Self portrait

Manchester

I'm in Manchester in the UK this week. What a change after the 48 degree heat of the Middle East. The UK has just had the highest rainfall since records were kept. It's freezing cold, pissing with rain and the wind is howling. A normal summer day here in the UK i gather.

I've never been in this part of the UK. Manchester is a very industrial city. It played a huge part in the Industrial Revolution in the 1800's. Parts of the city are very run dowm, grimy, and definitely not somewhere to walk alone late at night. but there is a revival. The old factories along the canals, long empty, are being refurbished and sold off as upmarket lofts and apartments. It's an expensive place - a two bedroom apartment (average place) goes for $700,000.

The UK has a sense of history i do not find in the US or Dubai. The pic I took of one of the old railway bridges. The bridge is over 200 years old, and still in us every day. The house? The local guy i was with thought 250 to 400 years. His own house is over 600 years old. and still standing.

Tired

Fuckit, I never get sick. The last time I was sick was about 8 years ago, and that was malaria. There’s a flu doing the rounds here, and it’s really kak being sick when it’s 45 degrees outside. And on top of all that half of my snr managers are on leave so I couldn’t afford to lie in bed and feel sorry for myself. This time of the year is known as the lemming run – all the expats go home to escape the heat. Traditionally the men go home for a month, but the wives stay in the holiday homes for the whole of the summer. I’m going for 3 weeks, and so is the rest of the family. Imagine just how much a mom and two kids can spend if left alone at the waterfront in CT – for three months! Hehe, almost forgot, I’m going to the UK next week on business. But it’s visiting a mining exhibition, so it’s not exactly hard work. So my holiday is a bit longer than theirs… :

This reminds me of me

She came to me one morning
One lonely sunday morning
Her long hair flowing
In the midwinter wind
I know not how she found me
For in darkness I was walking
And destruction lay around me
From a fight I could not win
Ah ah ah ...

She asked me name my foe then
I said the need within some men
To fight and kill their brothers
Without thought of love or god
And I begged her give me horses
To trample down my enemies
So eager was my passion
To devour this waste of life
Ah ah ah ...

But she wouldnt think of battle that
Reduces men to animals
So easy to begin
And yet impossible to end
For shes the mother of our men
Who counselled me so wisely then
I feared to walk alone again
And asked if she would stay
Ah ah ah ...

Oh lady lend your hand outright
And let me rest here at your side
Have faith and trust
In peace she said
And filled my heart with life
There is no strength in numbers
Have no such misconception
But when you need me
Be assured I wont be far away
Ah ah ah ...

Thus having spoke she turned away
And though I found no words to say
I stood and watched until I saw
Her black coat disappear
My labour is no easier
But now I know Im not alone
I find new heart each time
I think upon that windy day
And if one day she comes to you
Drink deeply from her words so wise
Take courage from her
As your prize
And say hello from me
Ah ah ah ...

Orgasms in public

This hypnotists lets people have an orgasm on stage - just by touching their hand. There are a number of similar clips available online. I was wondering, would you let yourself be hypnotised if you knew this was going to happen?

Getting directions..

Giving someone directions here is somewhat different. Firstly, except for the major highways, streets are not named. In fact, most suburban areas are a warren of small dusty alleys, often barely wide enough for a car to pass through. Properties all have high walls surrounding them, not for security, but for privacy. Maps are useless, news roads appear every month, and no-one has ever mapped the older parts of town.

“What to do?” as the locals say. You navigate by landmarks – buildings, shops, mosques – and roundabouts (traffic circles). Roundabouts usually have some form of decoration in the middle. Close to my home there’s the blue mosque roundabout (a mosque with a bright blue dome next to the circle), lantern roundabout, coffee roundabout (a huge coffee urn), and clock tower roundabout. In the old town you get pearl roundabout (two monstrous oyster fountains with revolving marble pearls inside them) and the dhow roundabout, which has a full-sized ship I the centre of the traffic circle.

So you navigate from landmark to landmark. Typical instructions would go like this. “Turn right at the coffee pot, turn left at the lantern roundabout, then you go a while until you see some shops on the right, Make a u-turn there, go about 200 metres and then there’s a small road next to a car shop I think its called Grand garage. Go down this road and we’re opposite the graveyard. Call me when you get there and I’ll come look for you.”

This all sounds reasonable, albeit a bit long winded. But you have to know that the mosque at the blue mosque roundabout is no longer blue, and as for Mercedes roundabout? Well that’s highway now and both the roundabout and the Mercedes dealership were moved three years ago….

The pic is of the lantern roundabout near my home. That where you turn right until you get to Istanbul, and you turn right again. We’re opposite the date plantation and the old fort…

What do you do when you've been to the moon?

It’s almost 40 years since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I remember listening to it all, my head glued to the radio for days on end. South Africa didn't have TV back then. And then the photo’s, grainy black and white photos of the footprints left in the sand. The photo’s of the earth rising above the moon.

I was wondering, what do you do when you’ve been to the moon? Do you stare at the moon when the moon is full? Do you close the curtains and hide under the blankets, wait for the sun to come up again?

What do you do when you’ve done what nobody else has done. When you’ve joined that select and exclusive club of people that have done something that no-one else has?

What do you do for the rest of your life when you’ve been to the moon? Sell toothpaste?

When we're grown up

Once upon a time, there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours,
Think of all the great things we would do

Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we'd choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way

A recent blog by a guy called BlackMacro got me thinking – remember those nights when you were young, talking about what you were going to do, where you were going to go? We were going to conquer the world, retire rich…the superman syndrome. What if those days were the best days of your life? Scary thought.

Sailing the trade winds

A dhows are traditional Arab sailing vessels. They usually have one or two lateen sails. They are used along the coasts of the Arabian Peninsula, India, and East Africa. A larger dhows of up to 500 tonnes can have crews of up to 30. The smaller fishing dhows have about12 crew.

Dhows are mostly motorized these days, but some of them still trade between Duabi, Muscat and Yemen all the way to Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, almost 4,000 km away. They’ve been using the seasonal monsoon winds for almost a thousand years, traditionally trading dates and carpets from te middle east with spices, mangrove trunks and slaves from Africa. These days the cargo is more mundane – plastic buckets, toys from china, electronics from Korea.

But that does not explain how beautiful they are. The first time I saw a dhow was on Lake Victoria, late in the afternoon. Two dhows came past the ferry I was on, their sails raggedy patches of bed sheets, laden with fruit and people to within 6 inches of sinking. But they were so beautiful. I still take photos of them whenever I can.

Hurrican Gonu

Another Rhino Story

This is also a true Rhino story. In the mid 90’s I was doing exploration in Kenya. We had a joint venture with a bunch of slimeballs from Europe. Their “man on the ground” was a Kenyan guy, a city slicker with not too many bush skills. He pretended a lot though.

We set him up in a camp in the Tsavo National park (the same one where a lion ate over a hundred labourers building the Mombasa-Nairobi railway at the turn of the century). He had a couple of tents, some labourers, a cook boy, a clothes washer, etc etc. Camping is done in a colonial style in East Africa. Tents are not the lightweight, synthetic tents we use for weekends away. These are proper tarpaulin tents, with beds and furniture inside. Each one weighs twice as much as a fat person and takes at least 8 people to erect. A typical tent would probably be at least 4m by 5m in size. His brief was to investigate mineralized zones in the park, and when I came down from Nairobi, he’d show me the most promising…

He was sitting in his tent (found out later that was about all he did), waiting for me to arrive, when this rhino wandered through the camp. The rest of the camp scattered, but he didn’t realize what had happened. The next moment the rhino stuck his head into the tent. Both of them got a hell of a fright. He screamed and dived under the back wall of the tent and ran for the bushes. The rhino charged, and suddenly found himself totally covered by a safari tent. I arrived there about 40 minutes later to witness a large, cream-coloured safari tent charging all over the camp sight, breaking everything in its path. The Rhino finally managed to extricate himself, trampled the tent a few times to make sure it was dead, and sauntered off into the bush.

Leonard Cohen

Some music for you..

Desert Rhino

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Chaos theory

I've been fascinated with chaos theory, and consequently fractals, for many years. Originally I used them in a scientific way to predict the way way gold orebodies are mineralised. But the more I read, the more it seems our lives are fractals, and chaos theory is what happens to us. As you probably know - the most common description of chaos theory is that the flap of a butterfy's wings in perus can cause a tornado in Texas. The smallest decision on our part can change our lives. Or someone else's. This pic I took off the back of a tarot card. It's called the devil..