Traveling To Strange Places

One of the strangest, most desolate places I’ve ever been is in the weathered volcano crater called La Morada del Diablo (the place where the devil dwells) in the Pali Aike national park in Chilean Patagonia. People lived here once. They must have had a very hard life.

A few weeks ago, our group visited this windy, lonely place, and I took a series of vertical photos with my digital camera, moving from left to right and overlapping each photo with the next. Our South American trip is over now, and today, Karen and I rode back from Mexico City to San Miguel de Allende on an ETN bus. The trip took four hours, so while we relaxed in comfy seats, I pulled out my computer, used Photoshop to assemble those vertical pictures into a panorama, color-corrected the picture in Adobe Lightroom, and made a small duplicate, suitable for emailing. Then, because the bus had its own wi-fi system, I went online and posted the photo to my Facebook page, with a comment, somewhere between Queretaro and San Miguel.

As I sent the photo, I wondered how I would ever explain what I had just done if somehow I was able to meet one of the people who lived in that crater. We all have very far to go, but we have come a long, long way.

Jim Quinn