Escape from Nouakchott, a poem I just realized it’s April Fool’s Day. I have no one to tell. I rode back to Nouakchott on the back of a truck. I introduced Malcom, the Canadian, to the fast talking Boston/Mauritanian millionaire Sidi Boya. He’s been hired on to work on the presidential elections. I’ve taken to wearing gris gris. The Auberge erupted in madness. Frusturated marriage proposals. Mohammad was crushed, I was fearing for his health. Two French Senegalese attacked a Frenchman in the morning, wielding tire irons. I bought two bottles of whiskey [View Full Entry]

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Nouakchott, Mauritania - The southern edge of the Sahara. The sands and the scrubs, the chaos and nonsensical logic, the diaspora of hungry souls coming to a hopeless place looking for opportunity. The slums of sand and fermenting piles of garbage and animals that looks like Bombay to the cultureless nouvelle riche mansions of cheap fabrication reminescent of a suburb of San Diego. Either way the sand gets in your food. What is this place? What am I doing here? This screed is not a guidebook; it's not a portrait of a country. Just a few simple words. I've begun [View Full Entry]

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desert kingdom orientation Mauritania, for those who don’t know (and I know many outside do not) is a large, mostly unpopulated country on the West Coast of Africa. It hovers like a pause, a broken sentence, in between Arab Morocco and Black Senegal. It is here that the unrelenting Sahara gives way into the scrubby Sahel, where Orthodox Islam confronts mystic Marabout brotherhoods, where the Oud is replaced with the Djembe, Arabic is replaced with Wolof, and paved streets crumble into sand expressways. There’s 3 million people in Mauritania, and probably 2 million in the capita [View Full Entry]

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A blistery wind front roars through the town, and the sky is blotted out with clouds of orange and grey. One could call it a dust storm, but any storm in the Sahara is worthy of that title. The wind merely lifts all the particulate that's always present into frenzy. Maybe you just don't see it until the storm. The landmass of Western Sahara is a region sparsely populated but largely contested. This is nothing new, and is evident even by the language spoken here. The dialect is known as Hassaniya Arabic, and only has about 3 million speakers. Its origin [View Full Entry]

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It's the end of November, two days after Thanksgiving. What herein follows is a much delayed and succinct transcription of travels since last updating: (After arriving in America, I floundered about in the Northwest a bit, before tying my shoes and hitching Eastward to New York City. Here, I ended up living for a year, in BedStuy, Brooklyn, surrounded by a great number of even greater people. In October, I flew to Paris, for a two week crash course in French society. Following the sun, I traveled South, hitching, walking, camping, blessing and cursing across the French and Spanish count [View Full Entry]

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Manaus, AM - In what is probably my last entry, I find myself, once again, pounding out words in an internet café. Travel weary, I now await my flight to return to the states, to the city of my birth, to another great unknown (an excellent opportunity to wax philosophically about life, changes, and the future). We arrive into Manaus, as usual, by riverboat. While the concept of travelling down the Amazon River may sound exciting, it is relatively relative (perhaps a native Amazonian would sense the same excitement of traveling by Greyhound bus down I-5) and loses it's appeal quickly, [View Full Entry]

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The city of Anapu lies rougly 140km east of the river Xingú along the Transamazonic Highway. The city is literally spread out along the road, the commerce and hotels scattered over a paved section of the infamous dirt highway that stretches across the Amazon. There are roughly 20,000 people living here; almost everyone is from somewhere else. Thirty years ago, the city was no more then a small villa - the highway in it's infancy. To understand the region of Transamazonia it's necessary to step back some 40 years. In the 1970's, the military government began a project to colonize and [View Full Entry]

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In Belém, I've booked a hotel straight out the Lonely Planet guidebook. It's justly full of tourists from every corner of the world that all speak English. The hotel staff is like the Adam's family, but if they were really indescrivable monsters and not family friendly comedians with a laugh track: the old woman, a stout ball of anger the shape of a stool; her grey haired giant son lurks clad only in a purple towel, amphibiatically darting in and out of the shower. As one of the few bilingual, I get the chance to be a bridge between the [View Full Entry]

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A quick update of the following months from which I seemingly vanished: I leave Pernambuco and head North into Paraíba, traveling through small dusty towns of the deep interior and into the state of Ceará. Greeted as a curiousity, as always I recieve loads of stories about whatever person from another country once passed through. I never once meet another foreigner or tourist. I make a beeline to Fortaleza and pass a week scoping out the city before recieving my parents. We pass a week along the coast, experiencing the coastal strip of tall dunes and one church towns and a [View Full Entry]

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The Northeast of Brazil is known for it´s beaches - white sand, swaying coconut palms, blue-green water, massive dunes, giant capital cities of festivals and sleeping fishing villages. But this is merely the crust. The mass of the Northeast begins only a few hundred kilometers inland; as you pass, the vibrant green of the coastal strip fades, the rolling hills transformed into rocky crags. In places, the horizon stretches indefinitely, a flat landscape of twisted shrub and cacti in wide variety. There is little water here. Occassionally one sees a small lake or a muddy puddle. More often it is [View Full Entry]

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