The trip of a lifetime

The frequent problem with "trips of a life time" and "photography" is that unless you have either been to these places previously or have had the luxury to live there for a period, it becomes extremely difficult to capture well. I am fortunate enough that I have travelled and lived throughout Asia for over 10 years now, yet there are still many places that I want to photograph again just because I need to learn so much more about the weather, seasons, moods and traffic patterns with multiple visits.

Without being intimate about a place, all you can ever do is scratch the surface...
 
For me:
1. traveling europe as a student in 82 and spending a lot of time behind the iron curtain
2. hiking around the Mont Blanc masif in 93 by myself
3. taking a road trip from L.A. to Denver using secondary roads with my best friend. (Navajo Nation, Monument Valley, Durango etc)
 
My trips of a lifetime:
1. Darwin to London overland through Asia, left August 01 1976 and arrived exactly one year later
2. 15 months hitching through Africa in 1978-79 (had such a fantastic time I'll never go back. It could never be as good).
These days I have little desire to travel much though if and when I retire I'm certainly heading back to India, absolutely love the place
 
I am on the trip of a lifetime right now! It started in Sept 1961 and it continues to this day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Happy travels!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And that statement is completely true in a general sense. I really dont think of my adventures as "trips of a livetime", Any place I really have found amazing I know I will go back to again and stay longer!!!! Asia in my most favorite place in this world and I have visited and worked on that grand continent may times over the past 25 years. I have visited or lived in most of the countries of Asia at least once. And I am planning to go back next spring. This time it will be my usual stop in Thiailand and then on to Nepal and from there on to Tibet for a few months..... Bon Voyage!!!!!!! - Michael
 
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Well, Roger, our trip of a lifetime (my wife and I) was not too far from what you see when you stay home. We were in France this past Spring (2009). Cassis, Arles, Les Baux, St. Remy (saw l'hopital where Van Gogh was), Beaune, Dijon, Auxerre, Vezelay, Paris. Some little mountain towns, Vaison la Romaine and others nearby.

Closer to home, we like to go to the mountains in Colorado. We take our Jeep into high areas inaccessible with 2-wheel drive. Colorado residents, though, drive to Missouri to see our rivers and springs in the Ozarks. In Utah, after climbing to Delicate Arch, we met a French girl who has come all that way to see Arches National park. That was her trip of a lifetime.

And for you, a trip of a lifetime involved leaving France. Leave France? Seems unthinkable to us. Seems the most beautiful place in the world to me! My dad once summed it up, I guess, when he said, "People are always going where they are not."
 
I once solo-paddled a canoe the length of the Mississippi River, and took about a dozen photographs on the way -- I was a lot more into the travel than the photography. Perhaps another trip of the lifetime would be traveling the Danube, or the Rhine, in a small craft. Or the Thames, for that matter. I don't think I'd do it in a canoe, anymore, but an 18-foot shallow-draft outboard skiff would be fun...I like the idea of wandering around Europe on trains, too; and maybe will do that.

By the way, if you Google Maps "Rhine River," you'll get a map of an amusement park pond in Florida, in the US.
 
My girlfriend is from Budapest, and I often think about how it would be to travel it. I am into boats and has a skipper license, so perhaps one time I will able to make such a journey...

Or one could do like the englishman who travelled from London to Leningrad in a bathtub! At least according to newspaper clippings from the mid eighties.

Edit: found this archived on the web: http://search.opinionarchives.com/Summary/AmericanSpectator/V16I11P4-1.htm
 
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The trip of my lifetime so far, is literally a once in a lifetime affair- the amount of red tape is almost impossible to surmount unless there's a lot of luck and coincidences involved, as was in my case. The place is off limits unless you qualify as a bona fide investigator for three separate gov. instituutions, have a very clean bill of health, convince the local missionaries and, most difficult, have a native recommendation: I spent three weeks with the Yanomami for my PhD thesis. Getting there included enough jungle Cessna flying in the fog and Amazonic boating to fill a lifetime with nightmares; as if the constant danger of the sometimes very drugged, sometimes ill-tempered Yanomami, (nicknamed somewhat coarsely "the fierce people") wasn't enough.

But it was fully worth it.

3801379760_8f436c0b0a_b.jpg
 
I have been fortunate enough to have made a couple of really fantastic trips that combined adventure travel and photography. In 2002 I traveled in Nepal and India and trekked to Everest Base Camp. It would take too long to describe how amazing that was.
Last year my girlfriend and I did a catamaran tour of the Galapagos Islands followed by a trek to Machu Picchu. Some of those photos are here in my gallery.
But my 'trip of a lifetime' has to be the four years I spent working as a cruise ship photographer. I got to visit nearly every continent (just missed Antarctica by a few miles!), work with some really interesting people from all walks of life, learn a lot about photography (surprisingly) and save up a bit of money.
It was very hard work with no complete days off for 6-8 months at a time but I got to go places I never would have got to any other way and have some incredible adventures! In some ports our time was so limited that you had to make the best of your situation. No time to wait for magic hour or set up tripods - hand held at high noon! It really taught me to be creative and get good shots on the fly.
I'll never have another experience like it.
 
During the last 50 years of his life, my father visited every continent and captured images with his Leica M2-R and 35mm Summicron lens on Kodachrome 25 film. However, my mother, my sister and brothers, and I all got so bored with his slide shows because of the redundancy of the 35mm lens' 63 degree angle of view. I used to plead with him to take his 50mm and 90mm Leica lenses on those trips so as to capture images with more variety based on their different angles of view, but he refused to. He died 6 years after I'd bought my R8 and M6 TTL and dozens of lenses and before his death, time after time upon showing him what I'd captured with my Leica lenses from 19mm up to 400mm, he finally agreed that he'd been foolish to limit image capturing with only the 35mm Summicron.
 
micromontenegro said:
The trip of my lifetime so far, is literally a once in a lifetime affair- the amount of red tape is almost impossible to surmount unless there's a lot of luck and coincidences involved, as was in my case. The place is off limits unless you qualify as a bona fide investigator for three separate gov. instituutions, have a very clean bill of health, convince the local missionaries and, most difficult, have a native recommendation: I spent three weeks with the Yanomami for my PhD thesis. Getting there included enough jungle Cessna flying in the fog and Amazonic boating to fill a lifetime with nightmares; as if the constant danger of the sometimes very drugged, sometimes ill-tempered Yanomami, (nicknamed somewhat coarsely "the fierce people") wasn't enough.

But it was fully worth it.

3801379760_8f436c0b0a_b.jpg
Click to expand...

Three weeks there! It must have been unforgettable! I guess there were moments of deep fearing... It's another world, the wildest one, really!

Cheers,

Juan
 
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