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Spend some time with a great study of life in the slums of four cities - in Venezuela, Kenya, India and Indonesia - by Jonas Bendiksen of Magnum Photos, called The Places We Live, in support of a book of the same name, published in August.
Extremely well done and an example of just about the best of the web today.
(Photo of the book The Places We Live)
Here's an article in Travel Rants listing the ten countries or territories with the fewest people by area. Greenland "wins," with the world's lowest population density, at 0.02 people per square kilometer.
Notably, all ten places, except French Guyana, are either islands or desert. I'd also note that all places may not be included. There are some 65 permanent residents, for example, of the Pitcairn Islands. Should Pitcairn be on the list? How about Iles Kerguelen, very remote in the southern Indian Ocean?
Of the ten countries on the list, see photos in the EarthPhotos.com Iceland Gallery (3 people per square kilometer), Australia Gallery (2.6 people), Namibia Gallery (2.5 people, Mongolia Gallery (1.7 people) and Greenland Gallery (0.02 people).
(Photo of Illulisat, Disko Bay, Greenland from EarthPhotos.com.)
A great compilation of 35 photos here on Boston.com. And there is a discussion here in the Belfast Telegraph with the man who took the photo, left, of a gunman at Chhatrapati Shivaji station, about how he got the shot.
(Photo credit: Sebastian D'Souza, Mumbai Mirror)
We traveled over land from Kathmandu to Lhasa, Tibet in the spring of 1999. I feel bad for anybody who has had firm plans or even just aspirations to visit Tibet since the riots of this past March in Lhasa. Even if you're able to visit, I'll bet the magic of the capital of Buddhism is at the least circumscribed by a heavier governmental hand.
When we visited no one ever asked to even see our coveted Tibet Travelers Permits after the Nepali border at Khodari. We had arranged transportation from the border to Lhasa with overnight stops at Nylam, Lhaze and Xigatse, and nothing beyond that. When we rolled into Lhasa our driver asked to what authorized agency he would be delivering us and was surprised to learn there was none. But he just shrugged and dropped us at a hotel we suggested.
I suspect such freedom of movement isn't possible nowadays. And it could be that that will remain the case for a while yet. The Dalai Lama is 73 now and very publicly pondering his mortality. The future of Tibet was the subject of soul-searching at an international meeting of Tibetan exiles in Dharamsala last week. Here is a collection of links to news articles about the meeting and more broadly, the future:
Young Grow Frustrated with Tibet Middle Way
The Folly of Spurning the Dalai Lama
Tibet Movement Takes a Stopgap Remedy for Dissent
Spoiling for a Tibetan Fight
Chinese Stage Show of Force in Tibet
(Photo of a monk at Tashilumpo Monastery, Xigatse, Tibet.)
See more photos from Tibet in EarthPhotos.com's China Gallery.
Bangkok's new airport, Suvarnabhumi (pronounced, very approximately, "sue wanna boom"), is occupied and shut down. So is the old Don Muang airport. Some news photos here.
Protesters seeking the government's resignation occupy both airports, costing Thai Airways $14 million a day. Speculation is rife that the army colludes with the protest movement, the People's Alliance for Democracy.
Riot police have gathered outside Suvarnabhumi, the Prime Minister has declared an emergency and sacked the police chief, and there are rumors of a coup. The government obviously must move to clear the protesters, but apparently has waited at least until foreigners have been evacuated.
With thousands of people at the airport, it's hard to see how this ends well.
The two main English papers in Bangkok, for updates, are The Bangkok Post and The Nation.
See photos from Thailand in EarthPhotos.com's Thailand Gallery.
This is a hallway at the fabled Taj Hotel. With the Taj ablaze at this hour, our thoughts are with anyone who is anywhere near there tonight, on a very grim night in Mumbai.
The government has a resource for photos from the Arctic. In case you're contemplating a nice, dark holiday, or perhaps like many are suggesting, a quick flight up to Iceland (which is half price right now), The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has an Arctic Theme Page to get you ready.
(Photo: Commander John Bortniak, NOAA Corps, via NOAA Photo Library)
See also EarthPhotos.com's Greenland and Iceland Galleries.
After more than a decade of slump, Nepal's tourism industry has begun to rebound. Here's a story.
Photo is Bhaktapur, in the Kathmandu valley, from EarthPhotos.com's Nepal Gallery.
Zimbabwe humanitarian crisis 'critical,' opposition warns
South Africa: Zimbabwe facing ruin
All these headlines are from the past couple of days, but you've been seeing headlines like them for years now - long enough for a whole sub-genre of Zimbabwe memoir books to surface, with titles like:
House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe,
Through the Darkness: A Life in Zimbabwe and
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa.
This photo is of a thriving downtown Harare in 1995. I remembered Harare fondly as a friendly city that worked, so I went back and found some of the things I wrote while visiting there, and to reread them today against the backdrop of those headlines is just astonishing.
Continue reading "Zimbabwe Had So Much: A Really Sad, Sad Thing" »
Odd story here: The I.H.T.'s Globespotters reports that Istanbul's Karakoy dock has collapsed. According to their story, "A big storm this weekend unhinged the dock, and it sank into the Bosporus." This screen grab from Turkish TV, via the I.H.T., shows the dock unhinged, and below is a photo of the Karakoy passenger terminal in better days, from the Ukrainian ferry Yuzhnaya Palmyra, which leaves from Karakoy for its regular service across the Black Sea to Odessa.
Karakoy is a busy place. In addition to ferry traffic across the Black Sea, Karakoy sends local ferries on the short ride across the Bosphorus to Istanbul's Asian shore.
See many more photos from in and around Istanbul in EarthPhotos.com's Turkey Gallery, and from Odessa in the Ukraine Gallery.
Finland has thousands of lakes. Here, in the east of Finland near the town of Varkaus, a summer shower has recently passed, setting up the gorgeous light for this shot of a boat dock and rainbow. This photo is currently the most popular on EarthPhotos.com.
Every visitor can rate every photo on EarthPhotos.com by mousing over the main photo on the page, which brings up "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" icons.
See more in EarthPhotos.com's Finland Gallery, view the most popular page, or browse photos from nearly ninety countries via the EarthPhotos.com Countries page.
All day it rained off and on in Addis Ababa. By late afternoon the clouds had set in, and to capture a photo of these somewhat damp worshippers at the Trinity Church - home of the Emperor Haile Selassie's tomb - required a high ISO, and you can see the resulting digital noise in the original version, on the left. But look at the difference after one quick pass through the Photoshop plug-in Dfine 2.0, right (Click the photo to see a much bigger version). Dfine, from Nik Software, costs about $125, is easy to use and works great. And, you can download a 15 day free trial.
(Photo from EarthPhotos.com's Ethiopian Gallery.)
Common Sense and Whiskey is the blog companion to EarthPhotos.com, our photo site, which at the moment contains nearly 10,000 photos from travel destinations around the world. An item from the photo side of things:
Everybody takes pictures when they travel. More and more of us have all kinds of content on line these days, so here's a good question: What happens to your on-line presence, in our case those 10,000 photos, when you die? The short answer is, whatever you want - and arrange for in advance. This article on TechRadar.com has a discussion.
(Photo from the EarthPhotos.com Greenland Gallery - a cemetery at Iliminaq, Greenland.)
They call it a "Zero-Star" hotel room. Cute story via NPR from Sevelen, Switzerland about the Null Stern Hotel/nuclear bunker.
(Photo from NPR)
This Anglican church, which was built beginning in 1903, is in the most unlikely of locations. Care to venture a guess?
In case you're not sure, there's another photo - an interior view - after the jump. The answer to this week's quiz is there, too.
Have a good weekend, from Common Sense & Whiskey and EarthPhotos.com.
Expedia lists your best deal on a mid-December economy class round trip between New York Kennedy and Barrow, Alaska at $1867. Orbitz says Houston's Bush Int'l to Barrow and back will run you $$1396 (with four stops). Travelocity quotes $1339 to/from Salt Lake city.
What do you get?
Darkness, mostly.
Yesterday afternoon, the sun set in Barrow at 1:59. They expect to see it next around noon on 23 January.
CS&W suggests: Save the air fare, stay home and watch this video clip instead.
But, in case that doesn't leave you cold enough, you can cruise through icebergs in the Greenland Gallery on EarthPhotos.com, and read the accompanying story, Chillin' in Greenland.
(Graphic from weather.com)
We were proud to post a guest column from author and friend of Common
Sense and Whiskey Laurence Mitchell on election day, datelined Esfahan,
from his recent trip to Iran.
Three months ago, on a flight from Dubai, we crossed over, and peered down at, the lights of Esfahan, Iran and alternately checked the in-flight map and strained out the window to decipher which were the lights of the holy city of Qom.
On the ground, our closest approach to Iran was in the summer of 2006, when we scampered down to within, best we estimated, about a dozen miles, on a trip down the A325 highway south of Yerevan, Armenia, to visit the Khor Virap Monastery, near the confused border of Turkey, Iran, Armenia and the Azeri-held Nakhichevan.
Now, when you can spare 25 minutes, check out a well done short film via Current TV called America's Secret War which shows what it's like on another Iranian border - the one with Iraq.
See photos of Khor Virap Monastery and more at the Armenia Gallery, on EarthPhotos.com.
(Photo from Current TV.)
Common Sense and Whiskey is the companion to EarthPhotos.com, where you can see and buy professional photo prints from 105 countries and territories around the world, and the blog for Common Sense and Whiskey - the book. It's Intelligent discussion about the world out there.
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