“You don’t take a photo with just a camera. You bring to the photographic act all the images you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”-Ansel Adams Traveling alone is a gift. The road of self-discovery, conquering phobias, and growing independence are rewards I intended to experience. What I didn’t expect was that meeting with local people would have the largest influence on me, forcing me to accept love in a different way than I I’m used to, in the form of ephemeral but memorable moments of kindness from total

Sichuan province in China has been full of great climbs that I had never heard of else and would never have known existed. That was all leaked to me when, at a hostel in a town between Chengdu and Lugu Lake, an eager hostel worker sat down with me and told me every spot she believed I should see after I uttered a few words of Mandarin to her and she realized she would be able to speak with me. Showing me photographs of each site on the Chinese version of Google, she then invited me to join her for

I went down to the beach after leaping off the boat after an incredible day of scuba diving in Tofo, Mozambique. The white sand cracked under my feet as the waves rolled softly. I had just seen a whale shark underwater and I was in paradise. It had taken me many days of grueling bus travels to get there, but I accomplished it, and it proved out more amazing than I had dreamed. I was wearing no shoes, hadn’t even thought about putting makeup in weeks, and was beaming from ear to ear on a bright day at one of

When this piece goes live, I am sitting on a bus from Johannesburg to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. If I’m honest, I’m a little afraid. I keep telling myself that things will be OK but honestly, I have no idea what to anticipate. I woke up to a bizarre message a week and a half ago, “I can’t go with you”, it stated, “A woman came floating out of nowhere and took my heart. » It wasn’t a major surprise. J and I had always had one of those ties that you could sense deep inside. He was always

We traveled in the rented vehicle, and the other locals were astonished when they spotted Greg in the driver’s seat, their faces turning from bewilderment to astonishment and excitement. Greg was dressed in traditional Hawaiian garb, and I wore a lei he crafted from a massive leaf. I’ve always kept it on my wall for good luck. “Do you believe Molokai was Hawaii 50 years ago?” I inquired, wondering whether it was simply a phrase or if it really true. “I grew up here for 40 years and keep coming back, and nothing has changed,” he said. This island gets

Picture this: it’s one of those evenings when the moon rises and everyone shouts “wow! because even though we’ve all seen him many times before, that night he simply managed to seem super, mega, big like a cartoon. I have never seen such a huge moon before rising. The sun was sinking perfectly opposite the moonrise, reflecting orange and purple on the placid waters of Lake Superior, looking like some kind of psychedelic quicksilver that shifted from purple and pink from the sun to blue and in the white of the moon. It was hard to know which way to