A Traveller’s Eye, A Thinker’s Heart
I like to tell stories. I like to take photos.
And I like to share them. Enjoy.
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THE STOPPING PLACE
Kuala Besut and Pulau Perhentian – February 1978 I lay on the floor of Jaafar’s house with a map of Malaysia spread out in front of me, and let my eye wander north. Jaafar took in travellers at his home, half a kilometre back in the jungle behind the fishing village of Beserah – no…
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THREE EMPIRES, ONE AFTERNOON
Malacca, Malaysia – 17 February 1978 Malacca felt like a different country. Kuala Lumpur was concrete and traffic and the muezzin’s call; Malacca was crumbling laterite and Dutch gravestones going soft in the rain. I found St Paul’s first – walls without a roof, the sea showing clean through empty window frames where glass had…
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THE YEAR OF THE HORSE
Kuantan and Beserah – 3–8 February 1978 The yellow book did it. Tony Wheeler’s South-East Asia on a Shoestring – the traveller’s bible, already dog-eared and coming apart at the spine – beckoned me to the east coast, away from the ordered calm of the Universiti of Malaya campus in Kuala Lumpur and toward what…
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AMERICA TURNS 250. BUT MY FAMILY’S REVOLUTION BEGAN IN 1774
In 1774, at the age of 47, my fifth great-grandfather, James Ward, went to war. And never came home. Trouble had been building along the western frontier of the British colonies in America. Under the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the Iroquois had signed away lands south of the Ohio River – present-day West Virginia…
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TARZAN NEVER MADE IT TO THIS JUNGLE. BUT I DID.
My earliest perception of a jungle came from the old Tarzan movies – Johnny Weissmuller re-runs, then all the other bare-chested muscular guys who followed on the big screen and television. I gathered that jungles were full of swinging vines, chimps and elephants. I didn’t know at the time that those “jungles” were mostly Hollywood…
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A BOWL THAT BROUGHT A SON BACK
The room in Naluwoli was full of women as we entered – babies on hips and laps, a lively chatter amongst mothers. My colleague Scott Christiansen and I were in Uganda to document the amaranth value chain research conducted by the World Vegetable Center with support from the Crop Trust’s BOLDER project. We wanted to…
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SEKAKO
While in Uganda, I repeatedly asked our host partner, Moses Owori, for the word ‘smile’ in Lusoga. ‘Sekako’, he told me. Over and over … I’d hear it but spit something different out of my mouth: ‘Sikayo’ … ‘Sickaku’ … ‘Sykuku’. A simple three syllables but I mangled it every time. I was hopeless. But…
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DORA AND THE FIERCE VOLUNTEER
Some crops don’t wait to be planted. They arrive uninvited, establish themselves in the gaps between everything else and dare you to ignore them. They just show up – fierce, thorny and needing nothing from anyone. Smart farmers don’t ignore them. They understand, perhaps better than anyone, that you can reap where you did not…
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THE PUMPKIN PROCESSOR
When our host and partner Moses Owori said our first of seven visits on the day would be with a “pumpkin processor,” I immediately began visualizing my photo opportunities. I saw workers in white coats and white clogs and hairnets checking stainless steel vats in a tidy factory. So when our Land Cruiser powered down…
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