Richard Stupart

With a number of months still to go before I can really get out and travel again (to Ethiopia this time),  there is some comfort to being able to roll like a pig in a sty through so many interesting pictures from previous trips.  Being something of a photomaniac, there are hundreds of pics from past adventures sitting on my computer – each with its own little story that usually causes the onset of a silly-looking smile. This is one of those.

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It was liberating to escape for an evening with a friend I have known forever – sitting on the roadside in a fat sofa with coffee and cocktails and watching the traffic – human and vehicle, strange and ordinary – passing by. Its those evenings when an hour turns to three and you can feel yourself physically melting into the night air, as your conversations – like a good book – start to straddle that space between talking about things and reliving those memories. This was a friend I had been to Laos with, during our Southeast Asia adventures last year, and the conversation invariably returned to the magical places we had seen. The reckless things we had done.

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Again a quiet night, again another urge to write something. Having finally gotten around to the more-taxing-than-expected task of compiling various footage and pics from the Southeast Asia adventure into a documentary DVD thing, I have found myself giggling again like a small child at our silly antics, remembering the sadness of places like Choueng Ek and reliving parts of the trip I had forgotten in the time since. When complete, the video is intended to be a series of chapters reminiscing over key points in our travels – the things we got up to, the sights we saw and just generally taking people back briefly to that feeling of adventure one last time. It’s a useful antidote to the real world.

While the video is taking its sweet time to get made (It is tough. I am trying, and thanks to my brother and feedback from Jonathan, I may yet get it right), I have at least produced a poster. No, I don’t have a proper reason for having made one – it just seemed like a fun thing to do. If you like it, click the pic and you can download the full size version, which prints deliciously on A2 gloss paper, and will enhance all but the most terminally boring wall.

“Beauty is fleeting and arrives on its own terms always.

Holding onto it is little more than caging the wind.”

At long last, I have finally gotten around to framing the pics from the South East Asian adventure. Not all of them, mind you, as 12Gb of printed photos would probably pave a road from here to Krugersdorp (yes, that is how much footage we managed to take off our four or so cameras). As someone who has framed less pictures than he would have fingers left after a horrific machinery accident, a great deal of thought has gone into the enterprise. My general attitude towards framing pictures was that it is little more than a desperate attempt to fill empty space with sickening pictures of chubby nephews and baby photos. Which I would love to record with the same zest and vigour as high resolution images of athlete’s foot.

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