Travels with Walter

Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, longtime Collinsville resident, artist and teacher, Walter Kendra often felt physically isolated. However, in his imagination, he always had a sense of what was just beyond the mountain ridges of his home on the family’s farm.

“I had so many interests that fed and freed my imagination,” recalled Kendra fondly. He found music to be one of those interests that allowed him to travel beyond the fields of the farm. “I was also intrigued by the images and lettering of stamps, which I collected, and couldn’t get enough of geography, map making and history in school.”

As a child, Kendra also indulged his passion for photography. He took pictures of what he knew best: the crops during the changing seasons; the corn stubble in the snow; the winter light reflecting on the land; the trees and hedge rows.

His many boyhood hobbies continued to nourish a desire to know more about different languages, cultures, people, animals and habitats. By the time he was 10 years old, Kendra had already started venturing out, with his older brother, on camping trips. Over the next few years, they would travel and camp all over New England, parts of Canada and Virginia.

Kendra’s childhood fantasies of adventure and exploration were driven, in part, by several favorite books which made major impressions on him. Kendra still has the original copies of the travel series “River Plate Republics: Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay; Kon Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 explorations of the Pacific and Polynesian Islands on a raft; and Silk Roads, the history of how Asian and European cultures, philosophies, religions, spices and silk were forever linked together.

As a young art instructor, Kendra continued to indulge his curiosity about the world by traveling through it. Whether it was cross country to bike in Yellowstone, climbing mountains in Wyoming or traveling south to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico to spend the summer studying painting, pottery and Spanish history in 1958, his longing to explore never abated. “This sense of adventure permeates my soul. I’m nurtured by that,” observed Kendra.    

In 1964, during his first trip to Australia with his partner, the late Maxwell Shepherd, they traveled back through Southeast Asia. There was one place they had wanted to visit, but were unable to fit into their itinerary; the 12th century temple, Angkor Wat, in Cambodia.

Nearly five decades later, and after many travels throughout the world, Kendra would finally make it back to Angkor Wat, during a five-country tour of Southeast Asia in January/2011. Some of what he would see and experience on this trip would be beyond even his imagination. 

Coming Tomorrow: Thailand, Burma, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.