Common Sense and Whiskey

Fresh from Addis Ababa

Here at the Emin Pasha Hotel in Kamapala, the internet is too slow to upload photos. And besides, just now there's one of those singular equatorial afternoon thundershowers brewing, so it's all hands to the terrace for a cold Tusker malt lager and a privileged view.

But before we head into the bush tomorrow morning for a week culminating in two days of gorilla treks, a note on Addis Ababa. There’s a certain way every place “feels” and looking back on yesterday’s excursion, I realize the photos that will go up on Earthphotos.com (after I sort through them, probably in a month or so), aren’t going to reflect the way Addis feels.

They’ll show more of the spectacle of Addis - the massive mercato and some aspects of Ethiopian Orthodoxy, especially. We happened into town during the sixteen-day Feiseta fast, which our guide Lule likened to Ramadan, except that the daily fast runs only from 9:00 until the end of a daily church service, about 3:00 or 3:30 or so.  Colorful.

I really liked Addis. The photos won’t show all the quick smiles. You won’t see that the cars’ accelerators aren’t hard wired to the horn, like in Cairo. Pictures can’t convey Ethiopians’ quick wit. You won’t be able to hear the general merriment and tremendous musicality that wafts from (side by side) churches and mosques, up from town and down from the hills. The photos will show some squalor and slums, and they are there, in Addis.

Perhaps it’s a particular challenge in photography, probably it’s one of my shortcomings as a photographer that I don’t know how to depict the quiet, contented ordinary. But all that’s there in Addis, too. Phillip K. Briggs, a prolific travel writer with a particularly African cache, I think calls Addis his favorite big African big city. I don’t have his deep African experience but I’d prefer to return to Addis than Durban or Johannesburg or Abidjan, Nairobi or Lusaka or Lilongwe.

So have a look at the women bent under firewood bundles heading to market and gawk at the Mercato’s scrap metal section, but know that Addis has lots more, too. Addis feels good.

Subscribe to the RSS feed on Earthphotos.com for an alert when the Ethiopia pictures are posted. And for now, we’re off into Uganda and Rwanda, where the internets still won’t go.

We hope to resurface in about a week from the Persian Gulf with photos from a successful mountain gorilla trek. Subscribe up at the top, and watch this space.

The Plunge into the Virunga Mountains

After a week in cool Finland and a quick spin through lovely Stockholm (pictured, the royal apartments), it's time for  the plunge into Africa - We'll fly overnight to Ethiopia and spend a week and a half in a part of Africa we've never visited: Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda.

All the gear is road tested, everything works, and I picked up a very nice 110/220 multiple battery charger at a little photo shop in Helsinki. It'll charge our Nikon D80, D200 and a little Coolpix, too. Middle of next week we'll be on gorilla safari in Rwanda before retreating to Muscat for a last few days on the beach to see how we did with our photos. We'll post 'em as we find the internet.

CS&W continues Olympic counter-programming from Finland

But it was nice to see the Beijing opening ceremonies live with much of the rest of the world at 3:00 p.m. local time Friday. In Finland the whole, handsome four hours ran without commercial interruption. We imagined NBC made it an all night affair, broken up by ads for impotence and incontinence.

A steady rain soaked up the whole day Friday. It stayed around 12/54 degrees all day, and we built a blazing Birchwood fire. But on Thursday I took a camera out among the birches and later cooked up a few HDR images of the Finnish woods. They’re after the jump:

Last Olympic Air Update

You may have seen this by now, and if not you will shortly. Here's the air in Beijing the day before the auspicious 8 8 of 08 opening ceremonies. Via Fallows.

More from Finland

A Tupa in east central Finland, sort of translated as “living room,” or “great room,” or gathering place. This one, dating from the 19th century, today is a single huge room of 65 square meters with a modern kitchenette along one wall with sink, fridge and stove, a huge stone fireplace with a complex flu system capable of opening, closing and, by means of three overhead wooden handles, being manipulated to re-circulate heat.

Stairs lead to the top of the fireplace where down through the last two centuries people have slept in warmth and security, surrounded by warm stone and the building walls. Huge logs, longer than a man’s height, burned all night in the stove.

It’s a common room in which, in the old days, travelers, or itinerant workers at harvest, slept. Workers, servers, the owners, everyone gathered here to eat and for meetings and common activities. Workers with little slept on what must be a forty foot bench cut from the trunk of a single tree along the length of one wall, which you can see behind the table.

Summer Chill

Forgive the Finns if they’re skeptical about global warming. Having arrived Sunday (today is Wednesday, 6 August), we’ve hardly seen the sun, and we look forward to a crackling Birchwood fire tonight.

Highs have been scarcely sixty, and stiff wind lowers the lows, either side of fifty in the first place. The strawberry crop was three weeks late. They’re afraid it may never be really warm this summer, with autumn due by a month from now. There’s a chance of frost Saturday in Lapland.

I like this shot of the high grass on a farm near a tiny place called Haimoo, northwest of Helsinki, where we stayed on Monday.

CS&W Hits the Road

Common Sense and Whiskey will turn into a little more of a travelogue over the next three weeks. We've created this blog because of our abiding love of international travel, and it's time to go out and do some.

Common Sense and Whiskey is also meant to complement our major work, EarthPhotos.com, where we keep (and encourage you to buy) photos of eighty-some countries around the world. We plan to add at least four new countries to the list on our return.

We'll start out at our summer cabin in Finland this weekend, then sail across the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia to Stockholm, in order to catch a flight to Addia Ababa (can you think of two cities connected by air that are more at cultural antipodes?). From Ethiopia we'll travel in Uganda and spend two days gorilla trekking in the Parc National des Volcans in Rwanda. After that it's a few days at the beach in Muscat, Oman before a hop up to Dubai to catch the crisp 14 hour 55 minute Delta non-stop back to Atlanta.

We'll be posting photos we're especially proud of here and/or on EarthPhotos.com, and we'll probably have a random thing or two to say along the way. Due to long transits and  a week in the bush in Africa without the internet, there will be gaps in posts during August. If you click on the RSS logo on the top left of the blog to subscribe to an RSS Feed, that'll let you know when we get close enough to  the internets to post a photo or two.

Cheers for now!

"We do not approve of the use of pictures to pass judgment on air quality ..."

So says Du Shaozhong of the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, in a USA Today article titled Hong Kong sets new pollution record as horses arrive (Hong Kong is the Olympic Equestrian venue). Here's a web cam view of the Hong Kong waterfront today, from the Hong Kong Tourism Authority:

And here's sunset across Victoria Harbor last time we were there, last  December/January:

Find more from Hong Kong and all over China in EarthPhotos.com's China gallery.

Comment? No Comment

From View From the Wing: Apparently you can use Delta Miles for Free Hair Loss Consultation.

The World's Most Expensive City

is Moscow.

Photography in Northern Latitudes

Vivid northern light presents opportunities for the photographer that you just don't find around the farm in Georgia, USA. We're looking forward to photo ops in Finland, where we'll be all next week. These photos, clockwise from top left, were taken at our cabin in Finland, in a general store in Siberia, in the harbor at Bergen, Norway  and on a midsummer midnight cruise in Greenland.

Click the links to their country galleries at EarthPhotos.com.

Scandinavian Retro

Image from Finnair.com.

Venerable Scandinavian airline Finnair is 85 years old this week, making it the sixth oldest airline in the air. Marking the occasion, an "Airbus A319 has been painted in the livery of Finnair’s 1950s Convair in honour of the airline’s 85th anniversary. The aircraft’s crew will also be dressed in 1950s uniforms" says Boarding.no.

We have a Finnair flight on Sunday, from Paris up to Helsinki, but alas, it's not on the aircraft they're calling "Silver Bird." Silver bird's maiden flight is this Thursday on the Helsinki - Copenhagen route.

Total Solar Eclipse Coming This Friday Morning

Photo credit: Fred Espenak's MrEclipse.com

Friday morning's total solar eclipse tracks across Greenland, Russia, Mongolia and China, with the largest city probably Novosibirsk, along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. As we've written here  and elsewhere, the experience of a total solar eclipse is hard to beat. A great photo resource for eclipses is NASA's Fred Espenak, whose web site is MrEclipse.com. In case you can't make it to this Friday's eclipse live in person, NASA plans a live web cast. Hey, it ain't Siberia, but it's free. Get there early. Totality is at 7:09 a.m. EDT.

There are a few photos from the total solar eclipse of 11 August, 1999 as seen from Lake Balaton, Hungary, on EarthPhotos.com.

Destination: Papua New Guinea

Thin clouds hung between the shore and mountains. A single tarmac road plodded east, and a smoky fire burned halfway up the hills. Inland, it would rain.

Port Moresby must be the only capital city in the world not connected to anywhere else by road. Port Moresby swelters alone.

Metal roofs, no apparent center, the parliament building was built in haus tambarin, or spirit house, style, just beside the runway.

A fair gale blew off the sea. Palms rattled along the utterly un-commercial waterfront. Brown shore water settled into azure after fifty meters, and a wooded hillock rose from the harbor half a mile out.

If you could face only this direction you’d be in paradise. Unfortunately, we had to turn back through town. Port Moresby is a hole you have to step through to get wherever you’re going in PNG.

Panoramas - A Photo Stitching Lesson

Screen grab from Panoramas.dk.

It's the Obama Berlin speech in 360. Panoramas.dk is a fabulous site run by Danish photographer Hans Nyberg. See tons more 360 degree panoramas there.

There's a very nice tutorial on Photo Stitching Digital Panoramas on the site Cambridge in Color.

Eleven Days Out - Olympic Air

Tourists, athletes and staff are arriving in Beijing now, eleven days before the start of the games. One of our friends who works on the Olympic broadcasts arrived Saturday and has sent two emails, both noting how gray the air is.

Beijing's pollution is in the press. The BBC has this story. The Engish language China Daily leads with Emergency Green Plan for Games. And James Fallows continues his occasional blog posts with this view from his window:

Much more positively, there are some great photos of Olympic preparations on This is Life.

Our friend for thirty years, John Kelly, is also working the Beijing games, and will blog about his Olympic experience here.

Weekend Favorites

A little weekend fun: Visit EarthPhotos.com's Favorites gallery and enjoy the 100 top photos as voted everyday by visitors to the site. While you're there, nominate your favorite from the 7500-odd photos from all around the planet.

This former #1 is from Cappadoccia, Turkey, and can be found in EarthPhotos.com's Turkey and Architecture galleries.

Friday Flying Complaints

From a blog called Economist's View, Why is Airline Service so Bad? (via Online Travel Review)

And from Tripso.com, Memo from an Angry Flight Attendant.