Travel Writing Prompt

Do You Have One Photo That Tells a Thousand Word Story of Your Travels?

You know the expression…but write us a story about it anyway.

Maybe you are the kind of person that spends their travels looking for perfect moments that demand to be photographed. Or maybe you just sort of let them happen, pulling out the computer in your pocket only when absolutely necessary. Or maybe you rely on those you are travelling with to send them to you, while you just exist in the moment?

Either way, there is probably a photo that you have of one of your trips that just says it all.

I won’t say which of the above categories that I fall into, but I have a few that when I see them, I am put right back in the time, space and place where it was taken.

Mine is the photo above. It’s a burger van in a converted VW Combi on the outer edge of a desert oasis in Peru called Huacachina. It was inhabited neither by greasy delights or a person selling them, and it was hard to tell if its dereliction was a new thing or if it was permanent. But when I saw it, I knew it would make a great photo.

Here is the story that brought me to it.

In the summer of 2015, I decided to take a teaching job in Colombia. Teachers, if they are being honest with you and themselves, start planning their Christmas vacation almost as soon as their new charges walk through the door in August or September.

I was no different then and I’m still not. But this would be my first time engaging in real travels in South America and it was time to get to know the continent a little bit.

Weeks two and three of my well-deserved holiday were already pencilled in with other people; a week split between Medellin and the Caribbean coast at Cartagena and then a week doing yoga in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica.

I decided on Peru for the first week and it wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in Machu Picchu, but I rationalized skipping it that there would be enough to do on my own for seven days without trying to squeeze that in as well. Next time, I figured.

Instead, I flew into Lima and spent hours walking for miles and miles on my own. I took a hop on hop off bus ride by myself as well. Interesting thing about Lima in mid-December, an open top bus might not be the best way to get around. It’s cold, there is a constant fog coming off the Pacific and the whole city seemed to hunker down for the season.

Which is a funny thing when you are alone and perhaps in search of a little bit of life. Ok, maybe not so funny.

By the end of Day 2, I felt like I had seen what I was going to see and therefore slunk into a movie theatre in a shopping mall to watch Episode 7 of Star Wars, which had just come out. I don’t remember any of it. Gracias a Dios, the deluxe Ceviche, Causa Limeña and Pisco Sours that I treated myself to at the clifftop restaurant in the Miraflores outdoor mall, overlooking the ocean made up for it.

I’d have left at that point, but there was the matter of the ticket to the Morrissey show that I had. I went on my own. He actually showed up — those who still follow him know that he often doesn’t — and played all the solo hits and Smith standards, in a freezing cold outdoor venue. Still, it was a right knees up, on my own.

Are you starting to get the picture?

It wasn’t a reluctant goodbye to Lima the next morning on a deluxe coach bound for Nazca. Why Nazca you ask? Well…the lines and all. Six hours in relative comfort down a coastal highway between the desert and the ocean that just seemed to go on and on.

Nazca was a dusty little place and if not for the $75 flights for a half hour of figure eights to view these mysterious lines, there might not be a town there at all. The poor guy that was wedged in beside me on the Cessna didn’t see any lines unless they were at the bottom of the bucket that was kindly provided.

Two nights there was plenty, but you’d be fine with one.

And the same can be said for Huacachina, which is where I headed next, on the way back to Lima. Visually, it’s a stunning place the first time you see it from above, and there is an unmistakable feeling of being “out there” and that you’ve stumbled on something that most people won’t ever see. But that might have to do with the fact that the place was virtually deserted of other travellers when I was there.

I don’t know if it’s happened to you the same way as it’s happened to me, this feeling of having “just missed it”, whatever “it” is, when I’m travelling. Even more so when I’m on my own.

Which I certainly was while I was there. Which I think is why that photo appeared when and how it did. It kind of boiled it all down into one image for me. What was it doing there? What was I doing there?

Back to Lima then, for Christmas Eve, my first one away from home and family. I had had the foresight earlier to get to a grocery store before it closed and pick up a bottle of Chilean wine, some meat and cheese and a piece of chocolate for the hour-long Facetime with the people at home from my hotel room.

After that all I wanted was to get out of that room and bounce around town from bar to bar. Have you ever done that on December 24th somewhere in the world? I wouldn’t recommend it in Lima, or at least the few blocks that I sauntered around, looking for a drink in the desolate streets where all the shopfronts and bars had been shut up tight.

I’d have given anything for a functioning burger van to come around the corner.

Your turn now. Do you have that one photo of your travels that you could write a thousand words about? Tag me in the article that you create out of it, I’d love to read it!