Reflections on the Road: How a Photograph almost Cost me my Brains, etc.

In providing captions for photographs, there is often background to the image that the photographer leaves out.  In this post I'm taking several photographs from the past year and filling out the captions in a way I normally would not.  The ones selected were chosen because they have something to do with adrenaline or pain, which I hope will reflect well on my adventurous spirit, dedication, and mild stupidity.

But first, as an aside and to share a little more about myself -- and because I often write about the region -- allow me to provide a complete timeline of my travels to Southeast Asia.  I have been to the region four times (2000, 2004, 2005, and 2007), and here are the reasons:

• 2000 - This was to celebrate the end of twenty-one consecutive years of sitting in classrooms, where teachers had labored to stuff my brain with all sorts of smarts.  Most of my friends ran straight into careers after graduation, unconsciously opting to do the bulk of their traveling post-retirement.  Granted, in my late 80s I might very well be working as a Wal-Mart greeter, struggling to pay rent while my friends are playing Bingo in the Bahamas.  But so it goes.

• 2004 - It would be too strong to say that those four months of backpacking in 2000 had been addictive, but they had been formative.  The older one gets, however, the more difficult it becomes to travel without a clear purpose.  And so on this second journey I went to Asia to write a book about the place and its people -- and about how a person changes in the process of such a long journey.

• 2005 - After nine months in a Tennessee library doing follow-up research and writing on the book, I was on the verge of something horrible, likely a research-induced coma.  And so I sought medical help by relocating my laptop and notes to the beaches of Bali, the cafes of Saigon, and the banks of the Laotian portion of the Mekong.  Living is cheap here, and during my 10-week stay the writing began to flow again.

• 2007 - By this point in my life it had become evident that so long as my focus was solely on writing - no matter where I was geographically - I would go completely nuts.  I was sick of my own thoughts, and drained by the solitude of writing.  I was also, relatively speaking, poor.  I wanted to torture paragraphs in the same way they had tortured me, even though I am against torture.  I wanted to bury them in a pit and walk away.  If I did so, perhaps I would rediscover the friendships I had neglected since the end of 2003, when I first began fulltime writing.  Who knows, perhaps I'd even find a way to earn a living?
  
  So what to do?  While not willing to turn my back on writing, I was anxious to devote my passion and time to something in addition to this, something that I would both enjoy and possibly earn an income from.  And so, this past summer on the week of my 34th birthday, I set off on my latest trip to Southeast Asia.  With me this time was a camera worth more than my car, and in the five months ahead I would take 25,663 photographs.

Nha Trang, Vietnam (July 7, 2007) -- I often take images along the street, and it is rare for this to cause problems.  On this day, however, it did.  After taking a photo of these kids, a guy unrelated to the bus rushed up and grabbed my camera by the lens, hard, yelling at me in Vietnamese for taking a photo.  He pulled on the camera, which I knew might damage it, and with no time for diplomacy I grabbed the middle-aged fellow by the throat.  (If you are mad at a photographer, particularly one that can't easily afford to replace his lens/camera, grab his arm rather than his camera.)  Slowly we eased up on each others valuable parts, and then went our separate ways.

Nha Trang, Vietnam (July 10, 2007) -- The week in Nha Trang continued to provide some intense moments.  Not only did I have to grab a man by the throat, I also got sunburned and almost split my skull open.  The latter happened during an all-day boat trip off the coast.  The boat I was on had pulled up alongside a sister boat and the crew tied the two together so that the passengers on both vessels could hear a band play on the one.  It was in this context that I made a bad move:  While the band played, I got up to take some pictures, including the one you see here.

To get the shots, I straddled the gap between the boats.  The distance between the two fluctuated slightly, but not enough that I worried about falling into the water.  After taking several pictures -- and perhaps after having been lulled by the band singing John Lennon's Imagine-- I stood upright, ready to hop back into my boat.  I forgot about the overhang, though, and in an uncanny act of timing my head rose into the overhang just as the two boats were being pushed together by the sea.  Instantly my head was in a vice-grip that had the potential to crush my skull.  I fully expected -- and had a mental picture of -- the contents of my head exploding out of my face.  As the band continued to play Imagine, I thrust outward with my thighs as if my life depended on it, since it did.  Finally I pulled my head free.  Back inside the boat, I was in shock both at what happened and, given the pressure, that my head apparently hadn't cracked.  All I had was a slight headache.

Hellfire Pass, Thailand (August 7, 2007) -- It had been a long motorbike ride up here, about 45 miles from my guesthouse in Kanchanaburi.  But I had wanted to see this particularly deadly portion of the Thai-Burma Railway, built by POWs during WWII.  Hellfire Pass got its name from the torches POWs used as they worked through the night to dig through rock along this 110-meter stretch of track called the Konyu Cutting (in the background, you can see a tree growing out of what was once the railbed).  This was a 12-week project and by the time it and several other nearby cuttings were complete, two-thirds of the POWs had died.

As I lay down on the track to get a photograph of the infamous spot, I felt something similar to hellfire in my lower back.  My herniated disc was in rebellion, and tears welled up in my eyes as I gritted my teeth to take the couple dozen shots I needed here.  When it was over, I got up off the track as if I were 90 years old and then limped back up a steep trail to my motorbike, which I would ride another 45 miles back to my guesthouse in a cold rain.

September 29, 2007 (Ko Phangan, Thailand) -- While hiking a seldom-used trail on the north end of this island in the Gulf of Thailand (I was en route to an isolated beach to take pictures), I came upon this rocky face with a nice view.  Four hours earlier during breakfast, I had been able to sit only with considerable pain because of my back problems, but now at 1:30pm I was feeling better.  And so I decided I was up for some rock climbing, which would take me down to the waterline where I could get some pictures that I couldn't from up here.  I made it down and back, but as I continued on to my destination  another hour away I felt progressively worse.  Shortly after I arrived, a pain unlike anything I had known shot through my lower back and down my left leg; I fell onto my knees in the sand.  This is why I wouldn't be taking any photographs on this particular beach, even though I had been planning to do so for months.  But I would be having surgery in Bangkok two weeks later.

Bangkok, Thailand (October 17, 2007) -- I had surgery the evening of the 16th to remove a portion of a lower disc, and this was my first photograph post-surgery, taken at 6:30 a.m. from my hospital bed.  I felt tons better already (morphine?) and loved the view of a new day dawning outside my window.  I was looking forward to recuperating, and to taking more photographs in the months and years ahead.

		Joel Carillet, Gather Travel Correspondent
	Joel's column, "Reflections on the Road," is published every other Thursday to Gather Essentials: Travel. His articles, based on extensive travels in Asia and the Middle East, seek to shed light on humanity, both our own and that of others.   They aim not merely to entertain and inform but also to develop a sense of connection between the reader and the world. Joel's writing and photography have appeared in several magazines and newspapers, including the Kansas City Star and Christian Science Monitor.  Currently he is seeking an agent for a book manuscript entitled Sixty-One Weeks: A Journey across Asia. When not on the road, he happily calls Tennessee home. Keep up with Joel's article series by joining his network, or subscribing to his content.