Marc de Faoite

1995 I was leaving Belgium for a new life in France. In fact I had already half-left a month earlier, sitting in the passenger seat while my friend Matt drove a rental van that contained all the furniture, clothes, and books I had accumulated in my downtown Brussels apartment in the previous five years. Having offloaded all my worldly possessions we made the trip in reverse. Back in Brussels I worked my notice period and was overstaying my welcome on a friend’s couch.  My final day came. I was ready to take the train south, but the powerful unions in the SNCF had other plans. A week went past without any sign of the rail strike ending, so I decided to hitch-hike the twelve hundred kilometres from the French-Belgian border to my new home in Pau, at the foot of the Pyrenees. I bought an inch-thick indelible marker and a sheet of Day-Glo orange card, which I cut into large strips and packed them in my bag along with a large sandwich, the Bruce Chatwin book I was rereading, ...

A Dynasty of Dust is best classified as a piece of travel writing (though I've tried to be at least as lyrical as informative.) I'm delighted to have it featured in Jaggery , a journal dedicated to all things South Asian. I am also grateful to Miguel Lamiel for the kind use of his beautiful photos. You can see more of them on his facebook page   or here:  http://www.redbubble.com/people/lamiel and here:  http://www.lamiel.info/

As I stood bleeding on the roadside in the middle of the Namib desert, delicately plucking glass shards out of my forearm, the sun already on the last stretch of its downward arc towards the distant Naukluft mountains, my car resting on its roof and all my baggage spread across the grey gravel road, I should have been thinking how lucky I was to be still alive. Instead my only immediate concern was how to stop Paul Simon singing. I had been doing about seventy or eighty kilometres an hour on a straight stretch of road, admiring the orange grey landscape, singing along with the cassette, thinking about how I was making good time . Thinking I would probably arrive in time to set up my tent before dark. Seemed like a week had passed since then. In fact, it was barely five minutes ago. One of the wheels on the upside down wreck was still spinning. And Paul Simon was still singing Train in the Distance. And I wanted it to stop. Right now. There was nothing more urgent in the world. I...

The landscape of coastal Kedah is unerringly flat; a fluid place existing at the juncture of land and sky and sea, a place where the earth is more liquid than soil and stretches out in every direction until it is lost in the not-so-distant horizon’s humid haze. This is one of Malaysia’s main rice growing regions, where the high water table spirit-levels the landscape flat. Alor Star, the principal town of Kedah, is easily passed through. Like every other town in Kedah it is a sleepy uneventful place.  The K1 cuts a narrow two-laned straight line south across the sunlit landscape like an exercise in perspective, the vanishing point blurred by the hot and shimmering air. Traffic was light. My car moved over the tabletop flatness of this water-world where cauliflower cumulous clouds are reflected in the perfect mirrors of canals and flooded fields. The dark mud of newly ploughed padi fields shone and sparkled wetly under the sun. Other fields were filled with the vibran...