FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, I have been reading about the antiquities of Egypt and Jordan. When I was a child, my mother, an avid subscriber to the National Geographic magazine, would take us on armchair vicarious journeys all over the world. Ever since then, I’ve been keen to visit the exotic, faraway places that the magazine profiled, and I’ve traveled, I must admit, to many of them – Thailand. Cambodia, India, and many more. But I had never visited Egypt or Jordan.
When the COVID-19 travel restrictions were finally lifted, I began designing my future photo-documentary trips, as I had done over the past fifty years. The first trip I was able to make was to the western Andes, in Colombia, to collect elusive heliconias native to the neotropical jungles. This was in December of 2022.
Toward the end of 2023, I decided that instead of watching the vear-end fireworks in the skies over my house in Isla Verde, or worse yet, listening to the deatening and out-of-control sound of the AR-15s and AK-47s of the rival drug gangs in the Llorens-Torres residential complex near my home, I would travel overseas again.
This particular trip was not to be at random. I organized it carefully, with specific dates in mind, as I had before — to experience the summer solstice at Machu Picchu, for example. This time, I was seeking vorries and comme lee a me lise behind foresem…
