Road Heart

A travel photo journal. Follow me on Instagram at @okaystephanie

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doesn’t this make you feel absolutely wild

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Snow obscured any view of Fitz Roy, but it was a solid 10 mile hike anyway, and a nearby glacier kept calving which sent gorgeous rolls of thunder echoing through the forest the whole time. Laguna de los Tres, El Chaltén, in Patagonia, Argentina.

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Sherpa, or so I called her, because she stuck by my side during a bad spell of food poisoning on my trek to Everest Base Camp. She was the encouragement and morale boost I needed to make it through that very slow, painful day. Thanks forever for your help, Sherpa.

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Early morning at the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. | Photo by S.C.

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The prayer flag-draped streets of Kathmandu, Nepal. | Photo by S.C.

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The Hindu cows of Pushkar, India. | Photos by S.C.

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Perfection in symmetry. The Taj Mahal in Agra, India. | Photo by S.C.

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Amber Fort in Jaipur, India, in the hot desert state of Rajasthan. | Photos by S.C.

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Kathmandu, Nepal.

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On the bathing ghats of holy Pushkar Lake, a town bordering the Thar Desert in the northeastern Indian state of Rajasthan. | Photo by S.C.

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Agrasen ki Baoli, a beautiful 14-century stepwell in the center of New Delhi, India.

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Astronomical observatory Jantar Mantar,  built in 1724 by the Maharaja of Jaipur (in Jaipur, India). | Photos by S.C.

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Kagbeni, the amazingly preserved medieval Tibetan village, spaghetti western movie set, and windswept desert oasis of my dreams. Located in the Mustang region of Nepal, it’s the closest one can legally get to Tibet without steep permits and restrictions from China. | Photo by S.C.

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Celebrated Writers on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary

Reflections on the value of recording our inner lives from Woolf, Thoreau, Sontag, Emerson, Nin, Wilde, Plath, and more.

A personal favorite conversation topic with other travelers is travel journaling: the ways in which we document these fleeting, miraculous moments as we live them, the joy and the tedium of maintaining an active writing habit on the road, and the surprising intersections and divergences of memory vs. records when rereading personal travel journals from years past.

“By keeping a record of my experiences I live my life twice over. The past returns to me. The future is always with me.“ - Eugène Delacroix 

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- “One of the earliest known records of taking pleasure in travel, of travelling for the sake of travel and writing about it, is Petrarch's (1304–1374) ascent of Mount Ventoux in 1336. His companions who stayed at the bottom he called frigida incuriositas (’a cold lack of curiosity’).“

- “Early examples of travel literature include Pausanias' Description of Greece in the 2nd century CE, [and] the Journey Through Wales (1191) and Description of Wales (1194) by Gerald of Wales.”

- “The travel genre was a fairly common genre in medieval Arabic literature.”

“Frigida incuriositas” is my new favorite term for travel-adverse acquaintances. Thanks, Wikipedia! 

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See Photos Taken on Illegal Visits to Chernobyl's Dead Zone

Thirty-one years after the worst nuclear disaster in history, a group of self-proclaimed “stalkers” makes illegal trips into the abandoned radioactive city.

A different kind of travel.

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Sunrise on a mountain peak at one of the rarest Hindu temples in the world, dedicated to the god Brahma. #brahmatemple #pushkar #india (at Brahma Temple, Pushkar)