The Travel Independently Blog

As a child, I remember seeing a photo of the temples of Bagan at sunrise, peach-colored mist rising among the towers… I knew I had to see the place with my own eyes. It took many twists and turns of fate and probably 5 decades for me to finally get to Bagan.

A number of months ago, I wrote about places that are as wonderful as we thought they would be or are disappointing to us – Larger Than Life or Smaller Than My Vision. I think that places we have dreamed of for years are especially in danger of disappointing.

But Bagan was no disappointment. That first morning, we took a horse cart to watch the sunrise over the plains of Bagan. Standing atop a temple, I looked out over the seemingly endless array of temples in the rosy mist. It was an echo of the photo I’d seen as a child. As we left that temple in the horse cart, over the dusty lanes, I felt I was breathing in the atmosphere of that photo. I realized that just that experience was enough – it fulfilled the dream. Of course, we spent the next three days visiting dozens of temples and loved every minute of it, but the experience of simply being there is what stays with me most.

Technorati Tags: Bagan, Burma, Myanmar, pagan, SE Asia Travel

No, this isn’t a reminiscence about viewing Van Gogh’s painting at MoMA, it’s a memory of stars.

As a city person, seeing the starts is very special. There is so much ambient light that when I look in the night sky, I am lucky to be able to pick out a few constellations.

When I was a child we used to go to a place way out in the country in upstate New York. My father took me out into an open field, to show me the Milky Way. I was amazed at how many stars there were spilling out in all their splendor across the night sky. What a revelation it was – to see something that is always there but seldom seen.

The times when I’ve seen the Milky Way as an adult have been too few and far between. But I have some favorite travel memories of the stars.

In Morocco, we stayed at a tiny oasis in the desert. I walked outside at night and away from a bright light they had as a marker for travelers and I could see the stars in the velvety sky… the Milky Way spread out before me.

I have a memory of flying into Tahiti after midnight. We took a ramshackle taxi to our hotel. I remember how grubby the cab was… the windows were greasy, but I could see lights. It took me a while to realize that the lights I was seeing were stars in the Milky Way! The view out the taxi window was straight into the middle of the galaxy. One night, we went out onto our dark balcony and drank champagne to the stars in honor of Dom Perignon’s description of champagne: “It’s like drinking stars!”

The most recent view I had of the Milky was from the beach in Kauai. I was taken by surprise by the stars… what a treat to see the Milky Way again! It was like a surprise visit from an old friend.

Technorati Tags: light pollution, milky way morocco, milky way tahiti, milky way traveling, travel memories starry skies

I’m amazed at how places don’t match up with our expectations.  To me that is always more interesting than a place that was exactly how one imagines it.

Back in the 1993, I took a trip to Greece and Egypt.  As an archaeology buff, it seemed to me to be the perfect combination – seeing two ancient cultures.

I found Greece shocking.  The ruins there were, well, ruined.  The Acropolis was mostly rubble.  Archaeological sites were overrun with school children on field trips, clamoring over fallen stones, causing them to shift.  They kicked at delicate carvings and chipped stones, all under the disinterested eyes of their teachers.  At the Acropolis Museum, the caryatids looked like they were dissolving before my eyes, they had spent so many years in the polluted air and acid rain before their move to the museum.  While I support repatriation of cultural materials, in spite of my belief, I found myself thinking that it was a good thing one caryatid and the Elgin marbles are in the British Museum!

Egypt, on the other hand was truly larger than life.  I’d been reading about Egypt since I was a child.  I feared that my first glimpses of the pyramids or of the Temple of  Karnak or Abu Simbel would be a disappointment.  Instead, I found the monuments stunning in their size and in their preservation.  To see the original polychrome on the temples like Abydos – 3000 year old colors – was amazing.  To step inside Tut’s tomb and see that the colors of the frescoes were “as fresh as if they were painted yesterday” just as Carter recounted!

I was surprised at how my reactions to Greece and Egypt, places we all know so well from our history books could be so different from each other.  People often say that places we know well from photos never live up to the photographer’s art and yet here were two places I seen thousands of photos of and one was so much less than the photos for me, one was so much more.

Technorati Tags: Abu Simbel, Acropolis, Acropolis Museum, Archaeology, British Museum, Elgin Marbles, Greece, Independent Travel, Parthenon

Photos are a wonderful reminder of the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met, the exotic experiences of travel.  But I find that there are a number of photos I didn’t take that stick with me as vividly as any I have in a photo album or on a CD.

Some photos are not taken because of technical issues, others because the camera was not available, still others because taking a photo would be intrusive.

On my second trip to Thailand, back in the late 1980s, we made a stop in Chiang Mai.  On the drive back to the hotel from the night market, we drove down a dark street. There were no streetlights, and the only illumination came from an old-fashioned phone booth – the kind where a light comes on when you close the door.  In the lighted phone booth were four novice monks, their saffron robes aglow.  Still adolescents, laughing together making a group phone call, they were the bridge between the secular world and the spiritual world.

In 1994, during my first trip to Nepal, we visited Changu Narayan, the oldest temple in Nepal, perched atop a ridge.  To get there, you must walk though a village on a stepped walkway.  When we visited, we were the only visitors there.  We arrived before mid-morning, and there was a meeting taking place outside the school – nearly everyone in the village was there.  We walked quietly up the stairs, and encountered a toddler playing on the steps… in a pair of his mother’s high heels.  The universality of the child trying on the parent’s clothing and the contrast of the high heels with the small, traditional rural village encapsulated the changing face of Nepal for me.

Technorati Tags: independent travel experiences, nepal, thailand, travel photos

It’s irresistible, isn’t it?  A new place to visit, so many things to see and do – I want to do it all!

Most people planning a trip have ideas about many more things they want to do than are possible in the allotted time.  Having more things I want to do in a place than I can do is an indicator to me that I’ve chosen well.  Frankly, I wouldn’t want to go somewhere I truly could “see it all” in a week or two or three.  That would mean there isn’t much “there” there.

One of the most important tricks in good travel planning is “editing.”  I remember when I first started researching my trip to Sri Lanka.  I listed the places I’d like to go, then immediately cut out half.  I did more research, more reading, calculated driving times, and cut out a few more.  I ended up with an itinerary that we really enjoyed.  We had enough time to explore new places, to absorb some of the atmosphere and enough time to relax – it was a vacation after all!

It takes time to get from one place to another – especially in Asia.  People forget how huge the continent is.  Flying time from Tokyo to Bangkok or Singapore is longer than flying time from New York to LA, for instance.  And driving times are long with winding roads, crowded with not just cars and trucks and buses, but also with motorbikes, bicycles, rickshaws, livestock, and agricultural equipment – either of the mechanical or animal variety.

While I can almost always fit in some activity or excursion on a transit day, I consider the things I do on transit days to be a bonus.  I don’t count transit days as days I spend in a place.  So if I want three days in a place, that means I need to spend four nights there.  Three nights means I only have two full days.

I’m currently in the process of planning our Burma trip.  This is a trip I’ve planned before but have never gotten to take.  I was recently looking at the original itinerary for a Burma trip from the early 1990s.  At that time you could only go as part of a tour group, and the maximum time you could stay was 7 days.  The itinerary put together by Thai Air  had 3 or 4 stops in that time!  My current itinerary has 10 or 11 days, and I plan to make three stops.  Still, I have to edit the things I want to do at each stop.  But the things I edit out this time will be the start for a new itinerary for the next time I visit.

Technorati Tags: independent travel itinerary, independent travel planning