It has been about three weeks since I left Kerala but my joyful and peaceful memories are still very fresh.  Living in the midst of skyscrapers of Seoul, I occasionally try to break free from all the busy, noisy, and exhausting life of the city and reminisce about the warm and welcoming smiles of Cardamom County staff, endless green of the Periyar Reserve, and the fresh and cool air blowing in from the Western Ghats.

After I arrived in Korea, I could not post here until now, and I want to give a sum up of my experience in Kerala, India as soon as possible.  The photo above, randomly selected from those I took over the summer, is a visual reference point for what I can say now.

I took that photo at Pamba Villa on a rainy day.  I had already taken photos of Cardamom County that were used immediately on the new website, and my job that day was to capture some new images of this backwaters villa. I realized that what works best for that task has to do with perspective.  People, flora, fauna, monsoon rains–those are in the foreground of my memory. The infrastructure to carry out the kind of business I have trained for so far, as a hotelier, matters; but it is not, or at least should not be, the focal point.  It is in the background of my memory, as it should be.  That is one important take away from the summer.  Another photo from the same assignment at Pamba Villa is here:

During my stay in India from early July to mid September I was mostly working at the Cardamom County Resort in Kumily.  With my background of being a student at Cornell University School of Hotel Administration and a Housekeeping Supervisor at the Statler Hotel, my main focus in Kumily was to improve the operational quality of the resort wherever possible.  I made a general observation report with suggestions, and wrote a Housekeeping Standard Operating Procedure, and trained Housekeeping Managers and Supervisors, as well as Huda, a Bangladeshi trainee who will become a manager at the Panigram Resort in Bangladesh.

In addition to my involvement in operation, I also took more than 10,000 pictures. As any photographer knows, with numbers like that there are bound to include some bad pictures, but you can find some of the good ones within the banner images of the blog and most of the posts about Kumily and the Periyar Reserve by Michael, Gourvjit, Martin, Amie, and me. Also I took most of the pictures that are used on the Raxa Collective website  Cardamom County “home” and “the resort” sections.  I wrote 10 posts, which compared to other contributors might seem very little but I hope my posts had offered knowledge about sustainability, wildlife, and conservation that entertained readers.

I am back in Korea now, waiting to join the Korean army. It is mandatory for Korean males to serve in the army, so I am on leave from the school, however until the date I join the army I will try to continue writing posts about sustainability or environment conservation since Korea is one of the leading countries in conservations in Asia.