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| So what exactly do you do with 400 photos of your Thailand adventure? That's the question I faced on returning to Atikokan after three weeks travelling all over Thailand with my daughter. I took two cameras with me -- a digital camera capable of holding 500+ photos and a regular film camera. Now, when you know that you have virtually unlimited photo space, you do take a lot of pictures of questionable worth -- at least I did. Something I've learned -- don't take more pictures that you want to download, look at and work with. A film camera -- it's easy. Take four rolls of film in; a day later, pick up four envelopes of photos. Easy. Someone else has done the work. Not so with digital photos. I took them and now I had to do the work. Number one thing to remember, no one will want to look through 400 pictures, even if they were National Geographic quality which mine decidedly were not. I culled them down to a slightly more manageable 230 of the more interesting ones (in my opinion anyway). But still, what do you do with 230 photos? 230 is way too many to print and would go through expensive ink cartridges way too fast. So I did a pretty neat thing (again, in my own opinion). With the help of a graphics program, I made a web gallery so I could share them with far-flung friends and family. The program did most of the work by batch processing. All I had to do was caption them so there would be some sense of context for the images. If you want to see the result, you can check out http://photoalbums.freeservers.com/index.htm As the trip has now become a very, very pleasant memory, I find funny things happening as I go about my little life in Atikokan. I never had a basis of comparison for life in Canada before. I find I am enormously grateful for the space and pace of life in small town Canada. After the crazy traffic in Bangkok, Atikokan is so restful, peaceful, quiet. But as I go about life here my memories of Thailand kick in all the time. I walked past a pineapple in Foodland and was reminded of seeing a small pickup truck packed 6 or 7 feet high with fresh pineapples on its way to Bangkok. Or, when we bought a fresh pineapple in an open-air market, how the young man so deftly and quickly wielded his machete to peel it, core it, take out the brown spots and chunk it for us in under three minutes. When I walk or ride through the rain here, I remember the monsoon downpour we walked through in Bangkok. It eventually flooded many streets and scared us with its deafening thunder that shook the hotel. I remember the corner of Ko Chang where our beach hut was. It was nestled in behind some rocks and palm trees. I remember thinking that if you changed the palms to pines, how like northwestern Ontario that little spot on the Gulf of Thailand would have looked. I remember being reminded of the old Progress office while standing in a market in Mae Hong Son where the vendors had rigged up a rain diversion system, using plastic tubing to divert the rain from their displays. And I remember how the wet, sucky, red mud of Thailand reminded me of here. Comting to world travel rather later in life, I find I am now having fun keeping up with my brain's new-found ability to switch between memories of here and of there. |
 Ko Chang. |
 Wet, sucky, red mud |
 Wonderful greenness at the forest wat |
 Misty mountain, forest wat |
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