Common Sense and Whiskey

A Problem of Olympic Proportions

Pollution in Beijing doesn't appear to be getting much better in the run-up to the Olympics, now just 68 days away. James Fallows posts pictures on his blog from time to time. Here's his most recent, taken May 27th:

Here's a picture of Hong Kong's pollution problem, taken on our most recent trip there five months ago:

Many more photos from Hong Kong are featured in EarthPhotos.com's China Gallery.

There is a discussion of Beijing's Olympic-sized pollution problem on Jaunted - The Pop Culture Travel Guide .

Magnificent Desolation

We're studying ship schedules and poring over maps (but then, we're always doing that), searching for a possible destination for early 2009. We've been looking at the Indonesian archipelago east of Lombok, which has brought our eyes over to East Timor and eventually down to Darwin. Whaddaya know, it turns out that Gary Arndt has just posted today about leaving Darwin driving west. He writes that - right this minute - he's in a campground in Broome, Western Australia. Follow along on his blog Everything Everywhere.

Crossing Lake Baikal

The eastern shore of Lake Baikal, like always, was shrouded in mist all the way up above the peaks. Out on the water in the morning, the wind bit with a determined late season chill.

The captain stood broad shouldered, square-faced and hale with a crew-cut and a Reebok jacket, and I liked him right away. Not a lick of English, but he made us coffee with water from a big painted teapot below decks and offered pelmini that we coveted but politely refused. Couldn't be sure we wouldn't be eating his own lunch....

Continue reading Crossing Lake Baikal on Earthphotos.com....

Astronomy Picture of the Day

There's a new picture of the cosmos every day on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Map Where You've Been

Douwe Osinga, a Dutch employee of Google living in Zurich, has written a tool for mapping all the countries you've visited. Here's ours:

You can make your own here.

EP - POD

Vote for the Picture of the Day on EarthPhotos.com. This picture is currently ranked #1:

This beach is on Aitutaki, Cook Islands, and it's featured in the EarthPhotos.com Landscapes Gallery. Vote for your favorite at EarthPhotos.com. Mouse over your favorite photo and click Thumbs Up.

Road Trip

Here's a guest post with thanks to our friend Rick Lewis, Executive Director and CEO of Friends of WLRN, Miami Dade public radio:

“One might travel all day and only see now and then a small pleasant grove of oak and walnut,” writes a traveler in southeast Minnesota.  As it turns out, Our Correspondent is the British explorer Jonathan Carver, writing in June of 1767, on a road trip before there were roads.  It didn’t take much to make his day.

As the price of gasoline rises through four dollars en route to uncharted territory of its own, the Great American Road Trip is among its most tragic victims....

China News

At the beginning of 2008 in Hong Kong we had the entire internet, uncensored. We flew an hour to Sanya and found ordinary sites like the BBC and CNN not apparently blocked but hung on a "waiting for the site" type message.

These guys live in China:

The go-to guy is James Fallows of The Atlantic Magazine. He's tanned, rested and ready for everybody to read during the Olympics.

These sites read like they're honest messengers of Chinese news:

China Rises by Tim Johnson, Beijing bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers

Check these guys too:

Danwei, The China Beat and The Opposite End of China Xinjiang Blog

EP POD

Vote for the picture of the day on EarthPhotos.com. Here's today's voted most popular:

Vote at EarthPhotos.com. Mouse over your favorite photo and click Thumbs Up.

Early Summer Reading List

Parag Khanna received a not so kind review of his new book The Second World in Foreign Affairs, but we'd guess he's one of not so many authors who takes the time to actually travel off the map to places like Kyrgyzstan before writing about them. Sort of reminiscent of Robert Kaplan's early writing about the Balkans. Here's a piece by Khanna on World Hum.

Also on the current reading list:

Two "great sweep of history" books, Strobe Talbott's The Great Experiment and A Splendid Exchange by William J. Bernstein.

Anything by Fareed Zakaria is worth a look. His latest is The Post-American World.

As has been written elsewhere, Robin Wright's Dreams and Shadows presents a damning indictment of the Bush administration's venture into Iraq. It's worth the price of the book to read that last section alone.

We have to recommend anything by the brilliant Amy Chua.

Also on the list is Phillip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, about the genocide in Rwanda, as we'll be traveling there in August.

Singapore Street Food

Here's a photo from Dunlop Street in Singapore's Indian quarter. It's featured in EarthPhotos.com's Food and Singapore galleries.

Indonesia East of Bali

Looking into a possible future trip to Indonesia east of Bali, we came across a great site we've spent lots of time on. The individual sections on Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores and West Timor may be of limited use unless you're actually thinking of going there, but the Tales of Asia Main Page organizes a bunch of travel information and features a reader forum. Its author also publishes the Tales of Asia blog.

A Little Holiday Cheer - Christmas in Kowloon 2007

And No One Knows Why

Earthphotos posted one little photo from our 77th country, Poland, this week. We thought we were scanning slides from Belgium, and one slide from Rynek Glowny, the market square in Krakow sneaked in.