I'm Richard Cain: designer, author and photographer for the websites Ethnic Minorities of Northern Vietnam and Global Wanderings. I've always loved travelling and photography and so the websites grew out of my desire to share my photographs with family and friends back in the UK while I was away working for the British Council (in Sri Lanka, Egypt, Vietnam, Tunisia, Thailand and as of September 2007, Jordan.
In 2001, I bought my first computer cobbled together in a back street in Hanoi. From there I picked up copies of Photoshop (photo editing software) and Dreamweaver (Web design software) and the rest is history.
I loved Vietnam, especially motorbiking up into the mountains of the far north and taking photos of the amazing minority women. I was fascinated by the traditional clothing still worn by the majority but frustrated by the lack of information about the area and the various minorities. I therefore decided to set up my own website. Spurred on by the success of the Ethnic Minorities site I uploaded further photos of my travels and collated them into the website globalwanderings. The most comprehensive coverage is that of Thailand (there are 20 separate pages) where I lived between 2005-2007. I'm now in Jordan so most of the latest pages are from the Middle East. New pages go up every month. I also occasionally spend some time writing travelogues for IGOUGO a companion site for the well known travel guide publisher the Rough Guides.
I hope you enjoy the sites and find them easy to navigate around - have a look at some of my particular favourite pages; Bagan, Myanmar; Sulawesi, Indonesia; the Dao page from Ethnic Minorities and Eritrea.
In addition to wesite design, I'm also very interested in podcasting and with my partner Jackie McAvoy, who is a writer for Macmillan Education, we have created the site www.podcastsinenglish.com It's designed for teachers and learners of English as a second language but I hope most people will find something of interest or fun in it. In addition to podcasts there are videos and plenty of other bits and pieces.
If you have any comments, suggestions or questions, I'd love to hear from you. I can be contacted at: richard@globalwanderings.co.uk
Enjoy the site!
