journal

last month i had the negatives of my travel photo archives going back to 1995 scanned. i already had digital versions of my pictures beginning with 2002 and i spent months uploading and organizing them on my flickr site. when i finished uploading all the jpegs i had, i felt the pull to do the same with my earlier travel photos. the reason for that pull is that when i upload and comment on each photo, i get to re-live my trip. just by looking at these long neglected photos, i remember stuff i haven't thought about in a while. also whenever i travel alone i keep a travel journal, so when i uploaded the uzbekistan travel set, i reread my journal from the trip (i don't keep a journal on the trips when mrs. noz comes with me. she's my travel journal for those trips).

right now, i'm starting to upload my mali photos. mali was a strange trip. i was supposed to go to uzbekistan. but then i had to reroute after the state department issued a bunch of warnings for various countries bordering afghanistan in late september 2001. mali had been floating around in my head at the same time, and was basically my second choice after uzbekistan. i somehow managed to get a rerouted plane ticket, malian visa, and malaria medication in 8 days.

anyway, as i start trying to put these images in chonological order and prepare them for uploading, i read the first paragraph of my mali journal for the first time, perhaps, from the day it was written, slightly after midnight on october 6, 2001 from the airplane over the atlantic ocean:

This journal should have been about a trip to Uzbekistan. But then what everyone is calling "The Attack on America" or "9/11" or "WTC" or just "recent events" (when will they decide on an official name?) occurred & it looks like war in Central Asia. So I'm going to Mali. After 3-1/2 weeks of endless jingoism & war fever it will be refreshing to be around foreigners for a while. Actually, given the state of air travel recently, I'm lucky to be able to go at all.