I'm motorcycling through southeast asia and, like Australia, still haven't remembered to take any snapshots.  Here are 18 photographs that do not exist, all 3x5, on one roll of imaginary kodachrome.

1.  The monsoon rains have flooded the road near the Burmese border and a boy on a scooter stops next to me.  Together we carry our motorbikes though the muddy waist deep water, wading back to get the next.  We are across when a Nissan pickup carrying three water buffalo stop at the other side...the boy laughs and gestures that we cannot carry the buffalo over.  The kid took a decent photo of me, wet and smiling.

2.  I'm in a corregated metal shack next to a swamp watching the local thai kickboxing match...the mosquitoes come up from under the wooden planks we're sitting on.  The crowd shouts at each blow and local musicians are in the corner, scoring the fight with drums and sticks.  I try to capture a violent punch but the flash doesn't go off and all you can see in the picture is the insects swarming around the flourescent lights.

3.  I'm riding on a rattling, rambling night train through the mountains down to the southern islands, my berth is 5' long and I'm curled up with my walkman and my backpack, a curtain separating me from the aisle. Across from me is a Canadian who bought a girl in Bangkok and was keeping her for the week, she dutifully coos and cuddles with him, interrupted by her cell phone.  I bump my backpack and the camera goes off in its case, the photo is black.

4.  Low on petrol, I putter into a tribal hillside village in the northern jungles near Laos.  I gesture towards my gas tank to a toothless woman sitting under a hut made from bamboo and banana leaves.  She laughs at me, disappears into her shack, and comes out with a Seagrams Whiskey bottle full of gasoline.  I ask if I can take her picture but she giggles and covers her face.

5.  I'm on the deck of a freighter heading to Ko Pha Ngan, a small jungle island on the Gulf coast.  Across from me are a bunch of the hallucinogenic backpackers who are heading to the south corner of the island for the Full Moon Party, the giant beach rave where scruffy kids do buffalo shit fungus and Ecstasy.  One of the kids takes my picture but his MDMA is kicking in and the photo only shows the rust on the railing.

6.  I'm sitting in a smoky bar on Khao San Road in Bangkok, a crowded, congested ghetto of $3 rooms and filled with the stoned backpacker crowd--detached, stalled, filthy, their ankles scabby with insect bites.  A bootleg of "Bad Boys II" is playing on the video and it's obvious someone filmed the movie from the audience...in the video you can hear the crowd laughing and sometimes someone stands in front of the picture.  An australian boy takes my picture, I'm flashing the peace sign and holding up my Singha beer.

7.  I'm resting from kayaking around an archipelago of lush islands that jut up out of the emerarld green water.  I've stopped at a cove where there are the bamboo ruins of a hippie colony that lived there for five years in the 70's...and it still has an odd haunted feeling of a small society hidden by choice.  I think about utopias and things I've missed in my safe life, wondering where I was during those years.  A young french couple tells me to smile when they snap my picture but I don't.

8.  My best photo.  I've stopped at an orchid nursery and walk through the delicate, intricate flowers, grown hanging from fishing lines off bamboo racks .  They hover in the humid jungle valley air like an acre of frozen colored birds. I got lucky with the light.

9.  No matter how poor, every small village has an elaborate buddhist temple...garish, ornate.  I stop my motorcycle to stretch my back and remove my shoes, borrowing the solitude of another religion.   I remember the Mamas and the Papas song..."stopped into a church, I passed along the way...I got down on my knees, and I pretend to pray."  I am not, however, California Dreamin'.  A monk in orange robes tests his english on me and takes my picture but the framing is off since he won't photograph the buddha in the background.

10.  My last english word 100 kilometers behind me, all the road signs are now in Thai.  My maps are now useless so I just always take the smoother road...navigating by pavement braille.  At a fork in the road, I I hold up my soggy map and use my timer for this one.

11.  Every village has a night bazaar where the farmers' wives gather to compete with cooking over outdoor fires.  I'm eating phad thai off banana leaves and drinking a Fanta although they keep the can and pour the drink into a plastic bag...like when you bought a goldfish as a child. A farmgirl takes my picture and I look satisfied and happy but can't put my drink down.

12.  The rains come hard and long and I'm riding at night in the back of a tuk-tuk, a motorized rickshaw through Chiang Mai...a noisy, crowded city in the north that stinks of diesel fumes.  The streets are filled with scooters, and I snap this picture looking out the back at a hundred headlights weaving in the downpour behind us.  There was rain on the lens so it looks like a constellation of motorized stars.

13.  I pass a caravan of thai boys on elephants carrying cabbages into the next mountain village.  The elephants are bound in coarse, rusted chains and hulk under the tiny boys riding on their heads.  My motorcycle startles them and I stop and bow an apology.  When I lift my camera to take their picture, one of the boys laughs and throws a piece of cabbage at me.

14.  This was supposed to be the classic tourist photo--me standing on the beach, painted Thai longboats behind me, a row of thatched huts hanging on the jungle boulders in the distance.  Brian has joined up with me for the islands and he took this photo...so of course in the lower corner of the frame is the butt of a dog humping.

15.  I knew this picture wouldn't turn out, but I had to try.  The beach at Ao Thong Nai Pan is lit by moonlight and the plankton sparkles up onto the night sand, glowing blue.  They look look like lost  christmas lights, washing up on a remote shore.  Knew the picture wouldn't turn out.

16.  A monkey sitting on my wet swimsuit, drying on the railing of my hut, the rough jungle beach of a small Muslim island off Malaysia behind it.

17.  Brian and I are in a rickety treehouse in Khao Sok, on a platform built on our roof, about four stories up, just below the jungle canopy.  Below us, a rushing green river, across from it the sheer limestone karsts jut up 20 stories high...dripping with color, ferns, and twisted trees.  It's pouring and we put the timer on to take our picture but the flash has shorted out.

18.  I'm drinking a banana and ice in a shack bar along the road, it's raining and I brought the motorcycle in with me under the roof.  On the wall behind some chickens is a Pepsi poster of a local boy band all wearing white and shouting something.  A foil mirror is built into it and I become the fifth, haunted, haggard member of 'Thai-sync.  I'm dirty, thin, unshaven, a cut on my arm is infected, and the windburn has left lines around my eyes.  I take my picture into the reflection but all you see is the flash.

It's been weeks now, and with every kilometer I lose another memory of home and lose another destination ahead of me.  I do not arrive or depart anymore, but hover and drift in some current that is invisible, gentle.  Waiting for a freighter, I put down my backpack and light another cigarette, thinking about my friends, why this travel holds me so.  Each day out here something is new to me, something I have to endure, enjoy, embrace.  I miss a life of firsts, and those firsts become more rare as I get older.  Seek new.

I will see you soon.  Much love to you my friends, these photographs are for you.