What a life .. what an adventure. Wish I could do the same or something similar.

[TraamisVOS]

No, no I understand about donating funds and resources to the anti-poaching patrols BUT this thread is about adventure, about the freedom to take off and see the world (and shoot a few poachers). I am not under any pretension that a trip like that would be a walk in the park but that is my point about making a trip like train hopping, I know it's not going to be easy, it's not going to be glamorous journey, but it's a journey more for the adventure. And photography.

I envy you and your Africa trip!

 

[bartjeej]

haha I totally see what the adventure would be in your anti-poaching adventures - and indeed it's a disgrace what's going on. Just last week I read a report that in the past 10 years, 60% of the African Forest Elephant population has been wiped out. At that rate, the species only has about 6 years left until extinction...

 

[TraamisVOS]

What makes it even worse is the way they kill the elephants, they wipe out entire families including the young. And they will often not kill the elephant(s) completely after they have taken what they want, leaving them to suffer a torturous death.

 

[Isoterica]

Living near train yards when I was younger I would see these people occasionally and always see their leavings. There would be mattresses in clusters of trees where they slept and bottles of whatever they drank. Sometimes it was just kids partying in the yards but other times when you'd see an abandoned jacket or old pair of shoes you knew it was someone swapping up and moving on. I lived by the largest train yards in the country.. in one of the larger exchanges outside Chicago, tracks many deep. We used to play back there too. Not sure doing that would be safe these days but then again it wasn't probably that safe back then either. I wouldn't want to live like that, roughing it. It's fun to play as a kid but to have that be your life isn't necessarily glamorous to me. There are better ways to travel, safer legal ones too. It still was a good photo collection thanks for sharing.

 

[TraamisVOS]

I think if you really, really want to take some truly honest and unguarded photos of the train hopping culture, you'd have to jump headfirst into it earnestly with them. I think the train hopping community would more readily open up to you if you were one of them rather than a photographer from Life on assignment for an afternoon, maybe.

 

[spinyman]

Beautiful images.

 

[Archiver]

I used to talk to a guy in America who did this for fun. He had a normal job and home, but used to take off and hop freight trains and sleep in the rough. He said that the outdoor areas where train-jumpers slept were called 'jungles'. It's never appealed to me at all, but he was a cool yet freaky guy.

It reminds me of a story from an old Eagle comic, in a regular feature that had a kind of 'tales of the unexpected' twist ending. It began with a young, handsome guy in a freight train yard, and a couple of old guys offered him some Mexicali Chili Beans they had pinched from a train. No, he said, he was going to California to become a movie star, and he couldn't eat stuff like that. He boarded a train bound for California.

Some months later, the old guys came across a freight car that had been uncoupled and left in a disused track. They went inside to see what might be there, and found the man. He had put on a huge amount of weight and looked nothing like the fit, handsome man who had wanted to go to California. You see, the freight car had been carrying a load of Mexicali Chili Beans, and that was all he was able to eat in the months he was trapped inside...

The thought of being on the open road, no responsibilities and a loaded camera does have an escapist appeal. A few years ago, I went on a three month road trip for work, and I came back with thousands of photographs of places I never thought I'd see. Deserted beaches in Queensland, sleepy little country towns, two iconic Australia country pubs, and masses and masses of buildings along the south coast of Australia. While I did have to work, the traveling was a wonderful time in my life.

 

[TraamisVOS]

No way man, no way that story about the can be true, lot of holes in that urban legend once you break the story down and analyse it.


That road trip you did around Australia, that sounds very very cool.

I used to go surfing along the Great Ocean Road, the usual places like Bells Beach and Winkipop. One time I saw a makeshift one-person camp down at Bells (could've been at Winki, can't remember now, it was a long time ago). There was a tiny fireplace there, it looked lived in. I must've gotten there around 7am-ish but the dude was already out in the ocean surfing the freezing winter waves. Over the next couple of months the camp looked more and more lived in and the guy's beard for bigger and bigger, but he was living the life he wanted and surfing the waves he wanted. I never got to talk with him but I could very easily imagine he's some high flying corporate executive wanting to get away from things for three months and do nothing but surf. After about three months, one day the campsite was gone.

I don't really know how he was able to camp there, surely the rangers would've told him to move on.

 

[Archiver]

The story I related was a in a comic called Eagle, a British boys comic that was published from the 70's into the early 80's. It was, of course, fiction. It was written as one of a series of stories in the 'Tales of the Unexpected' vein, where the protagonist gets caught in a twist at the end. Other stories involved a father and son fishing and throwing back the small ones, only to be scooped up by giant aliens. The father was eaten and the kid was thrown back for being too small!

The three month road trip really was the trip of a lifetime. I often look back at it and my photos with a deep sense of nostalgia. It's highly unlikely that I'll ever do anything like that again, not unless I put away enough money to fund a three month trip for myself!