Half Moon Island, Svalbard, Norway

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Half Moon Island, Svalbard, Norway

It was well past midnight, but at 79° north, the sun only skims the horizon. Sailing under gloomy skies toward the old trapping station on Half Moon Island, Heinrich and I spotted something in the water. He slowed the boat and a young polar bear swam towards us for a closer look.

The bear was clearly curious, and not much put off by the ruckus set off as we scrambled for position. I dropped down into the Zodiac, watching as he swam closer. And closer. And closer. His face filled the viewfinder, and I started getting nervous. At ten feet, I slowly sat up and murmured something like, “nice bear....good bear...easy bear...”

That was as close as he came, at least to me. He dog-paddled over to a nearby iceberg, scrambled up to a perch where he could inspect the boat at his leisure.

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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.