The only thing you will always have with you is your mind. On this trip I realized pictures cannot capture the essence and effect of a place; You can capture a scene, but you can never capture a feeling. The vibe that resonates from century old buildings will not reach you through a screen and the awe of seeing something for the first time cannot be relived. I’ve begun consciously acknowledging that the sights I’m seeing, I’m seeing for the first and last time. It is a very strange feeling to look at something you know you will never see again.
The human eye is not a rectangle. It won’t give you options for filters and will not dial the saturation all the way up to make the colors more vibrant. And a camera will never give you more than one sense, and the other four can add so much more to the experience and scenery. A camera could take a picture of the Ometepe Bilingual School, but it couldn’t give you the laughter of children that fill the campus.
Karl von Seebach, a German geologist, stated this about Ometepe’s neighboring volcanoes, “No words, nor drawings, can ever describe this marvelous spectacle of nature.” Sometimes we spend more time trying to get the best angle that we miss out on the best possible view there is, actually experiencing something rather than taking a picture and then continue walking.