This is why I travel

Suspended reality

Jo — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 20:29:46 +0000

Sometimes you just want to go somewhere where everyday life feels far away. Where things are not quite real. I get that feeling when I’m in Dubai – which is also known in my head as Arabic Disneyland. It’s all so clean and shiny and sparkly and unreal – and that’s just the airport…

There are many elements of the UAE that don’t sit well with me, like their environmental degradation and poor labour laws, but I seem able to ignore those when visiting friends for a luxurious couple of days. And a surreal balcony vista like this helps make my daily stresses feel very distant.

Dubai's motto: build it and they will come? The marina awaits its floating tenants.

Italy: where everything is ‘bella’

Jo — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:24:45 +0000

Italians just infuse everything with beauty and passion. It’s in their food. Their buildings. Their fashion, music, art. Every vista is a postcard. Florence, Italy, 2004

Experimenting with breaking the rule of thirds. I think it works.

Cultural insights from… supermarkets

Jo — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:13:02 +0000

Have you ever spent some time in a foreign supermarket? It’s fascinating! You can learn so much about the locals.

In the UK, there’ll be an entire aisle for breakfast cereals. In the USA, there are more types of milk than you can imagine. Here in Cape Town, the cheese selections are usually excellent. In Kuala Lumpur, an amazing fresh produce hall had me buying one of every fruit I’d never seen before (there were many – and it was such fun trying them all!).

This display at a Whole Foods store just screams ‘first world’… (Washington DC, USA, 2011)

You think they could have made sure all the peppers' stems were facing the right way.

Details

Jo — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:24:07 +0000

Who knew bags of oranges hanging on a wall could look so striking? There’s beauty in all sorts of everyday things if you just look for it. (Istanbul, Turkey, 2009)

Buy the second one from the left and you'll be short-changed...

Starting a new collection

Jo — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:26:18 +0000

It was this alleyway scene in a back street of Rhodes Town that triggered a new collection: I collect photos of Vespas and other scooters in interesting contexts.

This first one is still my favourite. The contrasting silvered textures of the wall, cobblestones and the front of the scooter are just beautiful.

Don't you wish you were there, right now?

(Rhodes, Greece, 2002)

Feeling a connection to home

Jo — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:07:33 +0000

I am drawn to the seashore at sunset as a moth is to a flame. I could never live inland; after more than 48 hours in a landlocked city I get edgy and the nearest river or lake becomes a magnet.

When I am standing on a beach, watching the sun dip below the horizon (and never seeing the green flash!), I get a strong sense that the water before me is the same water that’s lapping on the sands at the beach down the road from my home. And it’s the same water I stood before in Fiji, California, Thailand, Tahiti and numerous other places. No matter where in the world I am, if I can be down by the shore as the sun is setting, I feel at home.

Italy. Never anything less than 'bella'.

Capri, Italy, 2002

Crowd scenes

Jo — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 19:40:01 +0000

This field of Umbrian sunflowers makes me think of fans at a music concert. I wonder who they’re there to see? Robert Plant? Tree 63? Or perhaps the Rolling Stones?

Love the Italian word for sunflower - girasole: turn with the sun

Wandering through winding alleyways

Jo — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 19:12:18 +0000

If there’s an ‘old town’ section in a city, you can be sure I’ll make a beeline for it. I’ll happily spend an hour, or a day, getting lost in a maze of lanes too small for anything larger than a donkey. The further off the tourist trail, the better.

The vivid blue of the lower part of the walls in the Kasbah des Oudaias in Rabat is a treat for the eyes; a calm contrast to the dazzling white above. (Rabat, Morocco, 2003)

What's behind that brass-studded door?

“Pinch me” moments

Jo — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 22:32:07 +0000

I love, love, LOVE those moments when you’re in another country and it hits you: “I’M IN PARIS!” – or New York, or on a glacier, or 35,000 feet above Turkey and making a phone call from my plane seat, or….

I adore the goosebumps I get when in front of me, for the first time, is something so iconic, it feels totally unreal. It looks just like it does in all those photos! Whether my travel companions find my excitement and enthusiasm endearing or annoying, I don’t know – but I hope I never lose it. My stomach is feeling all squirmy just thinking about these moments, right now

The first of many images in this category: Cairo, Egypt, 2010.

Glimpsing the Pyramids for the first time. I'M IN CAIRO!

Understanding history

Jo — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 17:30:29 +0000

I detested history as a subject at school and gave it up as soon as I could. Never saw the point of knowing in which year things happened (plus we had to study the Afrikaner Groot Trek every year – yawn). It’s corny to say that history comes alive when you visit historical places, but it’s true. Few places on earth must be as moving to visit as the former concentration camps (now museums) in Germany.

Lifeless yet deeply moving.

Dachau was a moving, sobering stop on a coach-camping-sightseeing-and-drinking tour of Europe in 1996 – and the kind of place everyone should visit once in their lifetime in order to comprehend the human capacity for inhumanity. On a similar tour the following year we stopped at Auschwitz, where I stayed in the car park. Visiting a second concentration camp was just too much – learning that history lesson once was enough.

I’ll never forget the atmosphere at Dachau. Tangibly awful: such sadness, such evil. Strangely, there is almost no life there. Not a bird, not an ant. Only ghosts. (Dachau, Germany, 1996)