I try to give myself a "Day without cameras" every once in a while, even on a trip. Most of my travel is undertaken with photography as a primary activity, and this is a great source of pleasure and relaxation for me (as well as exercise... haul a 5x7 kit with a dozen film holders and six lenses across Buenos Aires and see how fast you lose weight!). I didn't really take one on my trip to Argentina, but I did make sure to stop and just savor the moment, watch and observe and create my own memories while I was up at Iguazu Falls. I did the same thing on my Eastern Sierra sojourn - I stopped to just take in the early morning light from the top of Black's Point overlooking Mono Lake, and again up in Lundy Canyon, and especially when viewing the cemetery at Manzanar. There are some moments and emotions you just can't capture on film, and are better kept as personal memories. I can retell them and let my reader experience that feeling more deeply and profoundly by imagining them in their own head than I can by taking a picture of it, because the emotion of the moment is too lyrical, too poetic, to be expressed by the literal representation of a photograph.
I had my epiphany to this state of affairs when I went to Cambodia. I dragged the camera around with me all over the temples in the Angkor complex, and had a grand old time at it. I had plans to take a break from temple-gazing, and went up to Phnom Kulen, a sacred mountain. I got up that morning and decided to leave the camera behind, because I knew there were some things I wanted to see that bringing the camera along would be at best an encumberance, and at worst, would put the camera at risk of damage or loss (descending a cliff to the bottom of a 30m tall waterfall).
Instead of living behind the camera and flattening my experience into 2-d representations that would be guaranteed to disappoint me, I clambered over rocks through dense jungle to see a buddhist shrine in a cave with a well that never goes dry, meet two young Cambodian men who tended the shrine and wanted to challenge me to a footrace (which I politely declined, given that I most likely weigh what the two of them do combined, and would have surely lost, if not broken my ankle!).
Coming around a bend in the path, I stopped to observe a crystal clear spring bubbling up out of the ground. The waters of the spring are the clearest water I have ever seen- truly like bavarian crystal. The apparent bottom of the spring is not the bottom, though. What looks like a sandy floor to the spring is actually a suspension layer- the sand bubbles and swirls, and it goes down another twenty or thirty feet before hitting bedrock.
All along the trail, I was followed by butterflies of every imaginable size, shape and color pattern. There were tiny white ones the size of my thumbnail, giant ones with fantastic dots and swirl patterns on wings each of which was the size of my open hand. They flitted in and out of the dappled beams of sunlight piercing the jungle canopy, and led us to the banks of the sacred river which flows down Phnom Kulen. The riverbed has been carved with hundreds upon hundreds of Hindu religious icons, the phallic Linga, so that all the waters of the river would be blessed, and the holy water would feed the fields of the plains below and make them rich and fertile.
Crossing the river on a fallen tree, like I would do as a young boy traversing the stream of the Conochoteague as it wandered through the fields around my hometown of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, I stopped to look into the river and observe the carvings from a better vantage point. A scene of Shiva and Lakshmi, his consort, could be clearly seen. The carving had been made in the riverbed over a thousand years ago, yet was still plainly visible when the waters ran clear and undisturbed. I returned to the riverbank, still chased by the horde of butterflies.
Along a rocky stretch of the trail, following a group of Cambodian teenagers texting each other with their mobile phones, I saw a tiny orchid, the blossom no bigger than my pinky nail, the whole plant the size of my thumb, clinging to a crevice in the rock face. I so wanted to try and photograph it, but trying to do so would have been a logistical nightmare, blocking the trail and annoying everyone behind me. It would in the end also have meant less to me, because I would not have endowed it with the same emotive resonance - having to remember it makes it all the more precious a symbol of the beauty and fragility and amazing tenacity of life. To photograph it would also remove it from the context of that moment- it would be a beautiful photograph of an orchid, but the contrast of the orchid and the cellphones would be nowhere to be found but in my mind, and would be lost to the viewer.
