The pace of life in Luang Prabang, Laos is so very charming. Charming is the only one-word description I can come up with for this low-slung city with wide streets (unnatural for much of Southeast Asia), French inspired post-colonial architecture, monks clad in sunny saffron robes, and a humming buzz of relaxed tourism. I wrote earlier about the changes three years and more tourism brought upon this sweet, sleepy country set between Vietnam and Thailand, but what cannot change in the intervening years between my visits,  is the history. Laos was …

Growing up I didn’t much care about the word “ecosystem.” I took many classes on Florida history (they made us study state history extensively–at least twice before graduation!), and the Florida Everglades was one of those places I took for granted until I reached adulthood, started to care more about the environment and realized “holy cow, there are some intricate and interesting ecosystems!”
This epiphany carried over to the present, and into my days navigating the marshy waters, thin canals and open expanse of rippling waters on Inle Lake in Burma …

I see a lot of gorgeous places when I travel, heaps and heaps in fact. About three months into traveling I decided I had to slow down because I was passing everything so quickly that waterfalls, monuments, temples? They all turned to mush in my brain. I couldn’t quite place some of the photos I was taking and that perturbed me…so I slowed down, paid more attention and stopped living through the lens of my camera ever single moment of my trip.
Okay, a bit of lie, I still photographed everything …

A rose-red city half as old as time; though these words sound like the opening lyrics to a love song, they’re instead penned by a poet and speak of an ancient civilization that carved evidence of their history deep into the soft sandstone rocks jutting toward the soft blue Jordanian skies.

Wandering through the miles of sandy roads, the nubby domes of eroded mountains visible in every direction, I was overwhelmed the moment I stepped into this ancient civilization. How did they do it? Why did they carve such beautiful structures into the side of the towering rocks? And I wondered even more, since sandstone is so delicate, why is the evidence still here a full two thousand years later?

The thunderclouds hung low for hours over Havana, Cuba before my friend Louise and I decided enough was enough–if the rain was going to play a game of chicken with us then we were going to spend the afternoon exploring the city instead of hiding indoors in anticipation of the thick sheets of rain that had, for six long and cold days, followed us around the island like a lost puppy.

We bundled ourselves tight into our rain jackets, twisted our cameras safely into zip-lock baggies, and set out on foot to walk Old-Town Havana (la Habana Vieja) and Cuba’s famous Malecón. The Malecón being a place that has always elicited evocative images seared into my memory from Hollywood films…

I find myself frequently fighting a nonchalance that creeps into my travels – like a spider building a web, the thoughts spiral: “Is this worth my time? Could I be eating food right now? I mean really, how is this different than the 25 other palaces I’ve seen in the past two and a half years?”

Then I feel the guilt. I’m in CHINA. Of course I need to see the Forbidden City. The thing is, I have to cop to knowing very little about it prior to my visit. And this lack of information only contributed to these wayward musings.

This photo makes me smile inside at the memory of the pray flags you find strung all over Nepal. From the lowest hilltops surrounding the Kathmandu Valley to the highest peaks in the Himalayas, and every important Buddhist site in between, prayer flags stretch diagonally toward the sky.

I love prayer flags. I love the aesthetics of them –the way the primary colors set off against the blue sky.

The first views of the Great Wall of China appeared over the treetops just as the chair lift gained enough height to crest the forested hillside.
My nerves fray into pools of anxious fear when I’m dangling over a mountainside from a dilapidated metal box , so it was a real effort to keep my eyes open for that first glimpse of the wall after the chair scooped me up from the base of the Mutianyu section of the Wall and started the rickety jaunt to the top.

The brown winter mountains …