Did we really do that?

I'm a bit gutted that I haven't kept up with my writing but you know how it is.  I wanted to catch up on my scrap booking journals but daily life with children has slowed the process somewhat and thus the writing has taken a back seat yet again.  This week however, a couple of things have happened that have given me a bit of a prod.

in 2001/2, DH and I went travelling around the world for a year.  It had a massive effect on us and still continues to now, nearly 10 years later.  Digital photography and the internet was really only just taking off for the hoi polloi then so our memories are filed in several journals and boxes of photos with negative strips.  Some of the memories are gone and some are still very very fresh.  When things happen in the places we visited, those memories are brought back with incredible force sometimes and we can find ourselves far more moved or troubled by them than if we were right there at the time, particularly now we are parents with a sense of responsbility.

Last week several people were drowned in Halong Bay in Vietnam on a wooden cruise boat.  We ourselves sailed through those beautiful islands on a wooden boat just like the one that sank but we didn't stay overnight on it like the poor travellers and guide who lost their lives.

And then this week of course there was the devastating earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand which has a death toll so far of at least 85.  Seeing the destruction there was awful and we recognised some of the buildings that had been destroyed.

Of course these things happen frequently.  Somewhere in the world every day there is a disaster of some form  or another and it doesn't always happen far from home.  When it happens to somewhere you have been or have family though, it takes on an extra significance.  We had been in many of the places affected by the tsunami and every time I see anything about it, I wonder what would have happened to us if we had been there at the time.  It makes me want to record more about our travels and perhaps do some writing around how our trip continues to affect us. We wrote about how we felt at the time and what we did but I think it would be interesting to explore who we are now and how we feel about what we saw and experienced back then.

Today again, something happened to increase my desire to write about our travels again from our current point of view, thankfully something very minor!  We went to Marwell Zoo where Louis and I have annual passes (Isabella doesnt need one yet).  We really dont feel we have gotten our money's worth since he has started school so we are keen to make the most of it.  We always love to see the tigers but they are rarely in sight.  Today though there were two romping around, one of them very close to the fence.  One of them sleeps by a window inside the shelter so you can be within inches of a fully grown male bengal tiger.  THEY ARE HUGE!!!!  Their paws are bigger than my head and they are like small horses in their height.  How does this relate to our travels you are wondering?  Well, we took one for a walk one day.  Not a trained circus tiger, but a wild orphaned tiger who had lived in a buddhist temple for a while.  I kid you not.  I will share the full story and some scanned photos in a little while but today we stood alongside this tiger thinking about our little walk, and had a bit of a squeaky bottom moment.  What a crazy thing to do?!  Did we really do that?!

So, there are a lot of photos for me to scrap and a lot of stories to share.  I cant wait to get started!  In the meantime though, I have been doing a lot of scrapping recently so I'll try and do a full update on that tomorrow.

Thanks for looking, bye for now! xx