson. Travel has healed me. Travel has given me the time and space to heal. To heal. Travel has distracted me when I needed it to, and forced me to work through the hard shit when the time was right. Travel has healed wounds and heart ache that ran deeper than oceans. 

There's nothing quite like finding yourself alone on a park bench in Ljubljana, with all of your belongings, and nothing else, but you, yourself, and I. A plane ride from New Delhi to Kathmandu. A cafe in Rabat. A bridge in Paris. A cemetery in Sarajevo, a mosque in Istanbul, a museum in Zagreb, a train in Agra, a garden in Marrakech, a hostel in London, a car in Toledo, a pub in Belfast, a cave in Cozumel, a beach in Jacó, a metro in Barcelona, a school in Lima, a gallery in Chefchouen, a restaurant in Fez, a small shop in Oaxaca, a brewery in Derry, a castle in Segovia, a market in San José, or a home in Ollantaytambo. From all of these places I learn. From all of these places I learn who I am, who I want to be, who I am becoming. 

Foreignness allows for this becoming. Travel is my life. Travel is who I am. Seeing the world matters. Culture and experiences matter. People matter.

Nights like tonight, spent laughing around the dinner table with my host family in Ollantaytambo, nights like tonight give me life. Walking down stone paths to get home, and crossing channels of running water, being disconnected from the internet (when I had plans to buy a plane ticket out of the country,) speaking Spanish poorly and learning bits of Quechua, holding baby Tiago, and playing volleyball in the street with Janis, it all gives me life. These are joys I would never know if I hadn't had the bravery to know Peru. I would probably have never watched Trolls in Spanish or tried masamora... or however you spell that yummy dessert. Half of my life's joys I never would've known without travel. Without foreign people making me feel at home in their foreign land, I wouldn't be who I am today. The world built me up. The world made me strong. Travel has healed me. Travel has changed my life, forevermore. 

I can't say it any other way. 

I believe in travel. 

19/07/17