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Read the initial road trip story here, but these images were the results of many visits in both fall and spring.
The Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory, sit by roughly 19º latitude north and 80º longitude west in the Caribbean Sea, tucked below the large landmass of Cuba and just to the west of Jamaica. Consisting of three islands, the country has a population of roughly fifty thousand souls, ninety percent of whom live in and around the capital of Georgetown on the main island, Grand Cayman.
The two other satellites, called the Sister Islands, lie eight miles to the east. Barely poking out of the water at the top of an underwater dorsal dropping straight down twenty-five thousand feet to the bottom of the Cayman Trench, they are small and almost identically shaped, about twelve miles long and a mile and a half wide in their center. Cayman Brac is the most populated with a little over a thousand inhabitants. It is flat on its western end but in the east, it ends in a sharp hundred and forty-foot high cliff called The Bluff.
Little Cayman, until now, has resisted growth and only claims around two hundred permanent residents, all of which are very fond of their home and usually a touch strange, too. Island life isn’t for everybody, and if the mythical fever does not strike soon after arrival to kick you off, you can assume you are “different”. And fit for the rock.
You can read the series of seven stories here and more underwater images are here.
In a few unfair words, Lisbon is old, dirty and wrinkled. Walls city-wide are covered in graffiti, some artistic, most plain ugly. The stones are tired and tile theft has left facades scarred. Cigarette butts litter gutters. Grime runs down the city’s face like mascara after a terrible grief.
But the heteroclite capital, it turns out, is also luminous and alive, peppered by twisted charm, sprinkled with charisma and drenched in flavor.
The colorful story is here.
I learned the Art of paragliding in the French Alps near Chamonix and my first hops off a grassy slope were done facing the majestic Mont Blanc, roof of Europe. From a prairie flea, I then graduated to a status similar to that of a paper airplane; my flights were short, at times bizarre, and irremediably headed down.
Later, as senses were honed in little by little, each flight sharpening my instinct a touch further like the repetitive passes of a knife on the stone, I began to soar along ridges, back and forth, as the clocked ticked. At last, I could stretch my air time and push back the unavoidable pull of gravity and associated return to the Earth. Eventually, I met thermals that carried me, always a little higher, like as many horses their rider, some docile and forgiving, others impetuous and strong as bulls.
Multiple trips took me through the Alps, the South of France, the Pyrénées, Utah, California, Québec, the Dominican Republic and even, much later, South Africa. Eventually, upstate New York had to suffice. But I had a new glider and my confidence was low, so I decided to do an SIV. That, unfortunately, was the beginning of the end. Bad instructor, bad experience, I basically stopped flying after that. The glider sleeps in its bag year after year now.
I’m afraid these don’t belong anywhere else, but they hold a special place in my heart, for various reasons, so I have kept them.
A long time family gathering spot, Rockport has been a favorite for four of our generations and counting.
Little Cayman lives for and from scuba diving. Every resort offers it. Sitting on the edge of a trench, the island is surrounded by deep water and is famous for its wall dives. Very little shore diving is done because of the presence of a barrier reef along most of the iron-shore coastline. The resorts being located on the south shore, inside the mile-wide and very shallow South Sound, dive boats exit the sound through the only cut in the reef and round the western point to go dive world-famous Bloody Bay about a third of the way on the north side. It is an easy ride a stone’s throw from land that will take most dive boats thirty to sixty minutes depending on the conditions.
The images in here were shot with a 2-megapixel Canon Powershot A-20 camera in a casing! This was the dawn of digital photography, yet the results are spectacular.
This solo road trip while I lived on Little Cayman was an escape from the overwhelming blues, whites and greens of the Caribbean. I had sought reds and ochres, and found them.
The year was 2004 and I had just upgraded my Canon Powershot A20 (used for underwater photography) to a Powershot G3 and its raw shooting capability. If I could have known that twenty years later I’d be shooting digital medium format, what would I have thought of my little G3? Probably no less, it was a fantastic little camera for the time.
Most of these shots were taken from a cruising altitude of 30,000 to 39,000 feet in a commercial jet, through thick plexiglas and small windows, while overflying Africa.
Whether the vector is a Boeing 747, an Airbus 380 or 340, or an Advance Iota 2 paraglider, when airborne, one – as Saint-Exupéry said it so well – only sees well with the heart. It’s not about the canned, re-heated food. It’s not about bad movies on small screens. It’s not about frustrating entertainment remotes, nor a seat’s pitch or the lack thereof. It shouldn’t be about security checkpoints and radiation. It cannot be about weather delays and impatient queues. It’s not about ego, or pride, or skill.
Flying, whatever the machine, the altitude and the speed, is about poetry. It’s about the beauty all around, and the power within. It’s about dreams come reality, and ambition well used. It’s about defying gravity by borrowing a bird’s gracefulness and Da Vinci’s cunning vision. It’s about looking at the world we live in from a privileged perspective, and smiling, and loving it. It’s about being able to take a moment to clear one’s mind while moving just below the speed of sound, or think as fast as the neurons will fire while controlling a frontal collapse right after take off with the hill swinging back at you.
I only included a few pictures of the Sahara here, but please pay a visit to this magnificent gallery for more.
