What is the worst thing you can imagine while travelling (worse than being murdered in your bed and losing your passport and all your money)? Correct! No photos. With just one day left to explore Mexico City I turned on my camera to...nothing. My battery was flat. Grrr! Has this happened to you and what did you do?
What I'm going to do is give you some word photos that would be way awesomer if they were actual pictures.
1. In a busy street, butchers offload the tray of a truck piled high with various cuts of meat. I'm talking a huge rounded pile of cow, sheep, chicken and pig flesh. Damn I wish I could show you this crazed meat frenzy. It's 27 degrees, flies are flocking and steaks and drumsticks are being hiffed into the shop past whole carcasses hanging at the door. You can imagine the smell. It is nasty.
2. At midnight two women serve at a tiny roadside eatery. The elderly lady makes dough with flour-covered hands, placing it in what looks like an iron toastie maker to shape and flatten it. Her daughter then deep-fries the tortilla before stuffing it with chicken, beef or potato - there're no mixed fillings here. The floors are made of rough concrete, the two tables are covered in checked orange and white plastic and the walls are grubby stucco. It oozes local charm and the owners are over-the-top friendly even though we can't understand one another. A simple and delicious feed for two for fewer than NZ$10? Perfect!
3. Peacocks shake their tail feathers at hens who don't give a damn about their showy beauty. We're at Museo Dolores Olmedo: once the home of the Mexican philanthropist of the same name and artist Diego Rivera's patron. Dolores turned her place into a museum in 1994, living in one small wing until her death in 2002. This place is seriously pimpin' - a peaceful oasis in the middle of a huge, bustling city. Despite the heavy traffic outside, all we can hear are the desperate mating calls of the peacocks as they roam the sprawling grounds. There's also a display of rare Mexican dogs - black, hairless and creepy.
4. Still at Dolores', a mariachi band takes the stage, resplendent in lime green outfits and sombreros. Mexicans love their music - the audience is huge and raucous. Playing trumpets, trombones, violins and a weird cross between a double bass and a guitar, the band knows every crowd request. Each man sings in turn, each voice perfectly pitched and resonant. One of the ubiquitous peacocks looks down from above and gives us a tail display. He's confident they're playing for him alone. Song after song, they hook us in until we finally have to drag ourselves away to see what we actually came for - the impressive Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo collections.
5. Mexican actress Ana Claudia Talancón gives an interview to media at the airport. She seems kind of a big deal, judging by the number of young men asking for her photo. I'm a sucker for a celebrity, even one I've never heard of (I have to ask the security guard who she is), so I get a bit star-struck. Above is a picture of her I pulled off the Internet (she looks much less glamorous in real life). She has starred in such things as Mexican soap operas, and Love in the Time of Cholera. Have you done some celebrity spotting on your travels? Do tell.
6. Hawkers on the metro move from carriage to carriage selling their wares, which range from highlighter pens to CDs. Many cart around backpacks with massive sound systems so passengers can rock out while they ride. They remain enthusiastic about their task despite the lack of interest of everyone else on board.
7. For such a massive place, Mexico City sure is pretty (didja like my rhyme?). Suburbs like Condesa are, anyway. The huge palm-tree-lined boulevards here make me feel as though I'm in a happy village.
8. The hordes of peeps on the way to the Zocalo (one of the world's largest city squares) in the Centro Historico overwhelm a smalltown New Zealand gal. I came here just before the camera let me down so I'm going to show you a real pic of this one (yes you may sigh with relief) - it's utter craziness.
9. Another rare picture for you (following some shaking and banging of the battery to squeeze out its dying breath). The canals at Xochimilco in the city's south are one big fiesta on weekends. They're the remnants of a lake and canal system that connected settlements in the Valley of Mexico. You can hire a boat for an exorbitant amount that I'm too embarrassed to mention (totally worth it though). Extended families (some boats can hold 60) clamber aboard vessels with names like Maria, Liliana and Ana-Luisa, and join the masses that take to the water for the day. They bring tablecloths and a picnic and party it up with on-board mariachi bands. Food and drink vendors punt alongside to hand out coronas and corn chowder. On the banks you'll see couples dancing, canal communities and stray dogs cruising for scraps. Our boat feels a bit lonely with just two.
10. Locals frequent a tiny Xochimilco bookshop, tucked between a fruit market and an Internet café. Despite not understanding any of the Spanish titles, I want to go in. But we are late for the train so we push on.
Memory bank photos - not as cool as real ones, especially when it's unlikely you'll be back. Tell me your camera horror stories. Where have you been when your camera failed on you? Have you accidentally deleted photos of a once in a lifetime trip? Or has some a**hole thieved your camera/computer and with it all your photos?
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On my first trip to Melbourne for the Australian Open my memory card starting playing up. For some reason it erased all the photos that I took on my first day. Very frustrating.
My camera got pinched off my lap when I fell asleep on a long bus trip in Guatemala, DOH!
So no photos, but you know what? Not having been able to take a picture of those things just makes them more memorable. There is a risk when you take too many photos of the photos themselves becoming the memories, rather than the experience.
Occasionally you have to dig a little deeper into the pocket for a great experience, view, one-off opportunity. No one around to share the boat trip cost? No matter, time in a boat is also very soothing and great to see the activity on the banks and life meadering past you. A moment in time to also distant yourself and rest up and let the world glide past you for a change. ml2b
@ samm#14 You're so right there! Friends went to Europe for 2 months and came back with 7000 photos which they forced us to look at!! It was horrific and even more horrific were their tales of spending valuable sightseeing hours hunting for batteries (they didn't know their digital camera batteries were rechargeable or even that they HAD a charger .. obviously at home.) The husband carried around a small backpack full of batteries wherever they went and it cost a fortune. We figured out they had to have spent every 3 minutes of their waking moments taking a camera shot. Learned our lesson and our month in Europe we took about 800 pics and used a battery which lasted for the whole trip. Cost about $24 and is a Kodak dig cam battery Lithium CRV3 3V ... we asked at the camera shop and were SO glad we did. We spent our time doing what we went there to do .. look at the wonderful places and snapped the best moments of each destination.
@samm - you are so right! Although my memory is so shocking sometimes I think I need the pics to remember ;)
@LMB - that is horrific - can't believe your friends made you do that! They could've at least edited them for you first!
@viffer - good tip on the batteries
My camera died for some unknown reason when was half way through my trip in south america 5 months to go no camera and funnily enough the last week it started working again.
missed loads of photos bummer
Buy postcards at the tourist spots rather than taking your own pictures. The pictures on the postcards are better than anything you could take yourself and simply spending 5 minutes in the gift shop picking out pictures after wandering around viewing the sights with your own two eyes is a way better experience than having a camera glued in front of your face while you're trying to take it all in.
I can identify! My "No Photos" disaster was on a trip into Lebanon and up the Bekaa Valley to Balbeck ruins. Situation tense at the time on the borders as we went past the refugee camps but no actual war. I was clicking away everywhere we were allowed to take photos - knowing I would never return. Got out of there to discover a malfunction had wiped all shots out. Wah.
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Nice!
Here's a tip for future explorations: get a digital camera that takes rechargeable AA batteries, and buy several sets and a lightweight charger. Then even if you run out of charged batteries, you can buy cheap replacement ones just about anywhere.
Camera horror story? Not so horrific, but a few years ago on a bus tour of Yurp, I missed nearly 2 hours of sight-seeing around Fiorenze (Florence) because I needed to clear thousands of images from my 8Gb memory card to make room for thousands more. Trouble was, because it was 8Gb, the computer in the internet cafe couldn't read it easily, so I needed to plug the camera into the PC and download the images that way (very slow). Then the images needed to be written to DVD. But (however!) because it was more than 4Gb, it wouldn't fit on a single DVD, so it took AGES to write two. No time for shopping, and severely curtailed sight-seeing. Moral: use several smaller memory cards, and backup images at night-time, every couple of days. Oh - and I now take a smallish netbook with me, to backup photos/videos on, use Skype for cheap calls back home, and keep up with email and internet banking.