Not a blog, a scrapbook

Two days ago we returned from a six week trip to Singapore, New Zealand and Shanghai.This is the story of that trip, not really a travel blog, because by my reckoning a blog has to be written in the moment and posted on the fly. 'Heels for Dust' - the account of our adventures round and about Europe by motorhome is written like that. Despite the vagaries of campsite wifi, every couple of days I can usually find a signal somewhere and because I write the blog on my phone's note pad, more or less on a daily basis, then the posts genuinely reflect the delights and tribulations of long term travel - the content is reactive rather than reflective. Blogs take time, but we do have the time as we travel sedately - there is no rushing about during our three month wanderings along the shores of the Mediterranean. Writing the blog is a past-time not a chore and over the years has become one of the delights of our part-time itinerant existence.

A six week road trip somewhere half way across the globe is not the same proposition. Distances  travelled tend to be  longer; living out of a suitcase and changing hotel every couple of days makes the trip more intense. The experience is more about moving through differing landscapes and city districts than exploring localities. Consequently writing a blog as you go becomes more difficult, you lack the luxury of spare time.  However, we did want to keep some kind of record and stay in touch with friends and family. Gill had the idea of keeping a photo blog. 

After looking at a variety of options we decided to establish a Facebook group - 'Traveling Turpies' and upload photos and the odd comment as we went. It worked well. Also, on all our trips Gill keeps a daily notebook recording our location, the weather and snippets of information about where and what we ate and notes any unusual occurrence - such as the moment hire car's front bumper dropped off - or random out of the ordinary native encounters. Added to these there are our photos and video, Armed with an SLR, a camcorder and a two smartphones then between the two of us we generate a prodigious number of images - on the recent trip over 5000 photographs and 100 video clips in 41 days. These provide a visual 'aide-memoire', especially the road photograghs Gill snaps on the go which provide  visual cues to jog the memory afterwards of landscape features and topography which otherwise would slip the mind. There is a tendency to remember only those places you linger in, but on a road trip the experience of passing through changing landscapes is as powerful an experience as the stopping places.

So what we have here is a kind of scrapbook produced soon after we returned drawing on all the above material  augmented with some reflections and commentary added later - particularly to give context to the photographs. There is an entry for each day including an 'image gallery' - some of the photos are simply the pictures we liked, others, perhaps less technically perfect, record landscape features or buildings that seemed interesting at the time. I suppose the main reason for doing this is to capture our experience before it fades entirely We may claim at the time this place or that is 'unforgetable'. but in truth without something to jog the memory even the most astonishing sites are difficult to recall after a year or two.

To follow our trip from the beginning click here.