Writing about a travel now so many years ago and a person that seems, and is, so different to who I am now, I look back on our momentous journey through photographs and diaries. So many places - Ban Na, Kunming, Lingshed, Orchha, Varanasi - the border crossings, bus rides, days on trains and weeks on foot; the temperatures from the unimaginable humidity at 48 degrees to the frozen icicles in our tent at -15. It was a journey so big I can’t picture it as a whole, with every section an adventure in its own right, a journey that only ended when a list of doctors and medicines came to dominate the diary and after eleven months we were pushed back to the West.

We had again been on a search for that timeless place, a place that has not been homogenized by the introduction of TV – a place that not many people encounter let alone understand.  A world before our time when not only dress was different but thought and reason, when curiosity and kindness to strangers prevailed over envy and comparison. A time when the world was large and the people were their own, before adventurers were replaced by tourists; a search not to see the monuments, but to understand the people, their way, and their past. In this world of constant change, that seems to move faster with every new innovation, to be searching for beauty, for that overwhelming moment when all else stands still and you have only an intense awareness of a timeless present, seems an unusual quest, yet that is what we were searching for.

What is it to travel? to know distances? to cross high passes? to live in a land where no power or use of taps has been called for? What is it to witness the mass of pilgrims arriving on foot or in the back of trucks to bathe in the sacred rivers? to witness the death of a starving child surrounded by multitudes of unaffected people? to see the joy in a person living in the present when tomorrow sorrow prevails? What is it to see lands of plenty and lands exhausted for all their many reasons? to be surrounded by the endless sea, or share in the eating of a sacrificial buffalo? to experience the joy of the catch or the quiet earthly patience of the farmer? In a world made so small by flight yet so large by foot, what and why do we travel? Not as tourists consuming cheap frivolities, but to understand and feel compassion with every joy and every suffering. What is it to go through life with an insatiable restlessness? a desire to see and feel the pulse of a people and a land, to see the ancient kingdoms, to be awed by the gods and the temples that house them, to know the world not through newspapers that are so full of misdirected facts but through our own eyes, or the journals and paintings of the artists and souls who trod before us, to feel the air, to smell the distant places – and how to explain all this? how to capture the silence that is within us when we travel?

Everyday and no matter what country or how familiar a place is, it can be a journey. A journey is only to be awake and to open your heart, to be slow, to be silent, when every second is an hour and every memory lasts a lifetime, and anyone can partake in this. We share these pictures of stillness and beauty in the hope that it may inspire a moment of silence, a few snatched seconds of calm before we are once more rushed back into the confusion that is our day. A reflection on the wonders of not only travel, but the people and the places that inspire hope and strength in us, be it the nomads, the hunter gatherers, the farmers or the fishermen, be it the religious or the city dweller – the people that can shape our lives or bring a moment of happiness can be found in the most unusual places, in the most uncouth or the most royal a person.  So let us never sleep, but be always awake to the wonders of a journey.