Common Sense and Whiskey

Proximity to Peril

Proximity to peril is seductive. Not real peril, just proximity to it. Walking into East Berlin on New Year's Day 1990 gave me a little shiver. We had spent the night before sitting on the Berlin Wall (it had been breached the month before, but it was still there) with a young fellow from the east who had never been on the other side. When we crossed that day, we stepped one by one into a little booth. The door closed and the border official, sitting above you, took your papers and stared. He inspected your back via a mirror behind you. All very gruff and creepy, but the truth was, by then his cause was lost. It wasn't real peril, just proximity to peril.

In 1993, after the collapse of the Enver Hoxha regime and shortly after Americans were again allowed to visit Albania, we sailed from its port at Durres up to Trieste. I stood on the deck of the little ship and stared into the fog to the east, oddly thrilled to be sailing past the war in the collapsing Yugoslavia, in Bosnia off to starboard (photos from that trip here on EarthPhotos.com). Proximity, not real peril.

After the war was safely over, we visited Sarajevo, then manned by the U.N.'s SFOR, or Stabilization Force. Our Holiday Inn bill was payable in cash in advance, in Deutschmarks. The only construction at the time was busting down curbs at intersections to build wheelchair ramps (photos from the former Yugoslavia here on EarthPhotos.com).

One of these days, I hope, we'll get to North Korea.

Most recently, we drove to Gisenyi, Rwanda, on the lawless eastern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose capital, Kinshasa, is a thousand miles away. We stood in a pouring rain and looked across Lake Kivu at Goma, packed with Hutu refugees, warlords of every stripe, and implicated in every instability in that unstable region. Not real peril, just proximity to peril (At least I think. As Dave, proprietor of the Ishasha Wilderness Camp on the Uganda/DRC border put it, "It only takes them three or four days to cook up a civil war").

Here then, for the record, is our most recent proximity to peril, Goma, Congo. Looks kind of nice, to tell you the truth.

Rwanda Gorilla Trek Pictures

Starting to get through some of the photos from our recent treks in Rwanda. These guys are from the Hirwa ("Good Luck") group on Mt. Sabyinyo, which forms the border between Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo:

See a first, raw, unedited upload of our gorilla photos here, on our photo site, EarthPhotos.com.

Olympics: Done and Gone

Maybe it's just me, but after how fraught with portent everything associated with the Beijing Olympics was, isn't it a little surprising how it's just disappeared from the entire discussion without so much as a debrief, here less than a week later?

Did anything prick that pesky, lurking Chinese nationalism? Was the pollution an embarrassment? Human rights? Tibet? C'mon. We've got the conventions and then football season and stuff.

China Rises does a debrief. China Beat, too.

Now's probably the perfect time to visit Beijing. Everything's still all spruced up and the crowds are gone.

Double Take

I'm really not sure how this picture works, either. I was standing just at the end of the bridge that connects the little island of Skeppsholmen to downtown Stockholm, and looked up toward that apartment block. That's some kind of port hole-like opening, and every once in a while people walked by. It was just a matter of waiting several minutes before someone framed themselves up for me.

The Flight Back from Muscat

Beginning the long haul back from Muscat in a few hours... will be back at the farm on Wednesday with tons of photos to go through, and some impressions from three continents in three weeks. Here's a link to an EarthPhotos.com page with a few initial photos from the last three weeks. They're not Photoshopped, primped or fluffed up. They're also not captioned, so see if you can figure out whether they're from Finland, Sweden, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, the U.A.E. or Oman.

While we leave for the airport, I'll leave you with a photo of our new friend Dost Mohammad, whom we met Saturday in the Muttrah Souk here in Oman:

Gorilla Treks

When bouncing around on Rwandan roads (one guide called it an "African massage)" begins to wear you down, one way to recover is to head to the beach, and that's what we've done. Not necessarily your ordinary beach, mind you.

We've just installed ourselves in Muscat, Oman. It's the holy day and the midday call to prayer wafts over the town as I write this. We'll stay here with our sea-view room until it's time to head back on Monday. I'll be going through photos, but I wanted to quickly put up at least a first gorilla photo. This is the silverback head of the Amahoro group, which we visited on Tuesday.

Watch this space for more.

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 an Orthodox sixteen-day 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!