Luke Melia: BootsnAll Photojournalist

Luke Melia
BootsnAll Photojournalist

Luke with local kids in a village in the mountains of Laos near Muang Ngoi.

Luke’s dad rode freight trains across the U.S. in the late 60s/early 70s. Once, he had a gun pulled on him as he groggily woke from a sound but illegal sleep in a car in a New Mexico freight yard. Later, his folks settled down and opened up the first natural food store on Long Island in New York. Luke was born that same year.

Luke caught on to his entrepreneurial heritage young, giving computer lessons during high school and starting a software company while in college. It took a college girlfriend to awaken his wanderlust genes, though. After visiting Meeta in Rajasthan, India at the tail end of her study abroad program, he was hooked.

A few years later, he conquered his workaholic tendencies and ditched everything to live with Meeta in Bangalore, India for six months. The BootnAll founders happened upon him answering a post on Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree, and he wrote a Guide to Bangalore.

His mom and aunt and 75-year-old grandmother came to visit, and he dragged them through Delhi, Agra, Rajasthan, Kerala and Bangalore, on overnight trains, planes, rickshaws, backwater river boats, and hired cars whose drivers praised their “good brakes, good horn, and good luck”. He traveled on his own and with friends extensively through South India and spent a bit of time in Sri Lanka. Having traveled across the Atlantic to get to India, he and Meeta decided to make the trip a full circle, and traveled through Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Singapore on their way to New York.

Luke’s now a web developer in New York City, and recently managed to sneak off on a month-long paid vacation to Singapore, Laos and Thailand. He wrote down a few good stories on BootsnAll from that trip, too. See the sidebar for links.

Aside from traveling, Luke’s into guitar, volleyball, theater, rollerblading, writing, reading, web development, eating brown rice and tofu, and generally living as passionate a life as he can. Drop by lukemelia.com and check out the travel section of the site or his journal.

Luke asked us to mention that he’s been shown an incredible amount of generosity as he’s traveled, and would be glad for the chance to share some of his own with visitors to New York City. Drop him a line if you’re going to be a tourist in the Big Apple. And if you arrive via the freight yards, he’ll understand.

Click on his name below for links to all of Luke’s BootsnAll articles. Also feel free to email him at luke@lukemelia.com.

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