I’ve always loved to travel, and I used to love to write. When I was 23 years old I decided to take the money I’d made over 2 years in finance and travel for as long as the cash lasted me – which ended up to be nearly 1.5 years. When I was 23 years old, I wrote – half for myself, and half for my family and friends who wanted to know where I was. I was pretty diligent and kept a blog for the first half of my trip alone through Europe, the Middle East, and Africa over about 9 months. Then I spent the second half of this trip, the next 9 months, in Brazil. And I stopped writing. I spent a lot of this time in Sao Paulo and Rio, both pretty gnarly at the time, and stopped taking my camera out and thus, stopped taking pictures. This was also before the era of smartphones, so I have few photographic memories of this time in Brazil which is unfortunate. Even more unfortunate though, is that I stopped writing – on that trip, and on future travels.
Once every few years since then I’ve sat down and for one reason or another, read through some of my 23-year old blog (currently kept on another domain). Maybe 3 times. But every time I read, I realized how much I forgot. People I met, places I went, things I saw. Scary times, happy times, the feelings and emotions. Descriptions of places which have undoubtedly changed over a decade through time or development or war. I read, and I think, how could I have forgotten that ?? And I realized that I really should have kept writing, even if just for myself to read again and remember the amazing places I’ve wandered to over the years.
In today’s age smartphones are everywhere and what you see and experience traveling is almost immediately transmitted to everybody you know and more with a tap of the finger. This is great in some ways but it’s also made us lazy and in many ways cheapens a lot of what the travel itself is about. Images aren’t real, in composition or lighting or colors. There are fewer and fewer captions conveying anything relevant about places or what your personal takeaways are. It’s just about getting it up on social media and making sure people like what you “post”. Well this is not why I travel. Not before, and not now.
So, I’m trying now to revive an effort I started in 2015 (haha) to centralize the memories of my little adventures over the years in one place. I will slowly migrate my old blog over as I have the time, and I will gradually upload pictures from trips I nearly forgot I went on. I don’t really know how to use WordPress, so things may be out of place. I was robbed at gunpoint once and lost my SLR, and so for example most of my Africa 2008 pictures were taken on a cheap point and shoot. And sometimes I’m too tired to write so the narration sucks. Some posts will be only pictures bc I was dumb and wrote no captions at the time, some will just be pages of pictures with captions, some will be only written blogs, and some will be a combination. But my goal is to make sure I remember as much as I can about the many, truly mindblowing places I’ve been, with what I have right now. I know that one day I will be happy about this.
Somebody very close to me a long time ago used to call me a Little Rover, because he said you could send me anywhere unknown and I would wander around and be interested in every new thing I came across, documenting and collecting data along the way. Somebody else totally unrelated told me separately that I reminded him of WALL-E, the Disney story of a little robot that ends up going around exploring the galaxy. I am not in touch with either of them anymore and they will likely never read this site but I named this site for their descriptions of me.
The Little Rover 