Common Sense and Whiskey

Friday Photo Quiz #16

The city on the waterfront in this week's photo is home to about two million people. On ancient trade routes, it has been inhabited since antiquity. Its first recorded mention dates back some 3500 years.

Perched on a peninsula with abundant resources, it's now a national capital. The city bid, unsuccessfully, for the 2016 Olympics.

Can you name the country, or the body of water in the photo?

The answer is after the jump.

A good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey & EarthPhotos.com.

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)

Fifty Photos #8

This photo, of fabric for sale in the market town of Otavalo, north of Quito, Ecuador, is today's contribution from the Top Fifty Prints collection at EarthPhotos.com.

Hugo, 37, was our man in Ecuador. He spent six years in the military, his brother was in the Air Force and his father was a career soldier, so we got a lot of military culture in our days together.

Hugo mostly worked in drug interdiction which in Ecuador is deadly serious business. He was frankly and openly frightened of Columbia and duty on the Ecuador/Columbia border.

The Hejab & the Miniskirt: Banned in the 'Stans

First it was Tajikistan. Now it's Uzbekistan.

In Tajikistan, the decree came down in 2007, along with "a ban on students' use of cell phones and private cars, and on lavish parties."

Shokirjon Hakimov, a politician and professor in Dushanbe, said at the time, "...it is an attempt to overshadow the problems in social, economic, political, and cultural life in Tajikistan and to direct people's attention to unimportant issues."

In Uzbekistan, it's not a cultural thing. Honest. Both the head scarf and miniskirt are unhealthy, apparently:

RFE/RL says that, "in a 25-minute long, prime-time television program aired this week," officials warned that "The hijab can also cause oxygen and calcium deficiencies.... As for women who wear miniskirts, they were advised to dress with "moderation" to prevent susceptibility to all kinds of infections and other unspecified health problems."

Quoted from Hijab, Miniskirt: Bad For Your Health, in RFE/RL's Transmissions blog, via  Foreign Policy's blog.

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)

Uncomfortably Close Encounters with the Original Flying Machine

From the Austrian Film Archives, get up alarmingly close and personal with "Wilbur Wright und seine Flugmaschine - 1909."

It's a three and a half minute silent film of demonstration flights for journalists, recorded on 24 April 1909 by the French production company Eclipse in Le Mans, France, including apparently the first footage from a camera taken aloft by a flying machine.

The Wright brothers were bicycle manufacturers, but the flying machine in this film looks more like having been made of lawnmower parts. Check out the skids used as landing gear.

The photo is a screen grab from the site. Click it for a link to the movie page.

Cruise When Money's Tight? Fancy Maybe... Siberia?

Everybody's reigning in spending.

Kraft Macaroni and Cheese dinner kit sales grew by more than 20 percent last year. And because folks keep shoes longer in times of recession, the Sara Lee Corporation will be pushing its Kiwi shoe polish products. So says the Chicago Sun-Times in the story Kraft, Sara Lee push products for penny-pinching shoppers.

So I'd guess the market might be less than robust for this cruise offering I saw the other day - the Ring of Fire Cruise - although it looks like big fun and high adventure: 14 days and 13 nights through Siberia's Kuril Islands and  Kamchatka. 

I'm just thinking if you didn't object to the starting price, $9743 per person, you might object to the four sharing accommodations - or if the dorm thing is okay, maybe the $10k per head might sound a little steep. Not to worry, though. If you're just dead set on twin-sharing accommodations, can do. It'll just cost ya a weensy bit more. Twin sharing cabin without a bathroom, just $26,228 for the two of you. What? You want a cabin with a bathroom? Well, sure. That'll be, let's see, just, um $28,358.

It's only $2181.38 per night. Except, oh: plus, you'll need to make it to Korsakov, on the southern tip of Sakhalin Island, and from Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

And one more thing: "Note: We expect to encounter much fog and grey skies during our time in the Kuril Islands. Be prepared for itinerary alterations to meet these changing conditions."

Why the Frenzy Over Ferris Wheels?

It's a Ferris Wheel revolution.

They're not all open yet, but when they are, to take a spin on the five tallest Ferris Wheels will require a far-flung four country itinerary: China, Singapore, Germany & The U.A.E.

You'll want to wait just a bit, though. There's suspiciously little confirmation out of Dubai about the completion of the Great Dubai Wheel, and Beijing's Great Wheel and the Great Berlin Wheel aren't scheduled to open until later this year.

InventorSpot.com lists the tallest Ferris Wheels like so:

London Eye, 443 feet
The Star of Nanchang, 525 feet
The Singapore Flyer, 541 feet
Great Berlin Wheel, 606 feet
The Great Dubai Wheel, 607 feet
The Great Wheel Of China, 684 feet

The Singapore Flyer only debuted as the world's tallest Ferris Wheel last year and, such is the wheel-building frenzy, by the end of 2009 should be only a disappointing fourth. The Smart Set has an overview of the State of the Wheel.

The Economist reports even Baghdad is getting in on the act. It says, "Although details of the wheel, even its location, are sketchy, a municipal spokesman has confirmed that it will reach 198 metres into the sky and carry some 30 capsules."

(Photo of the London Eye from EarthPhotos.com.)

Fifty Photos #7

This photo, of hill tribe girls selling snacks and soft drinks at a roadside traffic diversion in the mountains of northern Vietnam, is today's contribution from the Top Fifty Prints collection at EarthPhotos.com.

Knives in Oman? What Knives?

Behold the new logo for "Brand Oman," some four years in the making according to The Muscatis.

Someone from Digital Oman went to the presentation and explains, "looking at the brand from right to left, the first colour, dawn purple, represents the dhow; Musandum aquamarine green is inspired by Oman’s rich marine environment and the turtle in particular; sky blue is taken from the silhouettes of the mountains; and the Salalah green is the essence of frankincense."

I'd add that the nice, cool blue and green colors reflect on the summertime temperatures in Muscat about as aptly as the name Greenland fits with its glaciers. Not a single ray of yellow or red sun suggested in the new logo.

The traditional Omani curved knife, called a Khanjar (picture), which every merchant in every shop all across the land wants you to take home, is so ubiquitous that, as the Muscatis points out, it's odd that it wasn't worked in somehow.

 The Muscatis ascribes it to political correctness: "the government is conciously distancing away from the khanjar as a national symbol because it is a weapon since we are living in a 'sensitive' world."

See more photos from Oman in the Oman Gallery on EarthPhotos.com.

Ritz Camera Owes Nikon $26.6 Million

... after it's bankruptcy filing. Three weeks ago we learned that Circuit City Owes Nikon $14,926,445. A million here, a million there....

Aurora Photography

You gotta be willing to head north - way north -  the get spectacular aurora photos like those on the left. Astronomy North, in Yellowknife, Canada, has a great library of aurora photography, including some terrific time lapse movies of auroras recorded last year.

There's also the handy Yellowknife forecast of regular weather, which points out that right now, the temperature in Yellowknife is - 36 degrees C.

Photo at left is a screen grab of part of the menu showing a few of the Quicktime movies available at Astronomy North.

See also our list of specialty travel planning resources, including the custom aurora forecaster.

Drug Searches for South African Flight Crews

... says the BBC, after "customs officers uncovered 5kg (11lb) of cocaine in luggage at London's Heathrow airport" a week ago, and "On another flight from Johannesburg to Heathrow in January, 50kg (110lbs) of cannabis and 4Kg (8.8lbs) of cocaine was discovered. The crews of both flights were arrested...."

Photojournalism in Congo Conflict

T J Kirkpatrick, who's a photojournalist working in Congo has posted some interesting photos from the village of Bangadi, Congo, near the Sudanese border, where villagers are fighting back against the Lord's Resistance Army.

We found that post via a list of African bloggers posted by Glenna Gordon, a photojournalist in Liberia, on her blog  The Scarlet Lion. See also our interview with Glenna.

Friday Photo Quiz #15

Like last time, this week's photo quiz has more than one correct answer. The series of 275 waterfalls in today's photo stretches more than a mile and a half along part of the border between two countries. It's wider than Victoria and taller than Niagara.

Can you name either country, or the falls?

The answer is after the jump.

A good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey & EarthPhotos.com.

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)

This Is Becoming a Trend

Got to postpone that vacation to Guadeloupe, too:

- "BASSE-TERRE, Guadeloupe - Tourists stuck at hotels as violent protests swept this Caribbean island began flying out yesterday after police pulled down barricades following a third night of rioting." - from Amid protests, tourists flee Guadeloupe at Boston.com.

-  "Paris sent police reinforcements to Guadeloupe on Wednesday to stop the violence from spiralling out of control" from Violence erupts in Guadeloupe in the Financial Times.

Cancel Your Lhasa Vacation Plans

This morning's IHT headlines,  Security crackdown over vast areas in and around Tibet . Tourism to Tibet had been near collapse, according to The Tibetan Review last week. Now it's shut down entirely.

It's all about the first of a triumvirate of pesky anniversaries for the Chinese authorities this year. Next month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the flight from Lhasa by Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, ahead of the People's Liberation Army. The young Dalai Lama left Lhasa on 17 March  1959, with an entourage of 20 men, six of them cabinet ministers, in the wake of a failed uprising (The other troublesome dates are the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square on 4 June and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the prople's republic on 1 October).

Today, on the one hand there's a (seldom updated) web site, The Tibetan People's Uprising Movement, and on the other, the Chinese government, which has called the Dalai Lama, "a jackal clad in Buddhist monk's robes," calls the anniversary "Serf Emancipation Day."

In the run up to next month's anniversary, "Large swathes of Gansu, Sichuan and Qinghai provinces — home to large ethnic Tibetan communities — are now off limits to foreign travelers," according to the Associated Press. And as for Tibet proper, "'We had a meeting with the tourist bureau and were asked to stop all groups from entering Tibet for at least the next couple of months,' said Wan Feng, at Tibet Yak Travel," as quoted in the Telegraph.

(Photo of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet from the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Korean Photo of the Year

The Korea Copy Editors Association chose this photo, taken by the Dong-A Ilbo’s Kim Mi-ok, as photo of the year. Here's the site in Korean.

Via Korea Beat.

Facebook on Photos: Never Mind

Facebook Withdraws Changes in Data Use - NYT.com

Incidentally, I found that item on the New York Times' "article skimmer." Editor and Publisher's blog calls it useful if you want to pretend you read the paper.  Could it be an evolving prototype for the NYT's post-print newspaper?

You Just Know This Ain't Gonna Work

Zimbabwe is a lovely country with formerly happy, smiling people and spectacular resources, as we have written.

We'll return as soon as  tourism can resume without the taint of supporting the Mugabe regime. In fact, we're anxious to take the opulent Rovos Rail train from Pretoria up to Mosi-oa-Tunya.

But for now, "Its official, Morgan Richard Tsvangirai is sleeping with the devil."

- That quote from Living Zimbabwe, which also talks about the police kidnapping of Roy Bennett, the Treasurer of Tsvangirai's political party after assurances by Tsvangirai that he'd be okay if he returned to the country. As it turns out, he's now in jail accused of "attempt to commit terrorism, banditry and sabotage."

His wife, Heather Bennett, via Living Zimbabwe:

“If Morgan Tsvangirai has no power to protect his top leadership, the rest of the country is in big trouble because nothing is going to change.”

“If they get away with this Morgan Tsvangirai may as well not even be there because they will walk all over him. And unless he shows the leadership now it is going to be a waste of time having an inclusive government anyway.”

(Photo via Living Zimbabwe.)

Coup Watch: Forget That Vacation to Equatorial Guinea This Week

Today: Gunmen in Boats Attack Presidential Palace.

Interestingly, maybe, British mercenary Simon Mann is there in Malabo - in jail for a coup attempt. Are they busting him out?

Useful Web Travel Tools

Just a few tools I've recently found useful in booking international travel. This time, air travel:

Airline and airport links
Aircraft, airline and airport codes
Airline route maps
Airline route updates blog
Fare code listings
Farecompare
Flyertalk's general links
Flyertalk's mileage run links
Frugal travel guy blog
IATA codes
Low fare search
No frills airlines
Plane crash info

Around here, most brainstorming starts with a look at the airline route maps to see who flies where we're thinking about going. Maybe you can devise an interesting way to get there you'd never thought of. This worked great when we needed transportation between Finland and Rwanda. A look around showed Ethiopian Airlines would pick us up in nearby Stockholm and deliver us to Kampala, Uganda. We got an overnight trip on the Silja Line's "party boat" between Helsinki and Stockholm and a lovely day in Stockholm as an unexpected part of the itinerary.

The airline route updates blog has proved useful, too. Just recently, thanks to them, we found a new South Africa to Walvis Bay nonstop. We need to be in Walvis Bay around New Year's Eve, and that opens up the possibility of just popping into Namibia at the last minute, instead of waiting around a day in Windhoek - which is perfectly nice, don't get me wrong, but we were there year before last.

More tools soon. Next time we'll look at international ferries.

See photos in the Finland, Sweden, Uganda, Rwanda and Namibia galleries at EarthPhotos.com.