Today I have been trawling through my catalog of photos. Our computer is not coping with the sheer mass of images loaded onto it’s hard drive, it was time for a  cull.

My partner knows me as the ‘super culler’. I cull everything – clothes, toys, paperwork, shoes and more! I find it very pleasurable and cleansing doing so. However when it comes to freeing up space on the computers hard drive I am the complete opposite. My photos? no it’s not ‘my’ photos that are slowing things down, it must be the documents.

Well, I bit the bullet. I have spent most of my day tossing the absolute rubbish in the trash can on my computer screen. There sure was a lot of it. The computer is running quicker already. It must love a good cull, just like me.

The best thing about it was coming across hundreds of photos that had been forgotten. It was just like opening my treasure box of photos at mum’s place. Spending hours going through reminiscing, laughing, crying and wondering where people are now.

I made some amazing friends while working for Intrepid Travel. Locals, other guides and people who travelled as passengers on my trips across Asia. Masha was a colleague who I took to straight away. I first met her in the city of Beijing at a compulsory training course all Intrepid Leaders were required to attend. Masha is Russian, and it was her first trip to China. We clicked and were friends from the beginning. We still are today many years later.

As tour leaders in the same region we used to regularly cross paths. It was usually in the middle of the night at a train station in the middle of Siberia. We would never get to see each other for more than a few hours before our next trips started. Then one day our schedules aligned and Masha offered to take me and one of my passengers to her families dacha.

A ‘dacha’ is the the Russian equivalent to a holiday home. It’s a Russian word for seasonal or year-round second homes. They are really common in Russia and it’s estimated that about 50% of Russian families that are living in large cities have a dacha. I loved it!  We caught the local mini van an hour out of town. We were dropped off in the middle of nowhere and made the walk to Masha’s family dacha.

Walking the deserted streets lined with wooden houses, I was beginning to feel that I had stepped into a fairytale. It was beautiful and I wish we could have stayed longer. We stayed most of the day, wandering around and taking in the peaceful soundings. After a bbq of shaslicks we made our way back to the big smoke of St Petersburg. It was a memorable experience.

I am so glad my computer made me go trawling today. It makes me wonder if maybe I should get more photos printed and put them in albums? just like in the olden days.