Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25122
""'HAT l.lJI~I:ll YOU TO AI:I~I(:A IN TI·II: I:IIUH PI.A(:I:? I had a map of Africa on my wall for 10 years. Three Michelin road maps carefully taped together to create a five-foot-hi!ijh mural of the dark continent. I followed wars, revolutions and insurgencies faithfully. I idly traced desert tracks, searched for water holes and unexplored swamps. I was hooked. I made my first trip on an impulse. I was spending wicked nights and dull days in Monaco, staring at the bored owners of blinding white mega-yachts, walking the backstreets and angering the plain-clothed police that keep the Grimaldi's playground safe and rich. I came back to my suite one morning as the sun was rising. There was something different about this dawn. I looked out over the Mediterranean to the pink and tan line that grew and brightened. It wasn't the light. It was the smell. I could smell Africa from my bak:ony, and it beckoned me. The soft earthy spice smell that comes with the dust from the Sahara. Once you smell it you never forget it. I had to go. I called Aome and said I would be gone for a while, shaved my head and left for Africa. 'I\'I-II:I~I: Dill YOU tm I:II~~'T? 11111 YOU HIEAll STI~IGI-IT TO 11ANGI:I~? I flew to Bamako, Mali. At that time the government was fighting the nomadic, white-skinned Tuareg, but it wasn't really a dangerous place. My desire was to go visit the Dogon, a very unusual people who perform dances of the dead and bury them in caves high in rock faces. WI-IAT WI:J~I: Y()lJl~ FII~ST IIUIPI~I:SSI(]NS? Somewhat poetic according to my journal entry: My plane descended through the milky haze that shrouds the Sahel. Slowly, faintly, as in a dream, the brown landscape began to rise toward me. Widely spaced, painfully torn trees tied together with thousands of meandering tracks were the only sign of habitation. Then small clusters of brown dots began to appear. These were the round mud and grass huts of the Bambara. I had never seen a landscape so primitive and exciting. It began to hit me as I looked past the shiny aluminum wing to the crude huts that this is why I came 10 Africa. In a microcosm, I understood the problem of Africa. This 450 miles per hour, 10 million-dollar aircraft had to land on a flyspeck of broken asphalt in the middle of goats and arid nothingness. I felt like I had not come from another country, but from another planet. I took a photo and was arrested before I could even walk across the hot tarmac to the terminal.