I just returned from a quick four days in the Azores, a Portuguese paradise that has seemed to escape tourism marketing. Nine islands, stranded in the mid-Atlantic, each with distinct character. UNESCO world heritage towns and vineyards, fresh seafood and cheeses, wild flowers everywhere, hot springs, bull fights, crater lakes, Portugal’s highest mountain, and restored old walking paths crisscrossing the terrain.
Some snapshots here.
In this week’s Travel section, a wee review of a very good restaurant in Berkley, Calif. started by very good people committed to the changing the way we grow, source and eat food.
In the March/April 2010 issue of AFAR: a feature about a dessert sushi I created in northern Laos in 2002, its ensuing popularity in the rural village of Muang Ngoi and immortalization in Lonely Planet, and my return last year to reclaim my legacy. For the opening spread, AFAR hired LA editorial photographer Jeff Minton to shoot me in San Francisco with the “falang roll.” Fun gig!
In the November/December 2009 Mother Jones I wrote about Paul Stamets, a charismatic mycologist, and our sailing voyage through the coastal islands off British Columbia looking for a rare mushroom he has found to be highly active against flu viruses, TB and smallpox. Stamets functions as an ambassador for an entire taxonomic kingdom, and has been elevated by some to a kind of cult figure. He’s listened to in a variety of unexpected corners—from the Defense Department and academic research institutions to environmental groups and Hollywood. His intuition of fungi has yielded a range of inventions, including a cellulosic ethanol fuel and a pesticide that kills termites.
http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/11/paul-stamets-mushroom
As I experienced working on this, you may not think of mushrooms the same way again…hope you enjoy!
I wrote and photographed the cover story, on Tajikistan, in the December 20 Travel section of the New York Times. I spent three weeks last August crossing the Pamir Mountains, along the Afghan border, a region known for centuries as the Roof of the World that figured along ancient Silk Road trade routes. Stupendous and fascinating.
The World, a weekday radio news magazine (a co-production of WGBH/Boston, PRI, and the BBC World Service) today aired a segment I recorded from Tristan da Cunha:
http://www.theworld.org/2009/10/28/most-remote-inhabited-island-on-earth/
In the October 2009 issue of National Geographic Adventure Magazine I wrote a feature about ocean engineer Graham Hawkes and the sub that he secretly built with famed aviator and millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett. Fossett died in a plane accident and Hawkes has continued developing his lightweight subs that fly like underwater aircraft. Also includes some of my photography.
Currently (through mid-October) I am in the South Atlantic on the world’s most remote inhabited island, Tristan da Cunha, for National Geographic Traveler Magazine. So remote and isolated that I had to ask a passing ship two months ago to take this message to the Internet.
It’s been a busy summer in movement: Algeria, Barcelona, Ireland, Vietnam, Laos, Tajikistan, Riga and Prague, with several returns back to San Francisco and New York in between.
Here is a story and photographs from the August 2nd, 2009 New York Times Sunday Arts section about a film festival held in a refugee camp in southwest Algeria. I had to take a charter plane from Madrid, and then drive 3 hours across the Sahara Desert with other festival goers to a very dry, hot and isolated camp of 25,000 Saharawi refugees. We were put up in homestays, ate lots of camel, drank lots of tea. The festival was organized by Spanish filmmakers to raise awareness about the conflict over Western Sahara, which the Saharawi people and Morocco have been embroiled in for three decades. A little known issue, a rather sad situation, and deserving of more ink than I was allowed to give it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/movies/02isaa.html
I like undeveloped, natural hot springs. So I wrote about that in the March 20, 2009 NY Times Escapes Section. An ode to soaking (with a naked self-portrait):
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/travel/escapes/20Rituals.html
Iceland may be bankrupt, but at least there’s still pizza.
For the annals of food history, I give you – told now for the first time – the abbreviated story of how pizza first arrived in Iceland:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/15/TRL815SDNC.DTL
I have a cover story in the March 8, 2009 NY Times Travel section about a wonderful cross-country train journey I took last month. I also shot the pictures - The Times has posted 35 of them online - and recorded passenger voices that the paper turned into a nice multimedia feature. Check it out:
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/travel/08amtrak.html
I’ve posted many more photos of the spectacular coast-to-coast trip here:
http://www.worldwebeyes.com/Amtrak/index.html
I have a pair of cover stories on Suriname in the December 7, 2008 San Francisco Chronicle Travel section. I traveled there last year, and spent a month exploring various aspects of the country. I attended a Passover seder in Paramaribo, and an intertribal gathering of Amazonian shamans in a remote forest settlement near the Brazil border. (I wrote for Wired on Amazonian tribes in Suriname and Brazil using GPS and Google Earth to fight for land rights, and a piece on an innovative Western-traditional community healthcare project ran in Utne Reader). I spent a week with monkey researchers in a rainforest preserve and then flew into an isolated airstrip nearby a gold mining boom town near French Guiana. Finally, I visited Maroon communities up the Suriname river.
Here are the Chronicle stories:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/07/TRCR13EL21.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/07/TRCR13EL21.DTL
The Chicago Sun-Times on Sunday, November 16 ran my photo from the Obama home in Kenya as the entire front page of a special commemorative (and collectors) issue, which included a farewell letter from (Senator) Barack to the people of Illinois.
I just returned from a month-long trip to Kenya. watched and celebrated the election last week with the Obama Family, in Kenya.
Barack’s victory reverberated into his ancestral home village of Kogelo at dawn local time, heralded by crowing roosters and then declared in chorus by members of his extended family who danced around their modest homestead, chanting in their tribal tongue, “Our son / has won! Our son / has won!”
Below are articles I filed for Slate and U.S. News and World Report (and the Chicago Sun-Times) on Obamamania in Kenya and what it now means to be an Obama in that country. But the stories say nothing about how blown my mind was last Wednesday, sitting in the homestead where Barack’s father and grandfather are buried, while his sisters, brothers and numerous relatives celebrated the unlikeliest of moments in their family’s history.
In Dreams From My Father, Barack wrote about the impact of his first visit there, in 1988: “I saw that my life in America – the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago – all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away…. I felt the circle finally close.”
“That’s it, man,” Barack’s half brother Malik said to me. “Now we can walk around and feel free. Really free.”
As Barack delivered his acceptance speech in Chicago, digesting the steak his family had reportedly dined on earlier in the evening, his family in Kenya prepared to slaughter a bull. Later, as we sat together in plastic lawn chairs - watching elder women sashay to African beats and chop carrots, and villagers parade through the homestead shaking branches and chanting - his uncle Said told me: “It wasn’t until the speech that I realized what had happened, that we came to terms with what we knew was possible all along. What I saw was a man who could call attention to the world - who could say, ‘No, this is not how things should be, we should do it another way.’ Then I became deeply moved.”
Before I left the home and this sleepy village suddenly etched onto the world map, I talked with Auma, one of the sisters Barack acknowledged in the speech. “You heard what he said,” she told me. “He can’t do it alone. He needs you, too. This is your opportunity - take advantage of it. This is your time.”
The U.S. Election/Obama visit was just one part of my month-long journey through many aspects of Kenya. For more pictures of Obamamania, of African wildlife, of multinational refugees living at the Kakuma Camp along the Sudan border and Turkana tribespeople inflicted with AIDS, check out the gallery here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/worldwideeyes/Kenya#
Slate article: http://www.slate.com/id/2203232/
Frankly, upon hearing about “shark and stingray feeding” I imagined some Polynesian marine park where tourists dangle bait off the side of a boat while oooing and aaaing at a safe distance from the fearsome creatures. Shark and ray feeding in Bora Bora is nothing of the sort. At first the water color itself had me oooing, a seemingly artificial hue of pale blue so brilliant and with visibility so transparent that in the shallow water the floppy stingrays clearly appeared like freaky alien watercrafts gliding across the white sand. The boat anchored around them and my guide hopped out with a bucket of small dead fish. I followed, with snorkels on head. His tossed bait soon attracted a feeding frenzy: suddenly a dozen white gulls were flapping above us, while the ominous dorsal fins of as many prowling sharks clustered on the surface. The stingrays and schools of striped yellow fish circled in the midst. It was like being fully immersed in an aquarium exhibit, the glass wall nonexistent. Things then got even wilder. With bait in my hand, the fish and six-foot-long stingrays rushed into me – the sharks and birds disappeared - slimy bodies now all around, flopping, jostling, elevating high above the water, the rays’ ugly sucker mouths puckering up to my sunburned face. Apparently the creatures are habituated to visitors and unlikely to sting – good to know. The bombardment had me drunk on some cocktail of adrenaline and giddiness – woahing and oh-my-goding, while also cursing and laughing, as if being harassed by bees while a puppy dog licked my face.
