A Collection of Quarantined Thoughts
Coming home off a 3rd voyage from South East Asia this past Jan-Feb of 2020, I was thrown into the grips of quarantine due to COVID 19 outbreak emanating from China. This pause in everyday life, gave me time, as if heralded by the spirits of the Far East, to reflect on the many experiences that I was fortunate to have. Through the photography and video I captured during these recent travels to South East Asian religious centers / temples, agriculture-wildlife parks and other cultural relic’s, I took the opportunity to collect and catalogue my thoughts.
So through quarantine began a seminal body of work producing an somewhat educational and meditational video of pictures and video captured during my months travel’s this video became “Flattening the Curve” a call of creative duty amongst artist world wide to help lesson the hardships and anxiety of quarantine.
Bamboo for Me and You
The iconic imagery of photos and video used in “Flattening the Curve” captures the very likeness of being on location taking us through the sub-tropic rivers of the Mekong River by crossing a bamboo seasonal bridge from Luang Prabang the second biggest city of Laos.
Through the monsoon rain season about six months of the year the bamboo bridge is predominant way of crossing from City and is erected and dismantled depending on season but leads to and from the city to neighboring villages where most locals live , work and goto school.
Bridge to Everywhere
The Bamboo bridge symbolizes the ultimate journey of humanity of coming together not necessarily in a globalist corporate way but however endearment for better compassion for others ,unity through understanding and respect , i know its just anecdotal but then again i am a dreamer are you?
Click to find Greg Hernandez biography and previous articles.
Free Subscription
Please help support Independent Media by subscribing below. This is a free subscription which will entitle you to free giveaways, books information, book previews, merchandise giveaways, event news, book signing info and more! Thank you.
Community Publishing is from the community for the Community!
relationship with yourself and the world you experience. 
After about a week working and helping Gustavo, Leigh and I left our big bags and headed for El Bolsón for a few days of couch surfing near the town and weekend of hiking.
stands, you can by artisanal beer, chocolate, paintings, toys, and the list goes on. It’s not an overwhelming amount of vendors and the crowd of locals and tourists mingle to the beat of the drum circle playing near the pond. It’s a good way to spend the morning.
Leigh and I took an excursion to the jungle town of 
After our time spent on the Peruvian coast, we travelled East, climbing in elevation and winding through the 
people book treks up the Inca trail months in advance and I am sure those are great experiences. However, from the info Leigh and I collected while making our way to Cusco, we found that most people said the Inca trail was often very busy and underwhelming. It can be very crowded and expensive and you often see many of the same things as other, less expensive treks. In high season, july -september, the trail is often so busy that the maintenance crews can’t keep it clean and the smell from the out houses lingers like the sound of 
would try to start a conversation, at which point i asked them, in Spanish, if they were sisters. I thought I would relate to them by saying that I too had a younger sister and that she was really funny…but I didn’t get that far, not even close. Instead, after repeating my question at least three times through the wine and rain, each time getting louder, the girls started to laugh even harder. I thought they were laughing at my accent but I could tell from the look on Leigh´s face that I was missing something. Leigh looked at me and started laughing. “what did I do?”, I asked my friend as the girls ran away, clearly bored by this conversation. “Alyssa”, she said to me, ” what were you just trying to say?”, her face cracking into a huge smile. “I was asking them if they were sisters…wasn´t I?”, I repeated the phrase to Leigh, “Estamos hermosas? Si?” “No, Alyssa! It should have been, Estas Hermanas. You just told them that ´’We are pretty´, three times”. Haha, needless to say, since then I have put a little more thought into my Spanish questions.
dinner are huge portions of steamy white rice and vegetables, many grown on the farm. The company is a mishmash of volunteers from around the world, the US , France, Italy, England yet we all have something in common in the way that we have found ourselves here, in a post dinner trance, hot tea in hand playing a card game called 
got out and walked in the direction I knew the beach would be. But, after about a half a mile of scrambling over boulders while dodging a questionable smelling stream of black goo all with my big backpack on, it occurred to me that this might be wrong. I feel like an idiot now that I even walked that far knowing somewhere, in the back of mind, that there should be a dirt road or something. There was no way the volunteers were making this walk multiple times a week. Turns out, no one was making this walk, ever. I was nowhere. I confess, when I realized I was truly far from my real destination,there were tears, but only a few panicked ones that barely left my eyes. 
I made it back to the road just as the sun dropped behind some misty, green slopes near the pavement and I stuck out my thumb. It was nearly night and I was not at jihuay. In fact, I had not even begun the 30 minute walk to the farm yet. I had only had a very real detour. I was picked up by a nice couple who looked at me with a mixture of concern and fear as they asked where I was going and where I was from. I could barely answer there questions I was so relieved to be in a car for a moment. They dropped me at the Santa Rosa stop about 3 hundred yards up the road. I could have walked. I was so close and yet had gotten so very much off track. So close and yet, still at the top of a hill at night with the fact that my destination was down somewhere at the bottom. So I took out my light and walked. My feet were killing me and it was chilly. At this point I had already thanked my friend who gave me the bright orange, down coat I had been wearing that evening a dozen times. But it was still cold, probably from the thin veil of sweat that had appeared all over my body when I had to hustle back to the road and hitchhike, for the first time mind you. 
leveled off at the bottom and rounded a bend to find a large wooden gate off to the right. I had made it. “Fundo Jihuay” was written on the white plaster wall so I reached up and pulled the rope for the bell. I was quickly greeted by 2 huge ride guan ridgeback dogs and a smaller, silver mastiff puppy. These dogs would eventually be my friends but right now I was a stranger in the dark. At that point though, nothing could scare me, I was so numb with relief at arriving.
