For anyone who knows me, you know that travel is part of my identity. It started innocently, with trips around the 48 continental US states with my family growing up and at some point it turned into an international obsession. I took the rite of passage trip to Europe after college, with a backpack and Eurorail pass in tow. Over the new millennium, I traveled through the Middle East and experienced Ramadan, Christmas and Hanukkah, right in the heartland of each of these religions. This was back when Bin Laden was still in his planning stages and I was blissfully unaware. I think the defining trip that changed things for me was a 3-month trip to India and SE Asia, where a friend and I had obtained sponsorship from Nikon and were hired to write about traveling with a digital camera, which was new stuff back in 2001!

For me, foreign travel is like being on a sabbatical, where my sole focus is to take in the sights and culture and to document my journey with photos and words. Being focused on capturing and processing the experience as I go is incredibly invigorating. Leaving behind the cell phone and day-to-day worries and insignificances is the icing on the cake.

This is a long introduction to say that I am reminiscing about my trip to SE Asia, a year ago this time. My original plan was to meet up with Ida Becker and her U Truth Project. When at the last minute, that didn’t work out, I found myself with a plane ticket, plans made and an opportunity to travel solo for 3 weeks. I took it. It was the longest time I’d ever spent traveling alone and it became very introspective to say the least as 2009 had been a defining year in many aspects of my life.

I recently read about Vicente Wolf, a modern designer, photographer and traveler, who takes 7 weeks during December/January to travel each year. It’s a slower time for his business and he uses the time and travel to be reinvigorated, explore and refresh those creative juices. I love that! I want to make travel an annual recalibration process for me. There’s nothing like 3 weeks of being alone in foreign countries to get back to the roots of who you really are.

Looking back on my photos, I am reminded once again of their power to bring back a flood of memories. I was so incredibly wired when we landed in Tokyo, where a missed connection meant I got to stay there for the night. I wanted to see and do as much as I could in my less than 24 hours there: take photographs, eat sushi, exchange dollars for yen, scour the 7/11 for crazy foods and packaging. I was on a creative high and I couldn’t sleep.

This is one of my favorite photos from my brief time in Japan. Japan was very clean and direct, just like this photo.

Cliche shot from the plane? Perhaps, but it’s also very iconic to me. We’d just flown past Mt. Fuji.

Just looking at this gets me excited thinking about all the possible places to go.

This is a kind of a depressing shot of my hotel room in Narita, Japan, but it reminds me of exactly how I felt. Up in the middle of the night, 3am and can’t sleep, excited but also a little lonely as I had no one to share it with.