Storm clouds gather and rain is falling in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.
Photo Courtesy of Richard Yelen
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‘I was in the hotel on the second floor (in Manila),” Richard Yelen said. ‘I looked out and that was the view.’
Photo Courtesy of Richard Yelen
The orange sky over Tanzania, the turquoise waters of Seychelles, the pair of lions hanging around an air strip at the Masai Mara Preserve in Kenya — they’re just a few of the thousands of images Richard Yelen of Kingston has captured during his world travels.
On a trip to Bora Bora last month he shot a photo of a strip of beach sandwiched between a resort pool and the lagoon beyond — and CBS travel editor and author Peter Greenberg chose to post it on his blog as “Photo of the Week.”
Yelen is pleased by the recognition, but he’s even more pleased with the chance to share the stories of decades of adventures.
“Some people like to play golf,” he said, comparing hobbies. “I love travel.”
“I enjoy the planning of it, deciding how I’ll get there and where I’ll stay,” he said. After he’s enjoyed a trip, he added, “I enjoy reminiscing about it.”
Do you want to do some traveling yourself? Yelen recommends the West End of London for culture, the Sydney Opera House for live entertainment, Italy for gelato and pasta and, for sheer natural beauty, places as farflung as New Zealand and Vietnam.
He’s brought back quirky little stories, too, such as the one about the waiter in Barcelona who refused to bring butter to the table. “He brought bread and oil and I said, ‘Will you bring me some butter?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Do you have butter?’ He said, ‘Yes, but we do not serve butter with bread in Spain’.”
So far, Yelen has visited all 50 United States, and 108 of the 195 countries in the world. “Bora Bora doesn’t count, because it’s not a sovereign nation. It’s part of French Polynesia,” he said of his recent tropical trip.
Yelen traces the bite of the travel bug to his teen years, when he traveled to Canada, with a busload of other students who left from the Jewish Community Center in Wilkes-Barre.
Over the years, his late sister, Susan Yelen, would often ask him where he’d like to go for his birthday — and together they explored such places as Laos, Cambodia, Guatemala, Romania and Morocco.
In Morocco, they rode camels. “It’s a hard ride,” Yelen recalled with a laugh. “No shock absorbers.”
In Romania, they were introduced to a driver willing to take them to Dracula’s castle. At first, Yelen was a little dismayed to realize the driver didn’t speak English. But then his sister, “within about 10 minutes,” was conversing in Romanian with the driver. “It’s a Romance language,” he said. “She gave the credit to her Latin studies at Wyoming Seminary.”
There have been poignant, personal discoveries, too — as when the siblings explored the small town in Lithuania where their grandparents had lived, and a tour guide pointed out the one-time synagogue, identifiable by a Star of David in the concrete.
The Jewish population was gone, the tour guide said, and the building had been turned into a community center, but it likely had been the place where their grandparents would have worshipped.
Yelen’s sister passed away about five years ago, but he doesn’t let that stop him from seeing more and more places. “My attitude is, if you can do it, do it.”
In the 1990s Richard Yelen was one of several people quoted in a New York Times story about accumulating frequent flyer miles. He’d visit certain restaurants … he’d use a credit card to buy postage stamps … another person in the story even charged the dental bill for her root canal work to a credit card, all to earn discounted travel.
“We were doing it before it was fashionable,” Yelen said, offering the tips of using one major hotel chain and one credit card to maximize your rewards.
Ask Yelen if he’s ever felt unsafe during his travels, and he’ll tell you how he crossed the border from the country of Georgia into Azerbaijan, just to get his passport stamped. “Why so many countries?” an official asked suspiciously. “What were you doing in Armenia?”
“I didn’t realize Armenia and Azerbaijan had been fighting,” Yelen said, noting the official finally stamped his passport and he rushed back over the bridge toward the place where his driver had left him.
He’d rather reflect on the happier memories — the polite way people in Japan line up to get on a subway, for example, as opposed to the frantic rush he’s experienced in New York City, or the woman on a bus in Honolulu, who was wearing colorful leis. He asked if he could shoot her photo and she asked if he would share it with her. When he said, yes, “she had the biggest smile. I made her day, and she made mine.”
He’s also experienced the thrill of discovery, visiting a small country such as Slovenia “about the size of New Jersey,” and realizing “how beautiful it is, with the Alps on one side and the Mediterranean on the other.”
After working in media and entertainment strategy and marketing and living in such places as Los Angeles and Denver, Yelen is retired and once again living in the Wyoming Valley, where he grew up. That means he has even more time to travel. Where will he go next?
“I’ve never been on an inaugural flight before,” he said with a grin, noting that United Airlines is establishing a flight from Newark to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, and he will be one of the first passengers in June.