A Thousand Words

Travelling down the Nile beneath the magnificent white sails of a graceful wooden fellucca, I discovered my camera was broken. It refuesed to turn on, to oblige me by illuminating it's viewfinder to reveal the magic before me, to snatch it and stash it away for later use.

Since that awful moment, it has become painfully clear how pathological I have become about capturing every moment of my trip digitally, and storing the countless images on memory sticks as a back up for my inadequate long term memory, that has a tendancy to forget the specifics, the choronology and the details that seem mundane at the time, but that make the moments of these adventure so unique, so perfect.

The blueness of the sky, the ripples in the water, the colours of the Egyptian spices, the deep red hibiscus flowers; how can I hold on to them? How can I take them with me, to comfort me in the grey Melbourne winter, to aid rememberances of hot dusty days spent haggling in souks, spent in hiking shoes, dressed for modesty, not coolness, beads of sweat forming all over, eyes sqinting in the sun.

I do not trust myself to hold onto these sensations. I crave the lense, the tripod. I want to pose, and smile, and remember that I was happy.

'A picture is worth a thousand words', the saying goes. So I must write and write and counjour up images as I type, so as never to forget, never to loose what I have found here in the desert, on the Nile, under the ground where pharoahs began their journies to immortality.

Come with me, share my journey as I tell it the only way I know how. It may take a million words to replaces the pictures I never took, but when I am old I will have no album to flick through, there will be no slideshow, nothing framed on my wall. But I will have my words, and may I share them then, as I do now, with you.