Maputo, Mozambique

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Maputo, Mozambique

Stuck in traffic at the ideological intersection of Avenidas Karl Marx and Ho Chi Minh, I'm trying to follow Mozambique's vague rightward turn into its uncertain future. Post-colonial success story, or just another African playground to the world.

With a cool breeze rustling the palm trees overhead, I finish the last of my calamari and my second Dos M beer. At the next table, a chubby Portuguese expat picks at his teeth and paws a schoolgirl companion, gripping her chin without affection, then rustling her hair like a dog's. I can almost hear her teeth gritting, but she betrays nothing and goes back to idly typing a text message on her cellphone.

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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.