WOOLOO.ORG - david alexander bjorkman

david alexander bjorkman

Location: Boulder CO/United States

Website

Wooloo Url

http://www.wooloo.org/MayaYucatan

About

Award winning international photojournalist/artist David Bjorkman and writer Victoria Thomas are a husband-wife team who came together when a magazine sent them on assignment into the Darien Jungle of Panama to document a (New York) Explorers Club expedition to the Chagres River looking for Choco Indian Chief Antonio Zarco, who taught the original U.S. Apollo astronauts jungle survival in case their capsule landed in the tropics during re-entry. (On a subsequent expedition to Panama the following year, Chief Zarco married David and Victoria in a traditional Choco ceremony. For the occasion, the Zarco women painted vivid geometrical designs on Victoria's face and body with black berry juice. They neglected to mention that this juice would not wash off for three weeks which made for an eventful re-entry into the U.S..)

The expeditions were led by anthropologist H. Morgan Smith, an Explorers Club member (FN 56) who was rumored to be one of the prototypes used to create the Indiana Jones character.

Morgan Smith and Chief Zarco taught David and Victoria jungle survival in the Darien, a skill they put to good use later on when they spent much time working in jungles. Morgan also taught them another skill that turned out to be much more valuable, the skill of cross-cultural communications.

For eight years David and Victoria went on to cover the wars in Central America, including Guatemala where they had a chopper shot out from under them in the highlands north of Nebaj. In Nicaragua, they were smuggled across the border at night, two different times, in order to spend months in the jungles with the southern contras led by Eden Pastora, the legendary former Sandinista hero, Comandante Cero, who had just survived an assassination attempt.

Their work has appeared in magazines in the U.S., such as TIME, Newsweek, Conde Nast Traveller, Forbes and magazines in over 20 countries, NBC, and numerous newspapers including The Washington Times, The Washington Post and The New York Times.

After spending a year living on and around the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, having to sleep on the floor of a Lakota Sioux holy man's house for months at a time in order to finish a book documenting The Sacred Buffalo and the Seven Sacred Rights of the Lakota Sioux, they relocated to Merida, Yucatan, Mexico to turn their attention to the ancient Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula.

Since 1996 they have worked exclusively in the Maya Yucatan region of Mexico and Guatemala, where they have documented the Maya and the reconstruction of their ancient pyramids—now being rebuilt at a pace not seen in over a thousand years. In this time they have published six books, including the best selling "Climbing the Pyramid, Rediscovering Maya Mysteries from Chichen Itza's Great Pyramid," available in bookstores and on Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com, seven photo essays, and a museum exhibit of David's photographs documenting the emergence of the 3,000-year-old Maya Ballgame into modern times as a precursor to December 21, 2012.

Because of this work, they were invited to become members of the same Explorers Club, (FN 02), and were honored to join the membership ranks that include the late Sir Edmund Hillary (of Mt. Everest fame) and late Thor Heyerdahl (of Kon-Tiki fame) along with many other illustrious adventurers.