So it´s like this, while I was planning this post a day concept I realised I´d need content. I started with the week long series of posts (the first of which, the composition series, was a real success). I´m also going to be adding more mobile image, as I did earlier this week. Racking my brains for more I thought perhaps you would be interested to hear some of my past experiences, so every month I´ll be writing a reasonably in depth report on some of the great experiences that photography has given me. Firstly lets wind all the way back to February 2008 when I was traveling through Burma. I apolagise to those who have heard this story before.
I´ve always been interested in visiting far flung places and for some reason Burma appealed, I did plenty of research before I left and had things more or less planned out before I set off on my own. I was aware of the government situation and therefore and I only traveled by private bus and stayed in private (ie non-government hotels) in an attempt to reduce the amount of money getting into the hands of the military government.
During my time there I met incredible local people who, despite being impoverished, would stop me in the street and invite me to a restaurant for food and then refuse to let me pay even my half of the bill, extremely generous – this seems to be a running theme in my travels the less the people have the more generous they are.
A couple of weeks into the trip whilst in Mandlay, which is towards the noth of the country, a massive cyclone hit southern Burma. I knew nothing about it, power cuts were common so the fact that the telephones and internet were also out came as no real surprise. A couple of days later I hear of the ´big storm´ that had taken down the telephone cables in the capital and it could be a week before its up and running again.
News slowly started coming out as to how serious things really were, following the BBC world service as many Burmese do to hear acurate news instead of the cencored the stuff the get fed from the government, I learnt about the true horrors, hundreds dead and the number kept increasing every broadcast,thousands dead, tens of thousands, possibly a hundred thousand people dead, when were the numbers going to stop ?
According to Wikipedia the official number is 138, 000 people (although this is disputed and was probably higher), one of the most deadliest cyclones of all time. Obvioiusly In the outside world this was big news, Cyclone Nargis as it had been named had hit hard, however the military government tried thier hardest to put their spin on things making things sound less dramatic than it really was and stating how they were doing a good job and didn´t need any outside assistance. The truth is they weren´t, far from it.
Fortunatly for me I was far away continuing my adventure, however my family back home were getting incresing concerned the BBC, Sky and ITV all ran features on the missing British photographer, I have a copy of these broadcasts and they are chilling to watch. I was assumed dead, one of the 138 000. There was nothing they could do but watch the news coverage, see the numbers going up and up and watching the same images of dead bodies floating down rivers all bloated up in the heat of the day. I can´t imagine how they must have felt. Finally a week after the cyclone hit I was able to make contact. With the military roaming around in full force and the borders closed to foreigners I left the country pretty soon after.
I was welcomed back at Heathrow airport by my entire family, the press wanted to be there but I managed to give them the slip.
For me the sadest thing is when I returned to the UK and tried to publish these images no one was interested, despite attempts by one of the largest news agencies to get these images out into the public eye, over a week had passed and it was no longer considered news, I kept hearing the same response, no one really cares about what happens in Burma, so to this day none of these images have been published outside of my website. A sadening fact is that more people died from cyclone Nargis than did in the 2001 tsunami.
That was post number 15 of 366, come back tomorrow for more, I promise I´ll have something a little happier to share.
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Another train ride, it seems they never end and I´ve still got at least 3 more long ones before I return back to the UK in February. Although I wont be leaving India for another 3 weeks it very much feels like this trip is winding down for me, perhaps as I have no other specific photography stories to cover, or perhaps I´ve just been away for long enough and am missing a few home comforts. Either way I´m looking forward to it.
Travel photographers face a rather unique phenomenon that probably doesn’t occur to anyone else in the world, well it probably does…but….. It goes something like this. What ever and however they pack they will always always always wish they had packed more and yet on the same trip they will also wish they had packed less. Not being familiar with a destination or the events that may occur can lead to not bringing the right equipment for the job, you´ll want to make sure you have a full range of lenses and plenty of batteries for example.
