A Journey Called Life …

Here they breathed. There they laughed for a while.

Here they walked. There they had many meetings, fear, happy stories.

Bodie is fabulous.

All those words ran through my mind as we kept going into the town.

After a long walk there our three cameras were not tired for a second. Our feet, eyes were not tired too.

There was dust, dirt, over-flowing. Our car was sleepy after a 10 miles long drive without signs. And don’t ask about the very next unpaved 3 miles. We and our car survived the trauma and dust. I had to wash all foot-wears, backpacks and had to get the car washed the very next day.

“What is bodie?” everyone asked us, the night before our trip.

It’s weird that human beings move forward and don’t look back, don’t search for residues that hide beneath dust. What was once so present now sits behind and is called “history“.

I’m a complete national-geographic-and-discovery-documentary fan. If I didn’t have certain goals and aspirations, I would have been in amazon forests now, with a camera, of course. I have watched so many documentaries on ghost towns, and Bodie stood out always.

Ghost towns were in my travel list for a long time. I have seen many old historical places with present quirks but never saw a completely abandoned town with history. Bodie is one of the most beautifully preserved ghost towns in whole America. And it’s photographer’s paradise. A place where you can photograph the past without riding the time machine. And if you’re lucky, you might be the only one hugging the history there.

By 1879, the population of Bodie was close to 7000. There were around 1100 buildings, stamp mills, bank, fire companies, rail road. By 1920, the population declined to 120. In 1962, Bodie became Bodie State Historic Park.

To read more about Bodie, click here.