Shanghai II

Friday, June 17, 2005

Shanghai II

Tiger Balm, mister? It is the mantra of any self-respecting street hawker across Asia. The logo reads...

Heals Wherever It Hurts.

I wonder if it will fix my wounded psyche. My ill-fitting identity. My unmoored consciousness. My accosted solitude. This complete and utter disconnection.

Sitting along Nanjing Road, I can see the new Pacific Century, the long Sino-centric future laid out before me. And to tell you the truth, it’s not that pretty.

A sickly gray fog clings to the city at dawn. The air a moist warm rag smelling of cigarette smoke and diesel, charcoal and sewage. The city's surrealist skyline lies smudged by haze.

Shanghai, China

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INTRODUCTION

For much of my adult life, I have been lucky enough to get paid doing the things I love most. My work as a itinerant travel and wildlife photographer has sent me around the world and across all seven continents.

Over the last two decades, I have had ample opportunity to appreciate the absurdities of life on the road, having once spent 27 memorable hours during my first trip to Kenya digging a bogged safari truck out using only a sauce pan. In addition to my work in Africa, I have traveled extensively in Alaska, Australia, Antarctica and Asia.

I hope to work my way through the rest of the alphabet in a timely fashion.

Each year, I spend five or six months on the road. Along the way, I try to make time to scribble something in my notebooks. More often than not, it’s about whatever mishap has befallen me on any particular day. This collection offers a random sample from those journals, notebooks and emails.