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The Egyptian man above, who works in Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egypt, is smoking a cigarette in the Great Hypostyle Hall. Many, probably most of the foreign travelers who step into the hall are here on short holidays. They likely entered through a climate-controlled airport rather than through a more messy land border. They probably wouldn't have needed to do laundry since leaving home. They're on a visit, and they know it will be brief.

None of this is bad, but it does have its disadvantages. As Paul Theroux suggests in his book Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, through this kind of travel we may return home with a less developed understanding of the relationship between "Here and There". He writes:

I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease and speed with which a person could be transported from the familiar to the strange, the moon shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

About an hour before Friday prayers began, while walking through Cairo’s crowded Tahrir Square, a man named Mahdy grabbed the sleeve of my shirt and said, “Hey, where you from?” He had a beard (that’s him in the center), a strong, confident voice, and when I said “America” he said, “Oh, which state, I used to live in Texas, in Dallas.” Come to find out, Mahdy had even spent three days in Tennessee. “A nice state,” he said.

Like many other people I had met in Tahrir over the previous ten days, Mahdy quickly left me dumbfounded by his passion, articulateness, and courage. Cairo was in the midst of historic upheaval and Tahrir Square was the epicenter. Mahdy was one of hundreds of thousands who at some point had stood in this square since January 25, demanding change in Egypt.

He told me many things in the 15 minutes we were together, a righteous anger burning in his eyes, and at times I imagined I was listening to Patrick Henry at the Virginia Convention. Here’s a sample of what he said:

• We are eating ful and tamaya; Mubarak and his people are eating shrimp!”
• “I’m not one of the Muslim Brotherhood, but they are my brothers.”
• “Fear is dead. Nobody is going to back down even if they die.”
• “I wasn’t in the square yesterday…my health isn’t good and I needed to rest. But I definitely was coming today. I came prepared to die if I must.”
• “In the U.S. I’ve been questioned by the FBI but they treated me with respect – I even get emails from them sometimes asking me how I am doing. Here the police never treat you with respect. Sometimes when I arrive in the US the immigration official stamps my [American] passport and says, 'Welcome Home.' In Egypt they look at my beard and pull me aside for questioning. And they're not even sensible questions!”
• “My wife is American and my children have U.S. passports. Whenever they go out I make them take their passports. That way if the police stop them they won’t abuse them. But from now on, in this new Egypt, my children will leave their passports at home.”

As he spoke, another Egyptian in the crowd, a stranger, wiped the sweat from Mahdy’s brow. Sometimes Mahdy paused our conversation to translate what he was saying to those around us. The crowd nodded their approval or, in the case of his joke comparing U.S. and Egyptian FBIs, laughed. There was fire in Hamdy's voice. Like so many others in Tahrir he had a vision for his country and his children, a vision for which I am certain he would have given his life this day if indeed it had been required.

But several hours later, in an announcement that sent a deafening roar through Tahrir and all of downtown Cairo, we learned that Mubarak had resigned. Mahdy would return home to his wife and children, a proud Egyptian.

For more of my images from Tahrir Square and Cairo, visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcarillet/sets/72157626017436034/with/5436239812/

If you’ve ever backpacked in Southeast Asia or have undertaken casual research into the global party scene, you’re familiar with Thailand’s Full Moon Party. Whenever that lunar ball is all lit up in the heavens, alcohol and travelers wash ashore on Ko Phangan, an island in the Gulf of Thailand. Even well into the evening, vehicle headlights bear witness to the masses streaming down the steep mountain road from other parts of the island. Out to sea boat lights stretch like planes lining up at O'Hare, ferrying the anxious pilgrims from Ko Samui and the mainland. From the east and west they come: prostitutes, undercover cops, sexual predators, Russians, Thais, Europeans, and on and on and on. By midnight a stretch of sand a few hundred meters wide will fill with thousands of revelers.

And so it was that while reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, my mind fell back for a moment to the sights and sounds of Ko Phangan.  I'm aware that Conrad is speaking here about the upper reaches of the Congo. Yet I couldn’t help but think, even if a little in jest, of the Full Moon Party:

The earth seemed unearthly.  We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.  It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman.  Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman.  It would come slowly to one.  They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.  Ugly, yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of their being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.”

If interested in learning more about the Full Moon Party, click on my story "The Backpackers' Pilgrimage: Ko Phangan", published by Perceptive Travel.

On Christmas Day 2008, about three minutes before two stern-faced policemen approached to inform me that I would be robbed if I didn’t leave the park for a safer part of town, I took this picture of a man reading about Lance Armstrong.  As the man held up his paper (“Miracle” is the headline), and as a man on an adjacent bench made sure I knew Lance had only one testicle, I appreciated how even in a place like Panama City, Panama, people are interested in Armstrong’s phenomenal story.

This week, as Armstrong and others are zigzagging their way through the Tour de France, I suspect the guys I met in December are keeping tabs on their miracle rider.  There was a time, however, when instead of Panama reading about France everyone in France would have been reading about Panama.  And the subject, instead of bicycling, would have been about an undertaking much more expensive, deadly, and even grand—the construction of the Panama Canal.

Armstrong’s coverage tends to be positive thanks to the sheer feat of his victories.  In the late 1800s, however, coverage of the canal's construction, which was a French undertaking, was positive because the construction company had bought off all the French papers. “No less than 2,575 different French newspapers and periodicals had shared in the company’s beneficence,” writes David McCullough in The Path Between the Seas.  “Some little fly-by-night publications had even been founded for the sole purpose of getting in on the take.  In addition to such giants as Le Temps and Le Petit Journal (which received the largest sums), the full list included such publications as Wines and Alcohols Bulletin, Bee-keeper’s Journal and the Choral Societies Echo.”

France would spend more than ten years sweating and dying on the canal, during which time the French public—many of whom had invested their life savings in canal stocks—was left completely uninformed about the tremendous setbacks plaguing the endeavor.  When construction finally had to be abandoned in 1889 (the U.S. would pick it up again several years later) and after an estimated 20,000 workers had lost their lives, French newspapers, embarrassed and no longer in dubious partnership with the canal company, continued to print many a bold headline as newspapers tend to do.  “Miracle,” however, surely wouldn't have been one.

So here's to the independence of the press.  And, I suppose, to not being robbed in public parks, to retired men sitting on park benches, and to a 21st-century news culture which allows a Panamanian to enthusiastically expound on the testicular status of an American bound for France.

In November, on the steps of a church, I came across a man who reminded me more of Forrest Gump than a beggar.  When I asked if I could take his picture he was gracious in his reply and never once expressed interest in me giving him money.  Picture complete, we sat together a while.  Our sitting was mostly done in silence since within seconds I had run through the limits of my Spanish, but every so often he would sincerely say something I didn't understand.  He was gentle in both speech and movement, a simple man in the best sense of the word, the sort who reminds you that you wish to be a tender person.  I've always liked the line in As Good as it Gets where a gravelly Jack Nicholson says to Helen Hunt, "You make me want to be a better man," but it is a sentiment not confined to romantic relationships.  One can experience it in the most unexpected settings, even with a down-and-out stranger on the steps of a cathedral in Leon, Nicaragua. 

It was while sitting with this man that I thought, as I sometimes do, of Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran bishop who regularly irritated Right and Left alike.  Gunned down in 1980, his homilies still circulate in books such as the Violence of Love, reminding the reader of that terrible period in El Salvador’s history as well as challenging us with timeless, sometimes deceptively simple, themes.  It was 30 years ago this week, on Easter Sunday in a country wracked by poverty and oppression, that he spoke the following:

You that have so much social sensitivity, you that cannot stand this unjust situation in our land: fine – God has given you that sensitivity, and if you have a call to political activism, God be blessed. Develop it.

But look: don’t waste that call; don’t waste that political and social sensitivity on earthly hatred, vengeance, and violence.

Lift up your hearts. Look at the things above.
 

(If interested in more images from Leon, Nicaragua, I've posted a few black and white shots HERE.) 

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States.

Also on that day, and in the same city (Washington DC), the man in this photograph was selling newspapers on 14th Street, just outside the Columbia Heights metro station.  It was bitterly cold, but neither he nor the rest of the city really cared about that.  People were outdoors, flowing enthusiastically and en masse toward the center of town to watch a man who, had he been born at a different period in American history, could have been bought and sold like a piece of property.  But on this day, on this day, he was instead being sworn-in as president—President of an ever-evolving nation.

Whether one was heading to the national Mall for the history or the hope (i.e., the first black president or a change in U.S. policy), one thing was certain: we were a lot of imperfect people who, in this moment, felt on the cusp of something significant, something that made us feel better about our corporate selves. There were many parts of Obama's inaugural speech that drew a nod of approval (or a downright roar) from the crowd.  Here was one:

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.

And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

Inaugurations are the high point of many presidencies, lush with hopes that time and circumstance will soon enough level.  But whatever the future holds, the inauguration itself will remain a day to remember and celebrate.  For on that day history was made.

(If interested in seeing more images from inauguration weekend, visit my “Obama Inauguration” gallery on Imagekind.)

In the mountains surrounding the Panamanian town of Boquete, there is a rather phenomenal coffee farm called Hacienda La Esperanza.  It is run by Jose Pretto, a Panamanian citizen of Italian descent seen in this photograph.

We met two hours into my walk down a curvy two-lane highway, where I was on the hunt for good pictures of the region’s coffee harvest, now in full swing.  Jose called out to me from a dirt road leading off of the highway, inviting me to wander through his fields and photograph his pickers at work.  I thought I would stay for ten minutes; I stayed instead for four hours.

To summarize: Jose, who once flew commercial jets, has thrown his life into an organic coffee farm, and his love for the land is contagious.  He showed me his chicken coups, scattered about at key points.  The chickens, which provide eggs, also spend their days pooping and scratching the soil under the coffee bushes, providing nourishment and aeration.  Orange trees also dot the farm, providing shade for the bushes and dropping delicious fruit to the ground (which workers and the occasional visitor can then pick up and eat).  A beautiful stream rushes through one side of the property, and Jose is in the process of relocating his workers (who live on the property) a few hundred yards away so that the water remains unpolluted.  The farm even has a couple mules, imported from the U.S., so that the workers don’t have to carry full sacks of coffee on their shoulders as they do on most other farms.  And this is but a very small glimpse of the place!

During my visit, Jose also received several unwanted visitors: officials and lawyers who are hoping to take much of the water from his stream.  The water is needed, they say, as more American retirees flood into Boquete and build homes and condos that demand the area’s natural resources.  Jose, who has invested thousands of dollars to fight this, minced no words as he spoke about the short-sighted stupidity of developers (who are passionate about money, not about a right relationship with the environment) and of society in general (which poisons its food with chemicals).  It seemed fitting that when we said goodbye, we were standing beside the billboard seen above, which Jose put up along the highway to share his message that, when we don’t consciously care for the land, we may very well destroy it.

I suspect Jose would find a kindred spirit in Wendell Berry, who writes a lot about the land and our relationship to it.  In an essay entitled "In Distrust of Movements", Berry says:

Well, all of us who live in the suffering rural landscapes of the United States know that most people are available to those landscapes only recreationally. We see them bicycling or boating or hiking or camping or hunting or fishing or driving along and looking around. They do not, in Mary Austin’s phrase, “summer and winter with the land”. They are unacquainted with the land’s human and natural economies...In fact, the comparative few who still practice that necessary husbandry and wifery often are inclined to apologize for doing so, having been carefully taught in our education system that those arts are degrading and unworthy of people’s talents. Educated minds, in the modern era, are unlikely to know anything about food and drink, clothing and shelter. In merely taking these things for granted, the modern educated mind reveals itself also to be as superstitious a mind as ever has existed in the world. What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food? 

I made the mistake of arriving in the Vietnamese hill station of Sapa on a Friday, when it seemed half of Hanoi had already arrived for a weekend getaway and so had filled all the hotels.  Fortunately, after about two hours I found a place to stay on a road leading out of town.  This hotel was full, but they had an unused room of sorts on the roof that they’d rent me for $5/night.  While waiting at the reception desk for someone to find a key, I turned around and saw this man standing on the balcony.  The lush mountains drew the attention of us both, but in my case so did the scene of a solitary man gazing out at them.

Here’s a quote from a novel by C.S. Lewis called Till We Have Faces.

“And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.  But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.”

Precious few travelers venture to the Thai town of Pattani these days.

Located in Thailand’s deep south near the border with Malaysia, Pattani was the site of a major Japanese landing in the first days of World War II; from here they pushed down the Malay Peninsula to capture Singapore.  More recently (since 2004) the small town has been a focal point in an insurgency which has claimed, on average, two to three lives per day.  The motives for the violence are complex, but a significant factor is the discrimination local Muslims feel they receive under the Thai government.  Thailand is an overwhelmingly Buddhist nation, but the four provinces in Thailand’s deep south are predominately Muslim.

In the days surrounding my own visit in September 2007, several passengers on a bus were shot, a military truck was hit by a roadside bomb, a teacher and farmer were gunned down, and a judicial official was assassinated.  But as in other conflict zones, life goes on in the midst of the uncertainty.  On an afternoon walk through the town, I came across these two smiling Thai soldiers heading out on patrol.  I was struck by their facial expressions…and their mode of transport.

I was struck by this soldier's eyes.  It was late November 2006 and I was photographing a protest in the West Bank village of Bil'in, where Palestinians, along with Israeli and international activists, were protesting the route of Israel's Separation Barrier.  The barrier had separated the Palestinian village from more than half of its land, and the protest, carried out each Friday afternoon, was a largely nonviolent response to this confiscation.  During these demonstrations (which continue still today) a palpable and sometimes frightening tension filled the air.  The stress, of course, is handled differently by each person.

The soldier pictured here is an Israeli who had likely been tasked many times before with keeping the protestors from crossing the barrier, and in the three hours I saw him he never seemed fully present.  As much as one can know another through mere observation, I thought he was gentle and kind.  His watering eyes, his forced smile, his entire body language  indicated that he didn't like what was happening to this village.  And so the conflict this day was not only taking place in the fields of Bil'in; it was also occurring in the heart and mind of a soldier.