now that i have reached my goal everything has become divine and wonderful for me. cape town is a paradise of antique book stalls, beautiful cafes, lovely leather couches, fantastic restaurants and comfortable scenarios of every order, all of which are housed in towering and crumbling colonial structures of dutch and british origin, wrapped by delicate brass ornament and painted fading pastel shades with in stone on the facade is marked the original year, 1926, 1895, 1802... or even earlier. the wind comes off the sea and cuts through town fiercely, taking along with it any ill pollution that might otherwise linger. the air is crisp and refreshing. farther west, along the coast towards durban and north from there into the southern most tip of mozambique, going north into the northern most tip and then ... read more

onwards! yesterday morning once the freeze had lifted from the ground i lit my motorcycle up and banged west, buckling through durban, popping, backfiring and wobbling on blown bearings, worn out bushings and a loose chain. the bike has lost metal somewhere, the chain can become no tighter and has resigned to derail over any slight bump of the road, causing me to shutter to a halt and have to toil in the oil and grease to spin it back on to the rusty gear. even on the freeway, the horrid winding freeways of south africa that seem to twist through the entire country and overlap the small country roads, in south africa you must take the freeway because there are only freeways. my motor now only wishes to ride eighty kilometers an hour, down hill, ... read more

i've driven like a fiend straight down, across, through and around and now out my hotel window is shining, strange maputo. it's a city that is still learning how to be a city, the way that africans in general seem to be learning how to be people, people from the television. if there was never a television imported to africa these africans would not know about wearing their hats backwards, or low over their eyes, or about walking with a swing step, or about building and living in cement. everyone says it who has come here, that the problem is wherever the west goes, along with it goes the problems of the west. the question is if the original problems of africa are worse than our replacement problems. the original problems... disease, famine, poverty... they can ... read more

hello! i'm sorry to not have written but there is really no computers at all let alone internet, it is dirt and mud and dirt some more. i am o.k. in a strange way, the last couple of days have been a mix. mozambique is a true frontier. the world spins around and around and the africans here, on the east coast, spin with it. they scream at each other and laugh with each other and cry and jump around all at once and they are beautiful people. from the top of mozambique there is an endless stretch of mud and dirt they call a road through africa wildland that will take you if you wish all the way down to the end of the continent. the road is strewn with dead baboons for roadkill and ... read more

i am deep south. the world has changed now from loose tree scapes and lonely long low shrub plains into the Africa you can imagine before having been, the one from movies and books. wide fields of incredible tall yellow grass in the wind with wild twisting trees poking up and lending shade to those old rusty bicycles and their rusty riders that take long breaks from the angry African sun. the road is thin and cuts to and fro and over subtle hills through the land past mud villages thatched with the very same tall yellow grass, but dried into shimmering light brown and bound in small bunches, tied down by coconut husk rope. they don't run any business from their villages in the south, they keep a few goats and chickens about for their ... read more