Dream Trip 2009

Great Travel Moment

While visiting Laos, we woke early to watch the traditional ritual of the monks collecting Alms. The subject has been written about by millions of people and the numbers of pictures shared across the world dwarf those that have written on the subject. But of course that didn't stop me from taking several hundred shots in a sleepy stupor as I tried to understand the ritual and what was really going on. As the silent procession filed past the locals and tourists giving them food, something caught the attention of this young man as he pulled away from the uniformity of the moment to look at something in the distance. Was it my wife stumbling in the distance? I'll never know, because I didn't follow his gaze. Instead my eyes darted toward the little boy in the bottom of my viewfinder that held a bucket half the size of him, collecting the excess that didn't fit in the alms bowls the monks carried around their necks.