Excerpts from Travels with a Burro: BHUTAN
Excerpts from Travels with a Burro: BRAZIL
In the beginning: A burro is born
The original burros after eight months on the trail. Cuzco, Peru april 2011
Travels with a Burro was launched in 2010 as a place to share photos and adventures from the backpacking trip that started it all--the first of many journeys we would make together. The name for the blog was inspired by a small leather-bound book that I found in a random used book store on the Jersey Shore. I cried reading the prologue. Inspiration tends to happen like that. The prologue predicted an uncouth beginning, but the little burro has traveled many happy miles over the years and continues to serve as a virtual archive honoring the people and places that have made me who I am.
Sharing these words with you today, over a decade later, brings a fresh flood of nostalgia to my watery eyes. I dedicate these stories to you, dear friends.
Travels with a Donkey By: Robert Louis Stevenson, 1879
“My Dear Sidney Colvin,
The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travelers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world-- all too, travelers with a donkey; and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. they are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.
Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud of if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself affectionately yours. - R.L.S.” (Prologue)