My absolute favorite part of sketching around Southeast Asia and Japan was sharing the journey with you, so I’d like to invite you to join me on this next sketching adventure from Prague to Petra – I have a feeling it’s going to be good.
It’s been almost two months now since I first got the email, asking if I’d like to chat about my sketches for a story on travel blogging. I was not only ridiculously excited to head to New York for the interview, but also immensely honored.
I want to leave you with this thought – that every interest, every childhood pursuit, every old inkling of a dream, can mean something; that the little pieces of our past can always find their place in the puzzle of our present life.
Thank you for these five days to explore Saigon – a city about which I knew almost nothing before arriving.Thank you that it’s possible to travel so far from home and yet find a home here. Thank you – or as you taught me to say, cảm ơn.
I take their sketch with me when I leave – as a token of gratitude that something as simple as a sketch could open the door to our encounter. Here in Southeast Asia, as on every journey, it is the people who have made each place.
Meeting Ksyucha, a fellow sketch artist, in the Saigon Central Post Office reminds me that it is such sketching serendipities I have come to live for – no matter how long the actual sketch itself may take to complete.
What else can you do at a place where a million people died? What else can you do but leave something, anything, behind that says we were here, and that we remember?
The many little details of Josh’s life bounce around in my head for long after we say goodbye, reminding me that we never know who we’ll meet, and where. As always, inspiration had been worth waiting for.
Behind my decision to bike to Angkor Wat was a desire to feel a sense of exploration; to try and channel the sublime sense of discovery French explorer Henri Mouhot must have felt in 1860.
For days we have been moving the puzzle pieces of our trip back to Bangkok around. It may have taken a while for our plan to come together, but here on a Vientiane sidewalk, I’m glad it left room to meet Nam.