A Vincent Mounier Photography Blog
Penguins!
February 23, 2008
South Africa, in the mind of most people, is synonymous with game. Not poker. Not soccer. Game. As in big animals. No, not B'ush. Animals that are hunted down. And go on four legs. Oh, wait a minute, ok, maybe there are animals that go on two. Well, B'ush actually goes on all four when it comes to political games. But that's not the kind of game I'm talking about. Or the kind of animal. My animals are much more human. And by game I meant the African kind. But it's still hu...
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Best view of Table Mountain: the insider's guide
February 22, 2008
First, you must hire the best tour guide in town. I had. Then you should make sure that your guide has the picnic angle covered. She did. As always.
You'll drive north for a while, out of Cape Town and around Table Bay to Blouberg, preferably at the friendly purr of an old Volkswagen Kombi. Parking there by the seaside as a hot afternoon reluctantly turns into dusk, you might be shocked – almost literally – by the incredible wind sweeping the coastline into your eyes and...
Die Hel
February 21, 2008
The edge of the Little Karoo, an arid semi-desert region northeast of Cape Town, is where one finds, not far from the small town of Prince Albert, Hell.
To go to Hell (Hel in Afrikaans), you must drive through a steeply climbing section of the stunning Swartberg mountain pass, some of it quite narrow and unpaved. But that's nothing. You are still on a road from A to Z.
Somewhere around C or D, however, the civilized dirt road branches off to the right as a laconic sign...
African sands
February 21, 2008
Very little remains to be said about the fascinating views of the Sahara one gets from the air. Here are more images, the RAW files having been processed with better tools this time. They are not all perfectly crisp but keep in mind that they were shot through a plane window in manual focus. Still, our planet leaves me in awe.
Morning came, and went
February 20, 2008
Up at 4:30 am, I left home a little before 6:00 this morning, wearing a suit and trench coat (argh!), a briefcase at arm's length (argh again) and my thoughts distant and sweet. A thick winter fog bank blanketed the desert dark streets and muffled the sound of my hurried footsteps. My first stop, ritualistic and yet meaningless, was the coffee shop. Coffee, I had had already, and a very good one; an Italian espresso blend brought all the way back from South Africa and br...
Back from Cape Town
February 14, 2008
23:30 - Gate A3, OR Tambo International Airport, JohannesburgAir France flight 997 is finishing boarding. The massive Boeing triple seven, first aircraft ever released with an initial ETOPS-180 rating*, is just about empty. I’ve once again scored an exit row seat with a full 2 meter legroom and 2 empty seats next to me. And I’m almost sure that the crying baby who just threw up on the mother in the center row will now be quiet for a few hours.Almost a moth ago, I was flyi...
Trail Running in the Southern Hemisphere
January 26, 2008
It's called Table Mountain. It thrones over Cape Town like a king over his kingdom, or a queen over her lovers - high above, beautiful, strong, untouchable, feared and adored at the same time, killing remorselessly now and then, an icon.
The city of Cape Town has sprawled all around the mountain and nowhere in town can one ignore the presence of the imposing plateau. Many more pictures of it will follow, but today was trail running day and the Viljoen family happens to ...
Sahara 2
January 26, 2008
After sitting on the tarmac for almost an hour and a half, waiting for a difficult refueling operation to complete and then waiting some more in line for departure on the only available runway at Paris CDG, we finally took off and headed south on our 10 hour journey to Johannesburg.
It's now early afternoon. Air France flight 994, a mighty Boeing 777, is over-flying a most extraordinary landscape. 29,000 feet below us, stretched to infinity like the rippled and sunburne...
Airborne
January 18, 2008
Late at night somewhere over the Hudson Bay aboard Air France flight 045, an Airbus A-330 à destination de Paris. We're cruising at flight level 370 on our northeastern course. The outside air temperature is a chilly -60°C. To the south, the cold stars of Orion are perfectly framed into my starboard window. We will overfly the southern tip of Greenland in a few hours, on a great circle route between the two continents.
I've stretched my legs comfortably and reclined my ...
Off to Africa
January 15, 2008
Tuesday 5:00 am. Je pars. ETA at destination, Thursday 9:00 am. Is the world really still such a big place? The short night was agitated and restless. I spent most of it in and out of a dream where a grinning, toothless taxi driver came to pick me up at home and drove me a quarter of a block away to the beach where an old cable-driven river ferry would take me across the ocean. I kept making it as far as the sand with my huge 7 bags and there, an unsympathetic flight atten...
Good old geeky IRC
January 13, 2008
You had to be there. It was a long time ago. Long before AIM, and Gmail chat, and MSN Messenger, and Skype, and ICQ, and Trillian and the like, the ancestor of online chatting was – and still is – called IRC. It stands for Internet Chat Relay. I spent hours on it, in chat rooms called channels, using the ever-popular mIRC and ViRC programs, writing scripts, customizing my messages, implementing colors, offering roses, seeking privileges, learning the syntax and the codes...
Le vent dans la voile
January 11, 2008
It’s a pretty big bag, I said to myself. It’s a heck of a big bag. I sat comfortably in my leather chair, coffee at hand, mentally gaging the size of my luggage and imagining logging it all halfway across the globe. A suitcase, conventionally sized, and a B.A.G., as in Bloody Awfully Gargantuan.
That, mind you, was no ordinary bag. It contained, neatly folded and already asleep for way too long, my wings. And there as always lay the rub. Wings are not small. They grant ...