Taking a Lens to the World in Africa
I have included pieces of Asia in all three of my "roundings". Nepal in 2011, South Korea, Mongolia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia and India in 2016
and Sri Lanka in 2018. So many countries, so many cuisines and SO many people. Hiking the Annapurna Circuit back in 2011 was definitely a "high"light, with the crossing of Thoring La (High pass) at 17,500ft. You learn quickly that
all that is promised in brochures, isn't delivered in the mountains. The "lore" of the trek is the nightly stays in "tea houses" which were supposed to be small mom-n-pop operations. The reality is that these are spartan furnished
hostel rooms for two or three people. The common refrain was that "tomorrow" we'd have hot showers, and "tomorrow" never came..we DID finally get one near the end, and it was heavenly.
The week I spent in Angor Wat, shooting the temple sites was an exhausting slog, but the pictures are what I'll remember, you tend to forget the effort it took to get the camera there.
The week I spent in Malaysia was almost too comfortable. I figured out the mass transit and spent days crossing Kuala Lumpur and taking overnight busses to the shore at Georgetown, on Penang Island.
As for India, my advice to anyone pondering a trip around the world would be to start in India. If you can survive a few months there, with the traffic, trains, tuk-tuks, boda-bodas, the street food and the crush of humanity,
you can survive anything. There was a monetary disaster across India on my third day back in 2016, and while I was a fairly seasoned traveler by this point, it took most of the skills I had to survive. But yes, I would go back.
