I’m writing this post after having been back in the States for four solid months. I’m back to “normal life”. I still think about my trip every single day. I wonder what my goals are too, now that I’m in the city working. It took me a while to accept that I need to make time for writing. When I was traveling, it just came naturally and I genuinely loved it. I think it’s a sign that working in the city is pulling me away from doing the things I really love: traveling and writing.
I took a break from writing my travel blog posts when I returned to the States in January 2019. My posts were always 2-3 months behind my actual physical location. My last posts were from September 2019 as I was leaving Spain and going to Portugal. I’m about seven months behind now. It doesn’t feel great to be so delayed. I worry that I’ll start forgetting important things. Interesting statistic: from December 1, 2018 to December 21, 2018 I took 17,618 photos. I am not the kind of photographer who photographs everything but I absolutely photograph the things I do not want to forget.
So, let’s get to the beef: you may remember that I was in a car accident in Laos. I think enough time has passed that I can share the photo of the aftermath of the car accident:
After the car accident in Laos. Taken with Richard’s phone. We climbed out the broken side window. The van was compressed and we had to get our luggage out with a crowbar.
It has taken almost a year for me to be able to share this publicly. It’s amazing that no one was drastically hurt. I walked away 100% unscathed. We collided head-to-head with a dump truck during a rainstorm. We spun off the road and as you can see, the rear of the van is squished. My iPhone was on my lap during the crash and must have flown out of the window as it was nowhere to be found. My duffel bag had it’s main strap ripped off. My laptop ended up being completely unharmed! My external hard drive, that I was using as a backup for my photos, completely stopped working. So all of my travel photos from before the accident, six months worth, were seemingly gone. I knew that at some point, I would have to try to get my hard drive fixed to see if I could restore my photos.
I’m about to give away the ending here. Oh, I guess it’s in the title of this post, too. Just play along, if you will. Another important note in the story of the eventually recovered photos is that my hard drive back up was not the same backup as my iPhone backup. I would back up my latest iPhone photos to my laptop every few days in iTunes Backup Format. I would backup all of the photos to my external hard drive to iPhotos as regular photos. During our last day in Vang Vieng, right before the accident, I backed up my iPhone. When I arrived in Bangkok, I purchased a new iPhone and attempted to restore my iPhone backup numerous times. Apparently my iPhone backup was exactly 32 GB and new iPhones do not have 32 GB of empty space on them. So, if you are still following me, after six months of travel, I had an inaccessible iPhone backup and a dead external hard drive. I would end up traveling for another six months, holding onto these guys for dear life, knowing that I would eventually be back in Staten Island where I could sort this all out.
So, I paid $2,000 to drivesavers.com to recover the hard drive. They were able to recover everything. I chalked it up to a travel expense. I had saved so much money by staying in hostels and using points for flying that $2,000 seemed quite worth it to regain six months worth of backpacking photos. A few weeks after the recovery, I decided to watch some of the short videos that were recovered and I discovered that some of them did not work. This was bad. I paid drivesavers.com a lot of money and I knew they only retained my data on their end for 2 weeks after the recovery (in case any issues came up). I waited too long to test. The emotions of going through everything was overwhelming. When I called them to see if they could determine if the recovery partially failed or if I maybe messed something up myself, they had already wiped out my recovered data on their end. I had to swallow that pill. I still knew there was this other iTunes Backup file sitting around and eventually I would be less emotional about opening that up as well.
A few more months would pass before I would decide to pay the $50 to manually extract the inaccessible iTunes Backup. I had been so traumatized by the accident in Laos and so happy-and-sad-rollercoastery about almost losing half of my travel photos (and having to shell out another $2,000) that I even thought about deleting this 32 GB backup file. Well, dear readers, I am certainly glad that I did recover this one last big-ass file. On this backup were another 700 photos from the time between Indonesia and Laos that I had pretty much completely forgotten about because, well, after Laos I just wanted to get out of Asia. In addition, the backup had all of the photos and videos I had taken in the previous six months in working order. So, I kinda didn’t need to pay that $2,000 (I think?).
There are some key fun moments I discovered in these photos that I wanted to share with you. I had spent about five months in Asia and Oceania and returned to Kuala Lumpur to retrieve my 70kg piece of luggage I had left there at the end of January 2018. Chong was storing it for me in his parent’s house! He told me he would be glad to watch it for me as a show of Malaysian hospitality. I wanted to send it back to the States so that I would not have to worry about it any longer (and not schlep it with me to Europe). I had been living out of a duffel bag for five months and I was totally fine with only a few pairs of underwear. This piece of luggage is still sitting in my parent’s closet, by the way.
Click the photos to see the captions and follow my story of my last few days in Malaysia:
Stay tuned for the next installment of my recovered photos where I walk you through what I actually saw in Laos!