My Travels - Krakatau (October 1987)

Wow. What an experience for a 14 year old boy this was. I was so lucky as a child, that my dad was an expatriate - life in Asia really had a huge influence on me, and occasions like this were a key part of that. The school I went to in Singapore - UWCSEA - was and still is, an amazing institution, and as long as you could afford it, the opportunities for kids to experience some incredible things were always there. This trip was one such of those opportunities, and luckily for me, one of two I had during our three years in Singapore.

I won't give too much away, although the title kind of does that. I wrote a journal about the trip at the time, which I have kept since. However, as your will see below, time has not been kind to the book, and I fear that sooner or later, it will be gone. So I thought I'd photograph each page, and present it here as kind of a retro-journal, an old-school blog post if you will.

Apart from the state of some of the pages, the only sad part of all this is that way back when, I took a couple of the photos out - for a photo competition at uni I believe - and never got them back in. So alas there are a couple of blank spots in the book. But they are labelled as to what they were, and hopefully they still tell the story. You can read it just by scrolling down, although I suggest clicking on the first photo and using the arrows to go through, as you'll get a larger and easier to read picture that way:

So there it is, my first real foray into keeping a journal. I am glad I have this means to do so, as one day soon that book will be gone. But the memories live on forever. I have two more journals from that time that I will also do this with, as well as the important aspects of my UWC yearbooks. They are huge and hefty and frankly I don't want to cart them around any more. I think this approach is really cool, as not only does it mean I don't need to store them, but I also get to tell the story at the same time, which is more poignant, both for the reader, and for me as I get older :) I hope you enjoyed the tale!