Bali: A Smile In The Crowd

In Bali, an Indonesian Island, my clicking camera brought a brief smile to the face of a woman who, with others, was watching the passage of a funeral procession. Most women lining the street were carrying on their heads offerings they would display on a large makeshift table outside a Balinese Hindu temple. The old lady in her coffin would be cremated there and quite joyously dispatched to a better world.

Niger: Wodaabe Friends

This Wodaabe nomad man of Niger’s Sahel is watching other men dance the Gerewol, which doubles as an annual male beauty contest between clans. It takes place during the few weeks of rain that provide enough pasture and water for those people’s zebus to allow the tribe to stay together at one place for a while.

    

The way he and a friend lean on each other does not connote homosexuality and is common among Wodaabe men and women.

Ghana: Inseparable Little Girl Friends

Last month, Highlights for Children magazine published my story of two inseparable nine-year-old Ashanti girls of Ghana. This picture, which ended Becky-and-Bonsa’s story, shows them going for a walk at day’s end, still full of things to tell each other before going to bed. I photographed them in Adukrom, a big village of wonderful cocoa-growing people surrounded by tall and thick rain forest near Kumasi. The girls’ story is being offered to children’s book publishers.

Brazil: Street Capoeira

I photographed the following scene in Salvador, Brazil, in 1971. Supported by two musicians, a man challenged spectators to face him in a bout of capoeira, a form of Brazilian martial art, for a prize. A valiant teenager did, but was not long in biting the dust, and the coins that fell in the ring went to the man.

Brazil: A Woman's Pride In Shining Pots

Squatting next to Rio Preto in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest, a woman washes dishes and polishes pots. Behind her and to her left are two canoes.

  

Rio Preto means Black River in Potuguese. There are many black rivers in the Amazon, including Rio Negro, South America’s second most powerful river after the Amazon, of which it is a tributary.

Black rivers look like black mirrors. However, when scooped in a hand their waters have the color of tea. They even taste like tea. Unlike white rivers, which run over sand and clay, they run over rocks and should be transparent instead of muddy, like the Amazon. They get their color by soaking the surrounding vegetation when seasonally flooding the forest. 

Colombia: Last Of The Ice Miners

 One of travel’s rewards is the unexpected you can nearly always count on when leaving behind  the boredom of modern life.  In 1994, when I climbed southern Colombia’s Cumbal Volcano with my family, our goal was to peek inside its crater. We never imagined we would be watching farmers carrying blocks of fossil ice on their backs from the bottom of that crater.

     Now the farmers quickly wrapped the ice inside grass and espeletias. This would protect its temperature from the sun and the warm sides of the horses which would carry it down the volcano.  The men told us they would sell the ice to small ice cream makers in villages far below.

     Unfortunately, we had arrived too late to watch them ax the ice out of the rocks. They were done for the day. And soon forever. Electricity and refrigerators would soon reach those villages.

Cameroon: Poling A Dugout Canoe On The Benue River

Beckoning scene of a canoe-poling man on the BenueRiver near Garoua, north Cameroon.

Weaving With A Backstrap Loom

In Peru’s small Andean town of Uchucmarca, in Amazonas Province, a girl is using a backstrap loom to weave a poncho outside her family’s house.

Peru: A Great Husband

Shucking corn in his backyard was only one of the many activities this quiet man happily shared with his wife in the small town of Uchucmarca in Peru’s Amazonas Province. While on a 1976 Natural History magazine assignment in the couple’s remote region, which lacked accommodations of any type, I had to base myself in their modest house. But the bread they baked and sold to their neighbors, and the wife’s alfalfa soup, were among the best I tasted anywhere.

Peru: Honoring Saint Mary In Procession

In Peru’s Andean town of Puno, on Saint Mary’s Day, a crowd is flowing out of the cathedral following a representation of the Virgin Mary carried by several men.