Employing images as well as text, retired historian Ross Dealy recounts in A Moment in Time his unprecedented and incredible 1952-1955 trips by motorcycle, as a teenager, from the Arctic Circle to Rio de Janeiro and from Morocco to Cape Town. What he unfolds is not only an extreme adventure but eye-opening encounters with multiple societies and world views. Throughout he contrasts the world he experienced with both the past and the present, showing, in the words of Patricio Guzman, that “Those who have no memory don’t live anywhere.”

On the one hand there were the physical challenges, sometimes only paths for roads, sometimes no road at all. There was mud and sand, climbs as high as 17000 feet, a crossing at one point over 12 feet of snow—helped in some situations by Indians or blacks. On the other hand, there were encounters with ways of living little altered over the centuries. These ways of living were about to be radically changed or destroyed, as exemplified by gold mining in Fairbanks Alaska, Hacienda Guachalá and the Riobamba market in Ecuador, an Inca church service at Pisac and the Uros on Lake Titicaca in Peru, Kamayura Indians in Brazil, Ouled Nail and Mozabite people in Algeria, black life in southern Sudan, white farmers in Kenya, Luba dancers and Pygmies in the Congo, Tutsis in Rwanda, Sophiatown in South Africa. Ross also experienced a natural world not then damaged by tourism: notably the Andes, Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Ngorongoro, Serengeti and Hwange parks.