Melissa Vinitsky: BootsnAll Photojournalist

Melissa Vinitsky

Melissa Vinitsky’s love for travelling began when she was three months old, on her first of many annual voyages to Israel, home to her father’s family. At 16 she left San Francisco to be an exchange student to France, living in a small town in Brittany. She returned to France three years later, this time to Paris to study French at the Sorbonne.

After she graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in International Relations, Melissa set off on the requisite two month backpacking tour of Europe, accompanied by two other friends. Despite being chased by perverted garbage men in Istanbul, her love for the Middle East led her to pursue her masters in Arab Studies at Georgetown University. Following the mantra that no education is complete without first-hand experience, Melissa took an “extended” field trip to the region, where thankfully she was able to avoid all Turkish garbage men this time, only to learn that teenage Egyptian boys were just as bad.

Back in Washington, DC, Melissa worked for a defense consulting firm, a job she would find very hard to explain to other travellers and locals overseas. She found it easiest to sum it up this way – “we don’t build bombs, just the Pentagon’s foreign policy.”

After two years behind a computer, she could no longer resist the travel bug which seemed to have firmly planted itself in her soul. She ditched the desk job and set off on a five month journey which would take her from the high desert in Chile, where her younger sister was an exchange student, to the deserts, mountains, and seas of North Africa and Europe.

Through her travels she has come to realize that:

1) she functions much better in hot weather, hence her love affair with the Mediterranean;

2) she can do anything she sets her mind to (except maybe bargain with a Berber man for a good price on a carpet); and
3) no feeling compares to the freedom one has when travelling on one’s own.

The quote which most inspires her to travel, and one she carries with her on her journeys, is by Jack Kerouac from On the Road:

“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too huge world vaulting us, and its good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

Melissa plans to return to California and hopes she can make a living from her writing.

Feel free to email Melissa at melissa_vinitsky@yahoo.com. Also look below for links to all of Melissa’s BootsnAll articles.

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