Month: December 2017

What People Mean When They Say Madagascar is Beyond Words

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As written for the Relais & Châteaux Africa blog. Anything I have ever said about Madagascar before this was just words. Before I boarded a plane and flew over her curves and glimpsed her rugged red hills separated by winding rivers gold with the reflection of sunlight. Before I came to meet her, slipping through her narrow roads, past a world where time seems to have stood still, with its French cars from the 60s and 70s sharing the road with man-drawn and pushed carts, past rice paddies, past man, woman and child all out with somewhere to go or someone to share going nowhere with. I feel foolish for ever thinking I could write or talk about the country in any real way before. I hope to I remember this the next time I try to write about a place I have never been. The truth of a place, its spirit, is lost on you until you see it in person. On my first night at a hotel in the capital of Antananarivo, the Ibis Hotel, …

The Jungles of Jonkershoek

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As published on my personal project over at Mountains Creatures. It went by the name Waterfall One. But it was clear to us that this was not the kind of waterfall you could belittle with a number. This was an individual. This was something otherworldly, a space out of The Lost World, which would make me Julianne Moore, the video documentarian and paleontologist, descending into the jungles of a deserted world, to play with dinosaurs… Dream job, right there. And it would make the man I call both Dad and Mr Standing on One Leg, the mathematician and chaos theorist. As in, Jeff Goldblum, which would make Dad very happy I believe, on account of a crush on the film, The Fly. We had done a fair amount of adventuring to get here, to this cavernous corner of the Jonkershoek Nature Reserve, where water gushed down from the cliff face above, into a cool pool below. It’s not that the trail leading to the waterfall was arduous, just that we had gotten lost. We had attempted to drive …