True Tales of a Traveller 20: Way of the Shoestring Outdoor Photographer

The 20th story in the True Tales of a Traveller series, Way of the Shoestring Outdoor Photographer is a very difficult book to categorize. Basically, it's a travel story, but it's a travel story with a lot more than just travel in it: travel and the outdoor life, geography and history, ethnic conflict and racism, international relations and political power, family hopes and expectations, psychology and mental health; it even has a ghost story - or perhaps two - hidden away within it. Any one of these aspects of the story would be worthy of tackling alone as the subject of an entire book. For example, the ghost story is something that I reflected upon often in the months and years after it happened. I couldn't come to any definite conclusions on this, so I'll leave this part for readers to decide for themselves. Ethnic conflict and racism, within the travel experience context, are things I've written about before, particularly in the book Overlanding, and here, as in that book, this is not limited to academic research - although it does include some of that - but also includes first-hand experience. As for 'psychology and mental health', my own downward slide into depression, the way it happened, the factors initially preventing it from happening, and how I came back out of it, could well be subjects of interest in their own right, to mental health professionals for example. I was tempted to write more on this subject, but originally I wanted to make this a short story of moderate length! All of the above may lead the reader to imagine that this story is somewhat dry and lacking in humour, but that's not the case at all. And the best thing about it is that it's all true! But more than anything else, this is a story about photography as the title implies.