Whiskey Smuggling and Illegal Border Crossings ...
- Chris Hilton
- Oct 20, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 18, 2025
Strolling is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.
Honoré de Balzac
Last week we had quick romp through my back catalogue of travel photography with a few tall tales thrown in ... loosely tied to this years programme at the club, Nature, Light, Colour, A Sense of Place, and Collage.
So much of the modern travel experience revolves around expectation … white sand and palm trees, the rural idyll, cultural highlights or fine dining … whilst our time and imagination is given over to dreaming, the realities of the travel itself is given little or no consideration at all.
And it is there, amongst the traffic jams and the flies, the smoke, street food and sweat shops … barbers, buffalo, rats, lizards, chickens and street side snooker tables, temples and televised cock fighting, dogs defecating, kids peeing, bells, neon, scrap yards and spring rolls, politics, rice pudding and ring worm … it is there, in the cracks of an elaborately woven dream where I feel most at home.
The art of travel is not ‘to get off the tourist trail’, there are enough people doing that that it is a tourist trap in itself … the art is to find somewhere to get that zip fixed, or to get a watch battery, to go to the doctor, to get a haircut … to exist in the cracks where our imagination failed to go, to let reality wash over us in all it’s messy, uncomfortable glory without the hindrance of expectation.
It is then that I find my eyes are truly open … for me, travel is about being fully immersed in that 1/125th of a second, alive to a shadow, a colour, a glimpse … and if that is the case, then I find myself travelling as much in my home town as I do in pastures new because with the right eyes … it’s always new!
For those of you that missed it (and have two hours to waste), here's an earlier version ... more romping, more art and less about the programme.
The next meeting at the hall is the Knockout Competition ...
Followed by another discussion evening ...
And a talk you can view sitting at home ... Non members welcome, just drop us a line to register
