On Saturday, I returned to Seattle after six weeks in Asia. Doing any sort of trip recap would be difficult, simply because so much happened– I kept a journal during the trip, which I wrote in daily, and the raw document contains 44,137 words. I also took over 4,000 pictures. I’m sorting and processing those, now that I have access to my editing software again, but if you’d like to see some of the photos that I was able to upload as I went, here are some links to Facebook image galleries:
Trekking in Nepal
Hong Kong
24 Hours in Seoul
So much happened that it’s hard to do it any sort of justice in a short recap. But one of the reasons I travel is to try and broaden my perspective, to remind myself that the corner of the world I see and interact with every day is not the entire world. Because if you spend years fully submerged in your own little corner– not just physically but emotionally, mentally, spiritually– sometimes that little corner does start to feel like all there is.
Having spent four years in Seattle without any serious travel, I felt like I was suffering from that a bit, and I think that going to Asia, visiting the “developing world” for the first time, seeing cultures and parts of the world and ways of living with which I was almost totally unfamiliar, gave me a lot to think about it, not just in the short term but over the coming months and years.
So I will probably do a blog post or two on specific topics in the coming months. I also plan to take that 44,000 word travel journal and spend this year’s NaNoWriMo trying to make it into a readable narrative, complete with commentary and throwing some travel tips and advice as well. I do feel like I came back from Asia with a lot to say; now I just have to collect my thoughts.
In the meantime, I also need to get some business wheels churning again, so I’ll post occasionally with news on that front. Now that I’m back, and now that I’ve rested my way back to a normal sleep schedule and mostly shaken off the intestinal issues I brought back from Nepal, it’s time to get to work and see if I can make my creative aspirations start really paying off.
As usual, sometimes the hardest journeys don’t start until after you get home.
Off the Written Path 