Well, I’ve been home a full week now and I honestly think it took that long to get over another case of serious jet lag. Flying back from East Africa is no joke, and adding another full day to the front end of last weekend’s travel itinerary made it all even more difficult. The airline (Turkish Airlines) offers transiting passengers a hotel room if their layovers in Istanbul were more than 12 hours, so it was great to finally put my head down in a nice, comfortable room near Ataturk Airport on Sunday morning. You see flights originating in the East usually depart past midnight, and considering I’d left the coast Friday evening on an overnight bus (below left) back to the capital, Nairobi – which entailed another 8+ hour ride, I was totally beat. (Yea, those are mechanics fixing a flat on my bus at 3AM at the halfway point rest stop!) By the time we’d arrived back in Nairobi on Saturday morning, did some laundry by hand, had a decent lunch and started packing, it was nearly time to head to the airport, for the first of two long haul flights. Not to mention arriving back home into JFK on Monday evening and then right back to work the following evening. It
must’ve taken 4 or 5 days for my body to adjust to the time differences and finally get into a regular sleep routine. Although I’d initially set out to try and get up into the Somali refugee camps in northeast Kenya, as well as search out a few other stories, logistics and scheduling just didn’t allow for all I’d hope to accomplish. Tack onto those issues, the price of fuel, finding reliable drivers and secondary fixers, and before I knew it, I was into my second week of the trip. The only thing left to do for my few remaining 
days in country was to head down to the coast and explore familiar beach towns like Mombasa (above), Malindi,and a very peaceful beachfront area at Watamu Beach in Gede (right) on my last official day in Kenya last Friday. Swimming in the calming, warm waters of the Indian Ocean on that day really took a lot of the stresses away. It was all nearly perfect for those few moments on the white sands of East Africa…
in the Old Town neighborhood of the city faded really fast. In fact, 
my room was right in the glide path on final approach into Ataturk Airport, so I did manage to make a few generic aircraft images (left), and there were a few Bedouin women (right) roaming along a running stream within sight of my modest room as well. Pop on the 300mm and the 1.4X tele-extender and I was back in business for the afternoon, well at least until I collapsed for the night...
Chet Gordon resides in the lower Hudson Valley region of New York. A photojournalist for more than 25 years, he recently worked as Westchester Magazine's first photo editor, and previously was a staff photographer at four NYC metro area newspapers. He was also a photo editor at the NY Daily News for 5 years. His work has appeared in The New York Times, International Herald-Tribune, USA Today, MailOnline (UK), Army Times, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Popular Photography magazines, among others. He is a career member of the National Press Photographer’s Association (NPPA), and a former board member of the NY Press Photographer’s Association (NYPPA). He served honorably as a U.S. Marine in the mid-1980's, including 2+ years stationed on Okinawa, Japan, and throughout Southeast Asia. A longtime volunteer and travel enthusiast, he accompanies several humanitarian aid clients on their international disaster relief and medical missions. Since 1997, he's worked in several African countries, the Middle East, Central and South America, Eastern Europe, as well as Afghanistan, Haiti, the Russian Federation, and Thailand. He routinely mentors young photographers looking to break into the industry and vacations in Bermuda and Kenya.
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