I just kind of wanted to go and explore
the world and have an adventure so I hit
upon motorized paragliding it was a
really terrific tool for exploring you
can go to places no one’s ever really
been before downrange from the Chinese
military rocket range favorite corridor
for heroin smugglers do 600 feet tall
and once you get in it’s almost
impossible to climb back out I didn’t
really know what the hell I was doing
tonight I’d like to share with you my
own personal journey it’s one that’s
taken me to every continent and for the
past 15 years to apply overtly every
patch of sand on earth I grew up in
Beverly Hills and life up to that point
had been pretty easy for me and so I was
looking for a challenge and I hit upon
the idea to go hitchhiking across Africa
and my friend Kurt holzinger
let me his camera we figured that I’d be
seeing you know bare breasted women
people’s plates in their lips and the
kind of stuff you see in National
Geographic and I should have a camera
but I don’t really know anything about
photography I just kind of wanted to go
and explore the world and have an
adventure so that’s what I did and I got
to the edge of Algiers by bus and then I
started I put my thumb out and I had a
French dictionary and a lot of hutzpah I
learned French a little Arabic a little
Swahili along the way and I also I also
learned the the three rules of
hitchhiking which are never to pay for a
ride to drink any water that comes out
of a pipe in in three when you arrive in
a village walk around looking stupid
friendly and non-threatening and someone
will take you in and I didn’t really
know what I was doing about photography
but I felt like I started to kind of
pretend that I was working for National
Geographic and so
I want it I went up into the ruins or a
mountains in Uganda and I heard there’s
a revolutionary movement so I sought out
the king of the revolution is this guy
in the leisure suit and he I had to wait
a week to see this guy and he gave me
this long manifesto addressing members
of the Foreign Press which was only me
and when I got to Sudan I got there and
unfortunately in the rainy season in the
only way across was to ride the trend in
heaven of hitchhiking I couldn’t pay for
a ticket so I wrote on the top of the
train which smelled a lot better on the
inside of the train but it had a
drawback is when you had to go to the
toilet you had about 5000 people
cheering for you I spent two and a half
years hitchhiking around in Africa what
I really wanted to do was to go and
explore the world for the geographic and
I started doing aerial photos by plane
and planes are great they’re very safe
but they’re problematic and that you
generally are flying kind of high and
the planes a slow Cessna will fly maybe
six two hundred miles an hour but things
are going by pretty fast and so even
with it with the door off you’re limited
by a plane and I was getting pictures
but I was frustrating I wanted to find
something better so I hit upon motorized
paragliding if you look in this map
you’ll see that there is um this is that
this is uh Paul connect crater when I
saw this and I thought well to get it
I’m going to have to get up really high
because if it’s eight miles across line
that’d be really high use really wide
angle lens and we hit set up camp here
and I took off taking about an hour to
get up to about 6,000 feet and this is
what I saw so you can see in my altima
tur I’m five thousand five hundred and
thirty seven feet above takeoff in seven
thousand four hundred and seventy three
feet maximum altitude and with my little
aircraft the time that was about as high
as I hit go and this is this scared the
hell out of me being up this high it’s
really nerve-wracking flying this high
so I found it’s actually helpful to take
pictures while you’re flying because it
helps calm you down
you concentrate something else besides
dying
it was a really terrific tool for
exploring you can go to places no one’s
ever really been before and that’s quite
extraordinary it was also a great way to
jolly for locals the kids thought it was
fun but the old people they said oh
these guys he said they want to die but
God has not chosen their time but you
get to really remote places this is um
in northern Chad on the Libyan border
and this area had been mined when
Libya invaded Chad and hardly anybody
had been into this valley there were
there were no tracks or a few goat
herders and you can find you know Virgin
Trains you can fly over things and Leave
No Trace it’s really quite a privilege
to go and see a place that really nobody
has ever seen before from the air and
one of the great things that my aircraft
too is I can I can see things in kind of
a different way I mean here you have it
you can see how the seasonal winds are
pushing big fingers of sand into this
salt lake the lake here is saltier than
seawater and if you if you walked around
between around the palm trees you could
drink fresh water your footprints this
is really typical phenomena I saw these
in salt lakes and almost every desert I
went to is the edge of the lakes there
would be fresh water in your footprints
and the lakes were salty sterile and
travel like this is not cheap generally
in my trips cost about a thousand
dollars a day and that’s for the honour
to be able to sleep in the sand and eat
bad food you you know live in camp in
plays like this because the next morning
you can go and see something like that
this is in Central Chad from there you
can just see you can see patterns you
can see the forces that that shape the
desert you can understand it much better
um you can also get pictures of people
in wildlife that aren’t running away
from you I spent about five or six
flights trying to photograph camel
caravans and finally I was lucky when I
was in the year of the caravans pass
each other in opposite directions this
is going out to get salt in the central
Sahara India towards the end of the trip
I was I was amazed that I’d actually
been able to survive that actually was
possible to fly this thing and not get
not get hurt and get amazing picture so
I started thinking about what have you
like to take this aircraft other parts
of the world I hatched this idea to try
and maybe you interesting to to
photograph all the world’s deserts and I
the Sahara was really interesting but
what would we like to take my aircraft
to to the Gobi or the Atacama or The
Empty Quarter of Arabia
so I started hatching the Grand Tour and
I started to try to I thought I’d try
and knock these deserts off
one at a time when I was researching the
Sahara
I’d heard I ran into a scientist in
Berlin who had also been working out in
the Gobi and he told me about this area
of the of the Gobi called the body and
Juran has the tallest sand dunes in the
world but most unusual are the dunes
separated by lakes and that this was
really weird like why aren’t the lakes
filled up with sand to get an area like
this was really tricky physically it was
difficult but politically it was
difficult too because this is just
downrange from the Chinese military
rocket range so to get permission I
signed a letter of agreement with the
Chinese at Kennedy of science I got
letter agree between the National
Geographic Society and the CIS and we
hired 30 camels and 10 ponies to go out
into the body and Juran dunes trying to
solve the mystery of why these lakes
weren’t filled with sand and most of the
people we found out there were old
people the young people were required to
go to school and once they went to
school they decided they wanted a modern
life didn’t want to go back to chasing
after goats
this is juju an old widow and um she was
making us a pot of tea by boiling water
and an old satellite dish covered in
mirrored fragments
that’s the little Hut that’s where she
lives year round and she she was really
sweet she gave us half of a bottle of
whiskey at the time we were there most
people think of deserts as sandy areas
but most deserts are actually gravel
Plains and the Gobi actually means
gravel Plains in the local language and
here they’re harvesting red pepper out
of the plains this is the Shanghai basin
which is between Tibet and the
Taklamakan so I’m about toes about 8,000
feet and another area the Taklamakan
where the rivers coming out of the tons
on mountains drain into the sand this is
me after a very bad morning of flying in
the Taklamakan I hit a tree on takeoff
and got 17 stitches in my face we’ve
fixed my motor and I wouldn’t fly in the
next morning after I did my travels in
China I decided to try my luck in Saudi
Arabia and the empty court of Saudi
Arabia is this big Petra saying this is
the largest sand sea in the world it’s
the size of France Belgium and Holland
combined it’s extremely dangerous place
to go nobody goes in there there’s no
point of a potable water there’s no
permanent habitation and it’s all sand
not a single rocket there this is the
empty quarter at sunrise and the fog
lasted about
45 seconds and soon as the Sun hit it
all evaporated the red sand means it’s
extremely old probably hundreds of
thousands of years old because takes
that long to oxidize that much sand in
the trail across it is very difficult
and very dangerous I mean you can
imagine that these dunes are about 600
feet tall and most of the salt flats
you’re seeing here are bounded by slip
phases of the dune so once you get in
it’s almost impossible to climb back out
and if you burn a clutch or you break
your transmission you’re really stuffed
out there that’s why we have three cars
in a pinch we could you know get out in
two cars in a real tight spot we could
all abandon all the gear and get out
with one car get you really careful of
your water in your fuel and to define
interesting things to photograph out
there I relied on that satellite images
this friend of mine at NASA had given me
yellow is sand and the purple in blue is
the the salt flats the mud flats before
I went I spent weeks going through
satellite images kind of like looking at
your carpet through a straw because you
know that the resolution I was trying to
look for fine scale features of
interesting to photograph sometimes you
don’t really understand what these
satellite photos mean but you start you
know you see where you are and what the
photo looks like and you get an idea
what might be interesting and this was
an area I thought might be worth
exploring in Yemen see these migratory
dunes that see the winds moving this
direction
so those is moving and from the ground
you really have no idea that what you’re
looking at you just it’s just kind of
this lumpy ground and you’re kind of
lost but you get up and you can
understand the shapes of things and for
human elements you just have to go and
spend time and talk to people and find
things this is a Amanda lettuce camels
out to graze early in the early morning
on the edge of the empty quarter and the
other way we tried to get pictures was
infrared cameras that were triggered by
the animals coming to drink and I set up
an infrared beam across the edge of this
little pond in organ pipe cactus
National Monument doesn’t be testing out
the camera but anyway set up the sound
like a photobooth and everything that
came down to drink we got its picture
this is a bar no we really after though
we’re mountain lions and even the
mountain lions would come down to drink
and hunt at the water holes and after a
week we got a picture this female and
this is their first picture and then she
was freaked out she’s trying to where’s
that where’s that flash coming from and
she looked one way and she looked
another
and then bingo we got her picture after
the US had invaded both Afghanistan and
Iraq I thought it might be a good time
to go to Iran it’s a beautiful country
it’s a bit like Nevada on steroids you
have mountain ranges with big salt bases
in between and this was out in the dashi
Luke another fascinating area it’s a dry
lake and it gets pounded by winds that
come from just one direction and the
wind it arose these lumps in rose it’s a
geological formation called yardangs you
find these also on Mars and it’s a
favorite corridor for heroin smugglers
which makes a really difficult area to
go to because you can’t get a police
escort because they’re all afraid to get
shot that the penalty for heroin
trafficking in Iran is death and so if
the heroin smuggler sees any vehicle out
there the first thing I’ll do is shoot
at it because I got nothing to lose so
we had a really hard time getting an
escort but we’re able to go when we got
out there we found these fantastic dunes
all the all the sand that had been blown
out of those yardangs got learning’s
massive sand dunes on the Afghan border
this is BAM it’s one of the great
ancient cities and it was destroyed
about two weeks after this picture was
taken at a massive earthquake that
killed thousands of people it was the
biggest piece of mud architecture in the
world and it was leveled they’re been
rebuilt so I got tired of Iran I had a
lot of trouble it got arrested three
times in the fourth time we had we were
about to get a rest of you had to flee
the country and so I just got a little
tired the Middle East and aside it was
time to go back to Africa and Chris
John’s the editor of the magazine gave
me a wonderful job to photograph Africa
he wanted me to find all of Africa from
the air what kind of a great job is that
this is in Namibia we put my aircraft
and all this junk in this Cessna and we
would fly around and we see what we
could get from the air this is in SOSUS
flight in namibia from the plane but you
want to see wildlife and that plane is
too fast we spotted these um these
circles called fairy circles they’re
kind of mysterious information that no
one really understands and it was in a
wildlife preserve we saw some zebras
that who with my paraglider I can
probably heard the Zebras into the fairy
circles and we get some great pictures
plane you can never do that this is from
the plane there’s a living dunes of the
name of desert they get their own water
from from Warren
fog and this is the wreck of the Edouard
Boleyn it was a ship that ran aground in
1909 so you can see how much the the
beach sand is accreted since 1909 in 100
years and they have a tremendous uh
wildlife along the shores is the seal
colony at Cape Fria they’re about a
hundred thousand Cape fur seals there
and when I started fine down the beach
they all bolted for the water so I had I
had one go it was quite a stench though
and I’m coming down low you can see
there are some seals in the background
that are still sleeping and then they’re
starting to wake up when they’re the
other ones running and you kinda it’s
like pulling a zipper and you go down
the beach and they all go into the water
and you get one shot at it for the day
this is in Algeria a city called gardiah
and when you’re walking around Gardai
you’re going through these little narrow
passageways is kind of medieval city and
you have no idea what it looked like
from above and it gets so hot in the
summer that they will sleep up on the
roof but they’re very private they want
people to see them under sleeping so
they have these kind of like walled off
rooftop dormitories and we were in a one
of the ways this towns we heard about –
a lost city out in the the Great Western
sand sea and we spotted it on Google
Earth and we navigate out here through
the dunes and we flew over it it looked
like like that they were another form of
desert irrigation they’re called the
full gara and these are underground
aqueducts and what looks to me like the
earth got attacked by a sewing machine
or actually the those are the clean out
holes of the full gara and we weren’t
able to get a permit to fly in this part
of algeria this big problem for me is
getting permits to fly and in many parts
of Africa are many parts of what it’s
just not possible so you have to you
have to behave a bit like a thief or a
spy to get your picture anyway we were
flying away sis and I look down I saw I
saw big green cars with large numbers on
which the police cars and they were
following us but oh shoot what are we
going to do I was flying with my friend
Francois and so we both we both went up
really high like about 3,000 feet and
split different directions at sunset and
then we spiral down to the ground
and then became a log at treetop level
and we flew eland right by our cars was
time for a James Bond escape
so we left the cops over here in the
town we landed here by the by the cars
at dusk threw all our stuff in there and
they went taken off out in the desert
with no but turned the headlights off
and we couldn’t use the brace because
the cosmic seed the brake lights and we
got way out in the desert without ha
again we were they got some of those
stupid cops that we were really we’re
really pretty sharp guys until he drove
off a cliff and we went out we went out
the cliff the car landed it snows and it
kind of sat there in his nose for a
while trying to sideways go over and out
and then it went back down and while I
was up when it snows that the seat came
off the floor and all the luggage in the
back came falling on top of us but it’s
fortunately it’s settled back at its
tail so the car landed back on the gas
tank and we had to figure how to get
there sooner you could know 9-1-1 you
certainly not going to go call it call
the cops and Africans are incredible
improvisers these guys were terrific and
the car was amazing it survived but so
we had to figure how when you get out
and out we all had our different schemes
but the anyways is what they they did
this is on a moonless night is there
like 60 second exposures by starlight so
we took everything out of the car to
make it lighter and they took the spare
tire and put her Neath the back tire and
they up the sand ladders out dug a hole
and read the radiator and they started
to push I got off the sand and miracle
of miracles it started
deserts are not just hot environments
they’re also the world’s highest
environments and the coldest
environments is in the Dry Valleys
Antartica biggest ice-free Aryan article
most people don’t realize the Arctic as
a desert they just think it’s a you know
a frozen wasteland but it’s so it’s a
really beautiful desert environment this
where glaciers come together as a doubt
to the seat it’s all the debris that was
carted by the glaciers and the edge of
the Ross Sea with permafrost and these
are the sand dunes in Antartica frozen
dunes this is out in the salt flats of
Bolivia this is at 12,000 feet it’s the
world’s largest salt flat and it’s full
of edible salt and to fly there it was
quite challenging this is um 12,000 feet
way ahead yet you’d use a bigger wing
and the most powerful paraglider motor
available but from the air can you take
off it’s spectacular on the edge of the
Salar the salt flats you get out you get
floods in the springtime and this is our
– expedition cards going across about
six six inches of water across the salt
flats on the edge River Cunha endangered
species live on the edge of the Salar
and this up at 14,000 feet this is
really difficult flying I had to be
flying hands-free at 14,000 feet about
30 feet above these birds this is the
Himalaya in Ladakh it’s a part of India
that pokes up into the Himalaya and well
you have snow-capped peaks between the
valleys the valleys themselves are hyper
arid deserts hardly get any water green
at all this is the headwaters of the
Indus River it comes out of out of Tibet
and through Ladakh and then down into
Pakistan and you also find out there’s
the lowest points in the world this is
the Dead Sea 1,400 feet below sea level
on the Jordanian side of the border you
get really strong winds coming out of
Israel they turn the salt water of the
lake into a froth and they blow on the
shore and it crystallizes so a nude
beach and Israeli side that a lot of
people believe that bathing in the
waters that did sea is good for your
skin I got arrested for taking this
picture
I get arrested a lot and this is the
other there’s the second lowest place in
the world this is like a Solly and
Djibouti this is about a thousand feet
below sea level and the second saltiest
body of water in the well third body
saltiest body water in the room and this
is like a saul in ethiopia also below
sea level and they have salt caravans
camel caravans that come in to harvest
of salt and take it out and i believe
that’s our last picture thank you all
for coming tonight
you
the world and have an adventure so I hit
upon motorized paragliding it was a
really terrific tool for exploring you
can go to places no one’s ever really
been before downrange from the Chinese
military rocket range favorite corridor
for heroin smugglers do 600 feet tall
and once you get in it’s almost
impossible to climb back out I didn’t
really know what the hell I was doing
tonight I’d like to share with you my
own personal journey it’s one that’s
taken me to every continent and for the
past 15 years to apply overtly every
patch of sand on earth I grew up in
Beverly Hills and life up to that point
had been pretty easy for me and so I was
looking for a challenge and I hit upon
the idea to go hitchhiking across Africa
and my friend Kurt holzinger
let me his camera we figured that I’d be
seeing you know bare breasted women
people’s plates in their lips and the
kind of stuff you see in National
Geographic and I should have a camera
but I don’t really know anything about
photography I just kind of wanted to go
and explore the world and have an
adventure so that’s what I did and I got
to the edge of Algiers by bus and then I
started I put my thumb out and I had a
French dictionary and a lot of hutzpah I
learned French a little Arabic a little
Swahili along the way and I also I also
learned the the three rules of
hitchhiking which are never to pay for a
ride to drink any water that comes out
of a pipe in in three when you arrive in
a village walk around looking stupid
friendly and non-threatening and someone
will take you in and I didn’t really
know what I was doing about photography
but I felt like I started to kind of
pretend that I was working for National
Geographic and so
I want it I went up into the ruins or a
mountains in Uganda and I heard there’s
a revolutionary movement so I sought out
the king of the revolution is this guy
in the leisure suit and he I had to wait
a week to see this guy and he gave me
this long manifesto addressing members
of the Foreign Press which was only me
and when I got to Sudan I got there and
unfortunately in the rainy season in the
only way across was to ride the trend in
heaven of hitchhiking I couldn’t pay for
a ticket so I wrote on the top of the
train which smelled a lot better on the
inside of the train but it had a
drawback is when you had to go to the
toilet you had about 5000 people
cheering for you I spent two and a half
years hitchhiking around in Africa what
I really wanted to do was to go and
explore the world for the geographic and
I started doing aerial photos by plane
and planes are great they’re very safe
but they’re problematic and that you
generally are flying kind of high and
the planes a slow Cessna will fly maybe
six two hundred miles an hour but things
are going by pretty fast and so even
with it with the door off you’re limited
by a plane and I was getting pictures
but I was frustrating I wanted to find
something better so I hit upon motorized
paragliding if you look in this map
you’ll see that there is um this is that
this is uh Paul connect crater when I
saw this and I thought well to get it
I’m going to have to get up really high
because if it’s eight miles across line
that’d be really high use really wide
angle lens and we hit set up camp here
and I took off taking about an hour to
get up to about 6,000 feet and this is
what I saw so you can see in my altima
tur I’m five thousand five hundred and
thirty seven feet above takeoff in seven
thousand four hundred and seventy three
feet maximum altitude and with my little
aircraft the time that was about as high
as I hit go and this is this scared the
hell out of me being up this high it’s
really nerve-wracking flying this high
so I found it’s actually helpful to take
pictures while you’re flying because it
helps calm you down
you concentrate something else besides
dying
it was a really terrific tool for
exploring you can go to places no one’s
ever really been before and that’s quite
extraordinary it was also a great way to
jolly for locals the kids thought it was
fun but the old people they said oh
these guys he said they want to die but
God has not chosen their time but you
get to really remote places this is um
in northern Chad on the Libyan border
and this area had been mined when
Libya invaded Chad and hardly anybody
had been into this valley there were
there were no tracks or a few goat
herders and you can find you know Virgin
Trains you can fly over things and Leave
No Trace it’s really quite a privilege
to go and see a place that really nobody
has ever seen before from the air and
one of the great things that my aircraft
too is I can I can see things in kind of
a different way I mean here you have it
you can see how the seasonal winds are
pushing big fingers of sand into this
salt lake the lake here is saltier than
seawater and if you if you walked around
between around the palm trees you could
drink fresh water your footprints this
is really typical phenomena I saw these
in salt lakes and almost every desert I
went to is the edge of the lakes there
would be fresh water in your footprints
and the lakes were salty sterile and
travel like this is not cheap generally
in my trips cost about a thousand
dollars a day and that’s for the honour
to be able to sleep in the sand and eat
bad food you you know live in camp in
plays like this because the next morning
you can go and see something like that
this is in Central Chad from there you
can just see you can see patterns you
can see the forces that that shape the
desert you can understand it much better
um you can also get pictures of people
in wildlife that aren’t running away
from you I spent about five or six
flights trying to photograph camel
caravans and finally I was lucky when I
was in the year of the caravans pass
each other in opposite directions this
is going out to get salt in the central
Sahara India towards the end of the trip
I was I was amazed that I’d actually
been able to survive that actually was
possible to fly this thing and not get
not get hurt and get amazing picture so
I started thinking about what have you
like to take this aircraft other parts
of the world I hatched this idea to try
and maybe you interesting to to
photograph all the world’s deserts and I
the Sahara was really interesting but
what would we like to take my aircraft
to to the Gobi or the Atacama or The
Empty Quarter of Arabia
so I started hatching the Grand Tour and
I started to try to I thought I’d try
and knock these deserts off
one at a time when I was researching the
Sahara
I’d heard I ran into a scientist in
Berlin who had also been working out in
the Gobi and he told me about this area
of the of the Gobi called the body and
Juran has the tallest sand dunes in the
world but most unusual are the dunes
separated by lakes and that this was
really weird like why aren’t the lakes
filled up with sand to get an area like
this was really tricky physically it was
difficult but politically it was
difficult too because this is just
downrange from the Chinese military
rocket range so to get permission I
signed a letter of agreement with the
Chinese at Kennedy of science I got
letter agree between the National
Geographic Society and the CIS and we
hired 30 camels and 10 ponies to go out
into the body and Juran dunes trying to
solve the mystery of why these lakes
weren’t filled with sand and most of the
people we found out there were old
people the young people were required to
go to school and once they went to
school they decided they wanted a modern
life didn’t want to go back to chasing
after goats
this is juju an old widow and um she was
making us a pot of tea by boiling water
and an old satellite dish covered in
mirrored fragments
that’s the little Hut that’s where she
lives year round and she she was really
sweet she gave us half of a bottle of
whiskey at the time we were there most
people think of deserts as sandy areas
but most deserts are actually gravel
Plains and the Gobi actually means
gravel Plains in the local language and
here they’re harvesting red pepper out
of the plains this is the Shanghai basin
which is between Tibet and the
Taklamakan so I’m about toes about 8,000
feet and another area the Taklamakan
where the rivers coming out of the tons
on mountains drain into the sand this is
me after a very bad morning of flying in
the Taklamakan I hit a tree on takeoff
and got 17 stitches in my face we’ve
fixed my motor and I wouldn’t fly in the
next morning after I did my travels in
China I decided to try my luck in Saudi
Arabia and the empty court of Saudi
Arabia is this big Petra saying this is
the largest sand sea in the world it’s
the size of France Belgium and Holland
combined it’s extremely dangerous place
to go nobody goes in there there’s no
point of a potable water there’s no
permanent habitation and it’s all sand
not a single rocket there this is the
empty quarter at sunrise and the fog
lasted about
45 seconds and soon as the Sun hit it
all evaporated the red sand means it’s
extremely old probably hundreds of
thousands of years old because takes
that long to oxidize that much sand in
the trail across it is very difficult
and very dangerous I mean you can
imagine that these dunes are about 600
feet tall and most of the salt flats
you’re seeing here are bounded by slip
phases of the dune so once you get in
it’s almost impossible to climb back out
and if you burn a clutch or you break
your transmission you’re really stuffed
out there that’s why we have three cars
in a pinch we could you know get out in
two cars in a real tight spot we could
all abandon all the gear and get out
with one car get you really careful of
your water in your fuel and to define
interesting things to photograph out
there I relied on that satellite images
this friend of mine at NASA had given me
yellow is sand and the purple in blue is
the the salt flats the mud flats before
I went I spent weeks going through
satellite images kind of like looking at
your carpet through a straw because you
know that the resolution I was trying to
look for fine scale features of
interesting to photograph sometimes you
don’t really understand what these
satellite photos mean but you start you
know you see where you are and what the
photo looks like and you get an idea
what might be interesting and this was
an area I thought might be worth
exploring in Yemen see these migratory
dunes that see the winds moving this
direction
so those is moving and from the ground
you really have no idea that what you’re
looking at you just it’s just kind of
this lumpy ground and you’re kind of
lost but you get up and you can
understand the shapes of things and for
human elements you just have to go and
spend time and talk to people and find
things this is a Amanda lettuce camels
out to graze early in the early morning
on the edge of the empty quarter and the
other way we tried to get pictures was
infrared cameras that were triggered by
the animals coming to drink and I set up
an infrared beam across the edge of this
little pond in organ pipe cactus
National Monument doesn’t be testing out
the camera but anyway set up the sound
like a photobooth and everything that
came down to drink we got its picture
this is a bar no we really after though
we’re mountain lions and even the
mountain lions would come down to drink
and hunt at the water holes and after a
week we got a picture this female and
this is their first picture and then she
was freaked out she’s trying to where’s
that where’s that flash coming from and
she looked one way and she looked
another
and then bingo we got her picture after
the US had invaded both Afghanistan and
Iraq I thought it might be a good time
to go to Iran it’s a beautiful country
it’s a bit like Nevada on steroids you
have mountain ranges with big salt bases
in between and this was out in the dashi
Luke another fascinating area it’s a dry
lake and it gets pounded by winds that
come from just one direction and the
wind it arose these lumps in rose it’s a
geological formation called yardangs you
find these also on Mars and it’s a
favorite corridor for heroin smugglers
which makes a really difficult area to
go to because you can’t get a police
escort because they’re all afraid to get
shot that the penalty for heroin
trafficking in Iran is death and so if
the heroin smuggler sees any vehicle out
there the first thing I’ll do is shoot
at it because I got nothing to lose so
we had a really hard time getting an
escort but we’re able to go when we got
out there we found these fantastic dunes
all the all the sand that had been blown
out of those yardangs got learning’s
massive sand dunes on the Afghan border
this is BAM it’s one of the great
ancient cities and it was destroyed
about two weeks after this picture was
taken at a massive earthquake that
killed thousands of people it was the
biggest piece of mud architecture in the
world and it was leveled they’re been
rebuilt so I got tired of Iran I had a
lot of trouble it got arrested three
times in the fourth time we had we were
about to get a rest of you had to flee
the country and so I just got a little
tired the Middle East and aside it was
time to go back to Africa and Chris
John’s the editor of the magazine gave
me a wonderful job to photograph Africa
he wanted me to find all of Africa from
the air what kind of a great job is that
this is in Namibia we put my aircraft
and all this junk in this Cessna and we
would fly around and we see what we
could get from the air this is in SOSUS
flight in namibia from the plane but you
want to see wildlife and that plane is
too fast we spotted these um these
circles called fairy circles they’re
kind of mysterious information that no
one really understands and it was in a
wildlife preserve we saw some zebras
that who with my paraglider I can
probably heard the Zebras into the fairy
circles and we get some great pictures
plane you can never do that this is from
the plane there’s a living dunes of the
name of desert they get their own water
from from Warren
fog and this is the wreck of the Edouard
Boleyn it was a ship that ran aground in
1909 so you can see how much the the
beach sand is accreted since 1909 in 100
years and they have a tremendous uh
wildlife along the shores is the seal
colony at Cape Fria they’re about a
hundred thousand Cape fur seals there
and when I started fine down the beach
they all bolted for the water so I had I
had one go it was quite a stench though
and I’m coming down low you can see
there are some seals in the background
that are still sleeping and then they’re
starting to wake up when they’re the
other ones running and you kinda it’s
like pulling a zipper and you go down
the beach and they all go into the water
and you get one shot at it for the day
this is in Algeria a city called gardiah
and when you’re walking around Gardai
you’re going through these little narrow
passageways is kind of medieval city and
you have no idea what it looked like
from above and it gets so hot in the
summer that they will sleep up on the
roof but they’re very private they want
people to see them under sleeping so
they have these kind of like walled off
rooftop dormitories and we were in a one
of the ways this towns we heard about –
a lost city out in the the Great Western
sand sea and we spotted it on Google
Earth and we navigate out here through
the dunes and we flew over it it looked
like like that they were another form of
desert irrigation they’re called the
full gara and these are underground
aqueducts and what looks to me like the
earth got attacked by a sewing machine
or actually the those are the clean out
holes of the full gara and we weren’t
able to get a permit to fly in this part
of algeria this big problem for me is
getting permits to fly and in many parts
of Africa are many parts of what it’s
just not possible so you have to you
have to behave a bit like a thief or a
spy to get your picture anyway we were
flying away sis and I look down I saw I
saw big green cars with large numbers on
which the police cars and they were
following us but oh shoot what are we
going to do I was flying with my friend
Francois and so we both we both went up
really high like about 3,000 feet and
split different directions at sunset and
then we spiral down to the ground
and then became a log at treetop level
and we flew eland right by our cars was
time for a James Bond escape
so we left the cops over here in the
town we landed here by the by the cars
at dusk threw all our stuff in there and
they went taken off out in the desert
with no but turned the headlights off
and we couldn’t use the brace because
the cosmic seed the brake lights and we
got way out in the desert without ha
again we were they got some of those
stupid cops that we were really we’re
really pretty sharp guys until he drove
off a cliff and we went out we went out
the cliff the car landed it snows and it
kind of sat there in his nose for a
while trying to sideways go over and out
and then it went back down and while I
was up when it snows that the seat came
off the floor and all the luggage in the
back came falling on top of us but it’s
fortunately it’s settled back at its
tail so the car landed back on the gas
tank and we had to figure how to get
there sooner you could know 9-1-1 you
certainly not going to go call it call
the cops and Africans are incredible
improvisers these guys were terrific and
the car was amazing it survived but so
we had to figure how when you get out
and out we all had our different schemes
but the anyways is what they they did
this is on a moonless night is there
like 60 second exposures by starlight so
we took everything out of the car to
make it lighter and they took the spare
tire and put her Neath the back tire and
they up the sand ladders out dug a hole
and read the radiator and they started
to push I got off the sand and miracle
of miracles it started
deserts are not just hot environments
they’re also the world’s highest
environments and the coldest
environments is in the Dry Valleys
Antartica biggest ice-free Aryan article
most people don’t realize the Arctic as
a desert they just think it’s a you know
a frozen wasteland but it’s so it’s a
really beautiful desert environment this
where glaciers come together as a doubt
to the seat it’s all the debris that was
carted by the glaciers and the edge of
the Ross Sea with permafrost and these
are the sand dunes in Antartica frozen
dunes this is out in the salt flats of
Bolivia this is at 12,000 feet it’s the
world’s largest salt flat and it’s full
of edible salt and to fly there it was
quite challenging this is um 12,000 feet
way ahead yet you’d use a bigger wing
and the most powerful paraglider motor
available but from the air can you take
off it’s spectacular on the edge of the
Salar the salt flats you get out you get
floods in the springtime and this is our
– expedition cards going across about
six six inches of water across the salt
flats on the edge River Cunha endangered
species live on the edge of the Salar
and this up at 14,000 feet this is
really difficult flying I had to be
flying hands-free at 14,000 feet about
30 feet above these birds this is the
Himalaya in Ladakh it’s a part of India
that pokes up into the Himalaya and well
you have snow-capped peaks between the
valleys the valleys themselves are hyper
arid deserts hardly get any water green
at all this is the headwaters of the
Indus River it comes out of out of Tibet
and through Ladakh and then down into
Pakistan and you also find out there’s
the lowest points in the world this is
the Dead Sea 1,400 feet below sea level
on the Jordanian side of the border you
get really strong winds coming out of
Israel they turn the salt water of the
lake into a froth and they blow on the
shore and it crystallizes so a nude
beach and Israeli side that a lot of
people believe that bathing in the
waters that did sea is good for your
skin I got arrested for taking this
picture
I get arrested a lot and this is the
other there’s the second lowest place in
the world this is like a Solly and
Djibouti this is about a thousand feet
below sea level and the second saltiest
body of water in the well third body
saltiest body water in the room and this
is like a saul in ethiopia also below
sea level and they have salt caravans
camel caravans that come in to harvest
of salt and take it out and i believe
that’s our last picture thank you all
for coming tonight
you
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