In the second winter of my travels, 2011-2012, I departed for Senegal, India, Nepal & Thailand. After arriving in Dakar, and watching some dance performances which were unfortunately forbidden to film, I followed local advice and traveled to the Casamance. Senegal proved to be a much more difficult environment for travel, and the cultural differences were vast. Even the most basic opportunities for women’s education were lacking in many areas. I spoke no Wolof, and I had to use my rusty high school French in many towns. There were plenty of opportunities to trust my intuition, which guided me safely through a variety of difficulties. I finally arrived in the village of Abene, and local contacts helped me arrive via boat to Tiobon, a village where I lived for 10 days in a mud brick hut so that I could film a dance called the Cumpo. After that I studied a bit with a local dance teacher, and stayed with some Djembe drum makers. Although I had had no original intention of visiting India during that winter, my good friend contacted me through Facebook to ask if I would attend his wedding in Andra Pradesh near Madras (Chennai). I was overjoyed at the prospect of having a chance to film his wedding! Getting the Visa while in Senegal proved to provide a bit of red tape, but the US Embassy finally granted me the Visa (and an extension to my passport pages!)  Filming and photographing my friend’s wedding proved to be an extraordinarily rich experience. I found myself dressed in a full sari, on a crowded stage, vying for space with at least 7 other photographers, but in the end we all made room for each other. The wedding lasted 3 days, and amidst ceremonies and pujas I was truly happy to be a part of it all. After that I traveled to Tiruvannamali, to visit Ramana Maharshi’s ashram and film the lighting of the Arunachala mountain festival, Deepam Karthagai. In order to film this I had to climb and then sleep on the mountain, highly unusual for a Westerner, but absolutely necessary, since after dark it would have been extremely risky to attempt a descent among the boulder strewn paths. After Deepam came the holiday of Pongal, where colorful Rangoli chalk drawings were made at each doorstep. Then I traveled to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, magnificent!

Visiting the Red Fort, and then later on to Bodh Gaya, site of the Bodhi Tree, where the Buddha reached enlightenment, I was stunned by the details in the architectural elements. The way the light came through the window lattices, and the pink dawn at the Taj, provided amazing possibilities for photographing light. Following that, I traveled on to Varanasi, in order to see the bodies burning on the ghats, and to take a dawn trip on the River Ganges to see the light change on the Ghats and to photograph the men washing the laundry in the river at 5am. The rhythmic syncopated swatting of the wet clothes against the rocks was a hypnotic accompaniment to the rising sun and the many boats plying the river.

From India I took a short plane ride to Kathmandu, Nepal, and after visiting a few local sites such as Bodnath, ventured on to Pokhara to practice paragliding above the lake, and then trek into the Annapurna Wilderness Circuit.

 

 

 

After visiting Nepal for several weeks, I flew to Bangkok, and began traveling through Thailand, and ended my time there with an advanced underwater scuba certification, diving off of the Similan Islands, and Hin Dang off of Koh Phi Phi and Koh Lanta Islands in the South.