On Assignment

  

I spent last Monday and Tuesday shooting the beautiful empty beaches in the Southwest of the Dominican Republic.

My flight from Charlotte to Miami - incidentally, on the airline that paid me to take this trip - was delayed by 45 minutes because the luggage wasn't calculated when they loaded the plane. They had to re-calculate it while the pilot made a joke about his trigonometry being rusty. Because of the delay I made it to the gate in Miami as my plane was boarding, but then something happened to the engine next to me as we sped up to take off - there was loud bang and then the airplane stopped on the runway. The pilot said maybe a compressor blew out (whatever that means) but that we would be fine and not to worry. After ten minutes, he got back on the intercom to say that they had checked the book and we would be fine - it was just a problem with the autopilot and us accelerating too quickly - so they turned the plane around and took off successfully. The engine still sounded really strange and I've never been so sure that my flight would crash into the ocean.

I did get to the DR in one piece, rented a car, drove six hours to the Pedernales region, took a couple pictures, slept in my car next to a big lagoon in a national park and then took more pictures the next day of a bunch of different beaches, all hours apart. I filed my pictures by 3 PM and drove 6 hours back to Santo Domingo in time to have a beer at a gas station where I slept in my car again. I returned the car at 6am Wednesday morning, motorcycle-taxied, bussed and motorcycle-taxied again to the bus station. I bought my ticket to Port-au-Prince right before the bus boarded. 7 hours later, I arrived home to my beautiful wife, an indian meal and an avocado tree full of avacados.

  

I was hungry and in a hurry, so I bought this frozen pizza at a supermarket in Santo Domingo. At a military checkpoint, a fat soldier asked me for some and instantly produced a huge kitchen knife to cut himself a slice.