Mary Bartnikowski Photography

Welcome :)

Author, professional photographer, mother, kundalina yoga teacher, surfer, global citizen, and creative motivator. Mary has led programs at Stanford, Intel, Apple and worldwide for humanitarian foundations, photo enthusiasts, and international travelers. Mary has explored 27 countries on 4 continents, and has just released her 3rd book online chronicling her adventures and informing independent travelers on how to travel solo, what to do, and how to explore our world with little more than a language dictionary and a gale force of gumption. Or just the gumption.

In the last 5 years, Mary has...

photographed the Dalai Lama, surfed in Peru and Ecuador, been around the world twice by train, plane, boat, motorbike, bus, and rickshaw, ridden elephants bareback in Nepal and showed Buddhist nuns in Kathmandu how to do kundalini yoga, taught children and elders English in Colombia, lived in an ashram in India and taught yoga, gazed at the third highest mountain in the world in Sikkim but did not hike it, explored the Nubra Valley in Ladakh while sandwiched in a share jeep driving over the highest drivable pass in the world at 18,000 feet, scuba dived in Grand Cayman, motor biked in Thailand, crossed the border of Burma twice to extend her Thai visa, taught photography to Sikh students in Amritsar, photographed the golden temple at 3am, celebrated Kunigan a holy day in Bali, played in the Holi festival in India, and bathed in the Ganges river.

Mary has also . . .

Tangoed in Buenos Aires, gotten drenched by the biggest waterfall in the world between Argentina and Brazil, bought her first bikini at age 50, begged a bus driver to let her get off the bus in Bolivia so she could relieve herself, fed abandoned people their lunch and helped to raise money for them through writing and photography, taught photography to travelers in India, Bali, Thailand, USA, Nepal, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico, taught the staff of the Nepal Youth Foundation how to take great photos, meditated in holy caves in Sikkim and Ladakh, lived in a Buddhist temple in Thailand where no one spoke English but she used the universal religion of laughter, tackled the Thai language (and lost), climbed Picchu peak in Machu Picchu, photographed lightning in the middle of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, floated down the Mekong River on a slow boat in Laos and be-friended sea turtles in Mexico.