TweetShare  Thinking back on it now, it was so grotesque an extravaganza one could have easily supposed it to be a hoax. The pomp didn’t sit right with anyone who saw it. Along the length of the boulevard and all the way to the presidential gardens the familiar daily grind had morphed into an urgency [...]

TweetShare If anybody has spent their entire lives yearning for privacy, then New York is the place to be. One in every two apartments in Manhattan houses just one person. Having lived here for nearly half a year, it seems as though this city is peopled with strangers who have arrived to find some form [...]

TweetShare The terms ‘start from scratch’ and ‘bottom of the barrel’ are mouthed about this place a lot. But they’re redundant as a flopping fish out of water. Starting from scratch is what you do if the tree house you’re building creeks and tilts when you climb into it; or if the career you thought [...]

Hy Mayerson and Sean Corcoran step onboard an Amtrak train in Miami on the 12th of March for a not so ordinary journey. They travel for 30 hours through 11 states covering a distance of over 1500 miles until it reaches New York. The entire journey will be captured on camera. Hy is an experienced videographer and Sean uses photography as a tool of his trade.

Wiping away the sweat is what it’s all about these days. The Prado thermometer read 39 Celsius yesterday. It makes you develop a twisted kind of affection for the office air conditioning, the kind of deranged affection someone, erm, lacking in air might display. But what we really crave here is a little of Europe’s winter snow. Just for a day, just to spread the love. If they are having it hard taking a chill pill at home, maybe they could check in here for a sobering lesson in meteorological relativism.
About 20 seconds is what it takes in this heat for a shirt to grip your skin. And the hottest month has yet to arrive. That’s February, and the only relief between now and May will be the huge tropical storms that dump torrents of water in split seconds, but in their wake leave a few hours of plausibly stiff air.

TweetShare  The Sky Congo airplane was not just an abandoned and rusting shell, it was also a symbol. To look at it wither away on the tarmac, even before disembarking, the visitor would scarcely find a more potent symbol of the country’s decay. Today there is no sign of either half of it. At the [...]

TweetShare  How could you depict the form of something so shapeless? A country with structure in so far as structure is a tumbling roll of rounded dice. Dark black Africa was elusive enough a thought without having to explain Congo, and all its rusty nuts and bolts. ‘Different’, of course, was the operative word – [...]

TweetShare  Without even feigning to make eye contact, he just came right out with it. “I love you,” he said. “I love you.” Quite frankly, I could have done without the sarcasm. Normally there was no getting round General’s aloofness, or his brazenness. He had come to regard this corner of the property as his [...]

TweetShare  The first thing you notice is the wide fields of green, stretching out across the horizon like a grand quilt. And the history, too. Yes, all the learned about moments in history loom large, attack the senses, embellish all previous misconceptions, and tell you that you’re here, now, sharking in over the gothic churches, [...]

TweetShare  No matter how much you travel it is one of the enduring truths that you can never predict how someone will emerge on the other side. One man’s epiphany is the next man’s implosion; for each formative flirtation somebody somewhere will surely cave in on themselves. Rather than encourage a new perspective, travel will [...]

TweetShare It was just one of those days, when everything you touch turns to slush. One bad turn triggers another, petulant and exasperated you drag yourself further deep into the hole, and swirling ever more chaotically downwards eventually you pull the rope in on yourself. A bad day at the office, or on this day, [...]

TweetShare  Across the border Macondo was the first word that sprang to mind. Gabriel Garcia Marquez conjured a fictional place of magic in One Hundred Years of Solitude, of a time and place nobody could figure. But snaking through the vivid colours of southern Colombia, I could have sworn this was it. Marquez´s place of [...]

TweetShare You would think to be exposed to something should also sharpen your ideas about it. But the more I`ve seen poverty in South America, the more nebulous my feelings as to its causes have become. I have cultivated an attitude noticeably less effusive. For once I am not belligerent, just confused. It struck me [...]

TweetShare  You could call Cajamarca the lull after the storm. It`s a sleepy little city perched 2,700 metres high in the lower Andes, in northern Peru. The rolling green landscape around it, the obvious dearth of tourists and the trickling pace of the town just bring into sharper contrast the mayhem that preceded here. There [...]

TweetShare  A trip so manicured would make any man nauseous. Certainly my patience was steadily draining away. Through some 4,000km due south, west, then north in Argentina I had allowed myself to be shepherded along like a supine little lamb. Puerto Madryn, Bariloche, and now Mendoza – each precise little step of it horribly choreographed. [...]

TweetShare  Jean-Marie finds himself on the defensive back in France all the time. They reckon he, with his company Produits de Palestine, is just “in it for the money”. “Eez difficult for us in France. We are a traditional family. People don’t understand what we make. I went to a village outside Nablus during second [...]

TweetShare We all like to believe that travel brings out our wild side. Ever since Star Trek forever smeared into our conscience the curse of the most infamous split infinitive and its seminal pledge, ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’, human kind has scrambled to the most peculiar of crevices, laying itself [...]