Hello, I’m Carol
Every trip I take begins the same way.
I tell myself I’ll travel light, keep a short itinerary, and finally learn to tell myself when to go home.
But by the end of the first hour, I’ve somehow accumulated three hundred photos of landscapes, birds, random things, cups of coffee, sunrises I woke up far too early for, and at least one street cat that decided we were friends, I love petting animals. My phone battery is somehow down to 12%, and I’ve almost certainly wandered into a small town I hadn’t planned to visit.
I’ve stopped fighting it. That’s simply how I experience the world.
I’m not the traveller who races through ten attractions before lunch. I prefer spending minutes watching life go by. I’ll happily miss a famous viewpoint if I discover a tiny place, like a tea farm where the owner tells me how the town has changed over the last twenty years and how tea farming is looking like. Shout out to the farmer I met at Gatura. I have a habit of following roads with no particular destination, convinced that the next corner might have a better story than the last.
I wouldn’t rush through a town because I want to tick it off my list. I want to see everything, slowly.
Most of my favourite travel memories weren’t planned.
Photography became my excuse to slow down. While, close to every photo I have for now is taken on my phone, I am still working on having some nice gear for this.
Why this blog exists
This blog started because I wanted somewhere to put those moments.The places that I loved. The hikes that nearly convinced me to go back again. The restaurants I’d visit again and again. The tiny details that rarely make it into travel brochures but somehow become the things you remember years later.
You’ll find wildlife photography from Kenya, travel guides built from places I’ve explored myself, short writeups about cities that stayed with me long after I’d left, and the occasional article about whatever is on my mind. By day, I’m a software engineer, so every now and then Android development, GIS, mapping, or whatever technical rabbit hole I’m exploring could find its way here too, maybe? I don’t know. But I do have a site for my portfolio.
I know it might seem like an odd combination, software and storytelling, but both are really about curiosity. One asks how things work, sometimes they do and this other hobby asks why places feel the way they do.
What I hope you take away
I hope this site encourages you to travel a little slower.
To wake up before sunrise once in a while. To take the road that isn’t marked on the itinerary. To spend less time worrying about whether you’ve seen everything and more time appreciating what’s right in front of you.
And if, somewhere along the way, one of my photographs inspires you to visit a place, or one of my stories reminds you of somewhere you’ve been, then every early morning alarm and every extra kilogram of camera gear will have been worth it.
Thanks for stopping by.