I haven't been around lately but the reason may surprise you. My Editors at Fox dispatched me to cover the Mauritania Hockey Playoffs. You'd think a country located in Africa on the North Atlantic Ocean would be a veritable paradise and if by paradise you mean sand you'd be right. Here's a few things I learned after getting stuck there for over a week.
                        
It's hard to see why these plucky people who inhabit a dry, dusty, sweltering spit of desert have gone hockey crazy but they have.

Since clean water is measured in drops and sold in portions thereof certain accommodations have to be made, the rink for instance like most everything else is made of sand and not ice. A sensible precaution when you consider most water is teeming with bacterial and protozoan diarrhea, hepatitis A, and typhoid fever.

It's very easy to skate on ice, conversely it is very hard to skate on sand. The game is much more deliberate and prone to stoppage when the rubber puck melts or in most cases simply oozes around the blade of the stick.

According to the brochure at the hotel, Mauritania is a Democratic Republic the ballots however are cast out of the barrel of a rifle. It is a source and destination country for the trafficking of children for the purpose of forced begging and in certain parts of the country slavery still exists. Please enjoy your stay and complimentary wet nap.

Now to the meaty part of my adventure, after donning suitable togs for the desert, pith helmet and flask of bourbon fortified coffee, I met up with my guide and translator, umm, well he had a different foreign sounding name so I called him Gus which I explained meant "He who lives in a golden palace filled with fresh running water and virgins" Gus was very pleased and spent the next few moments pumping my hand and jabbering something about my bleached bones in the desert.
                              
Surprisingly the arena is very modern and oddly enough constructed of a ring of brightly painted port-a-potties, which Gus assured me was the 9th wonder of the world in pantomime while repeating, "no wait, no wait, no wait" and making a funny squatting motion. I asked Gus about port-a-potty etiquette in his delightful country and he replied very gravely, "Scorpion very bad."

We grabbed a cold cup of something that smelled like camel urine and made our way to our seats at center ice. We were just in time for the pre-game ceremony where four black marketeers were executed for selling pirated DVD's and the crowd went a little nuts when the executioner held one of the heads up and made the mouth move to the lyrics of the local team fight song.

The game itself was anticlimactic by the second period the sun had driven all but the already mad insane and the sand fleas made short work of any other comfort you might enjoy. The stench from the port-a-potty's didn't help either, my free advice? Plumbing. Lots and lots of plumbing cause when the favorite stadium food is an oozing meat/veggie/locust goop ladled into a flat-bread funnel you need it. It smelled so bad I took it to the nearest port-a-potty and just chucked it in cutting out the middleman, hours of unendurable bowl twisting agony.

The teams were evenly matched with the something-something-Kabir's taking a one goal lead early on when this swarthy guy 180'd his stick into the opposing team's captain's head who kicked the puck past his own surprised goalie with a leg spasm while he twitched on the red hot sand, this incited an on ice brawl that quickly spread to the stands where it turned out Gus and I were the only non-relatives in attendance.

We beat a hasty retreat to the hotel where I spent my time drinking iced lime gin & tonics and playing a game with the local gals I like to call, mustache or nostril hair...so I'm pretty sure the something-something Kabir's won because all the other teams were captured by rebels or arrested for being rebels Gus was a little unclear on that. I caught the next puddle hopper out and waved goodbye to my beloved inferno by the sea...