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Can you name the river? The city? The country?
The answer is after the jump.
A good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey & EarthPhotos.com.
(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)
Once we stood in a receiving line to shake hands with Marti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland and Nobel laureate, who was in town to speak at Atlanta’s Piedmont Driving Club. In his introduction, a forgotten member of Atlanta’s high society cited, among Ahtisaari’s achievements, brokering a deal which led to the independence of “Nambia.”
We smiled, winced and understood a couple of things: That the presenter’s lack of knowledge reflected the provincialism of our town, and that Namibia isn’t very well-known, either.We’ve since visited Namibia, which is beautiful, and are scheduled to return in just six weeks time. As we’re booked into a couple of days stay at Walvis Bay to start the New Year, Namibia is on our radar, and this story in the New York Times caught my eye. It’s no surprise, more sad than scandalous, and just a reflection of the world as it is today.
The article details allegations of preferential treatment for the children of politicians, and other misdeeds, including that “a state-controlled Chinese contractor … facilitated a $55.3 million deal to sell the Namibian government security scanners with millions of dollars in kickbacks.” Until last year, Hu Haifeng, the son of President Hu Jintao, ran the company.
The article quotes Xia Lili, First Secretary of the Chinese Embassy in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, with that characteristic light Chinese touch, as contending he had no obligation to respond to queries. “This is over,” he said.There will ever be scandals, of course, and we'll just be travelers passing through town. So never mind all that. For enjoying the southern hemisphere summer, and a couple of days at the beach, we're looking forward to the first CS&W posts of 2010 coming from Walvis Bay, Namibia. Over the next few weeks as we get closer to travel, we’ll have a story or two from our last trip to Namibia.
Photo of Namibian sand dunes from EarthPhotos.com. See about a hundred more in the Namibia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Really long, but riveting, play-by-play of the events of one year ago today in Mumbai in the Virginia Quarterly Review by freelance journalist Jason Motlagh. It's called Sixty Hours of Terror.
Photo from our one stay in the Taj Mahal hotel Heritage Wing. We stayed in room 436 during a three month round-the-world trip in 1995.
Photo from EarthPhotos.com's India Gallery.
We used to call it the party boat, and it looks like we weren't alone. The Silja Line is one of two companies (with the Viking Line) that ply the Baltic Sea at the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia between Helsinki, Finland and Stockholm, Sweden.
It's an agreeable way to travel between the two capitals. You board in the afternoon on either side and arrive at your destination the next morning, and along the way enjoy the lovely archipelago in between.
These are huge cruise liners. The Silja Symphony, for example, holds 2,852 in 995 cabins. And it literally is a party boat, with entertainers in the main atrium, like men on stilts and acrobats (photo).
This time of year companies book their holiday office parties aboard. Trouble is, the Helsingin Sanomat reports that the Silja Europa is out of service until December first, and that
"This will affect the travel plans of thousands of people who have already booked their cruises. This is a busy period with many bookings for Christmas parties”, regretted Vice President Pasi Näkki of Tallink Silja."
All Silja Europa departures are cancelled until 1 December due to a rudder problem.
(See more photos in the Finland Gallery and the Sweden Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
As a single event, the initial breach of the Berlin Wall succinctly symbolized the entire tumult of twenty years ago, so on the twentieth anniversary of the event earlier this month everyone reflected on what it meant to them, personally, and what it has meant to the wider world. But the wall's fall was just the beginning of change.
The really great compilation called The Collapse of Communism, as written at the time by the correspondents of the New York Times, captures the sense of wonder with which we all watched the daily events, from Lithuania in the northwest of the increasingly tenuous Soviet empire all the way down to the Caspian Sea, where pogroms against Armenians had already begun in Baku, Ajerbaijan by this time twenty years ago.
Just today twenty years ago, 24 November, 1989, the Czechoslovakian Communist Party leadership resigned and, from a NYT article on 25 November by Steven Greenhouse, some
"350,000 protesters crowded into central Prague in the eighth straight day of huge demonstrations.
"In a striking paradox, the throng was addressed by Alexander Dubcek, whose liberal regime was overthrown by a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968.... It was Mr. Dubcek's first public appearance in Prague since 1968."
Ominously (since we all watched the brutal Christmas Day demise of the Ceausescus), further to the southeast in Romania, old Nicolae and Elena just didn't get the whole change thing. From Alan Riding, writing in the NYT twenty years ago today:
"In a huge display of government control, tens of thousands of workers were marched to a demonstration here today to celebrate the re-election of President Nicolae Ceausescu as General Secretary of the Communist Party."
Read the entire article, In Rumania, the Old Order Won't Budge.
(Photos: Top, "Red Square" sign from the Russia Gallery, and bottom, the Ceausescus' Palace in Bucharest, Romania, from the Romania Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
We have it on good authority that these items are for sale:
• Ladies kick flare jeans sizes 10 priced at £15.00 eachInterested persons can call 2976 or visit No 1 Parish Block, Jamestown.
*****
Or, send us a note. If you're keen for a variety of lipsticks and eye shadow for only a pound apiece let us know. We'll be in Jamestown, St. Helena Island, in January and we'll see what we can do.
The ad above is as printed in the weekly St. Helena Independent, current issue. The Independent is posted for free download every Friday.
St. Helena Island is a British Overseas Territory some 1200 miles west of Angola and 1800 miles east of Brazil in the South Atlantic Ocean. It has no airfield, so visits are only by the British Royal Mail Ship the RMS St. Helena.
The EarthPhotos.com site for photo coverage is ready, bookmark it now.
That'll be us in cabin B36, sailing from the Namibian port of Walvis Bay to St. Helena and calling later at Ascension Island, some 600 miles to the north of St. Helena.
We'll start the new year in Walvis Bay, with a couple of days there before we board the RMS St. Helena. Walvis Bay, Swakopmund to its north and Sandwich Harbour to the south, are touted as prime areas fo bird photography. We'll give it a try.
Sean Gallagher is unlike most people. He has been to Pyongyang. In September the award-winning, Beijing-based photographer and the Canadian Globe and Mail's Asia correspondent, Mark MacKinnon, entered North Korea as tourists. Gallagher wrote about his experience in an article for The Digital Journalist titled Inside North Korea, and now he talks further about North Korea with Common Sense and Whiskey:
- Sean, thanks very much for answering a few questions about your trip to North Korea. First, you're a British photojournalist working in China, right? Tell us a little about your work.
My work in China over the past 3 years has focused mainly on social and environmental issues although recently I have been focusing more on the environmental side. My biggest project of note so far has been on the issue of desertification in China, for which I have received a number of grants and awards. This is the work people probably now know me most for.
- So, you and a colleague crossed the China/North Korea border into North Korea in a bus with Chinese people, right? Since you're not Chinese, did you attract extra attention from the border guards?Well, we stood out like sore thumbs to be honest. Our entry into North Korea was all a bit ‘cloak and dagger’, so we were getting handed from one person to the next, just doing what we were told. When we got told to get on a bus full of Chinese tourists, we did it. The border guards saw us but we think they obviously knew we were coming, so they didn’t do anything.
- Sounds like you were maybe bringing in a camera that was a little more than a point-and-shoot? How did you manage that?
I broke my camera up into as many parts as possible, to make it look less suspicious. When they went though my bags they found my relatively large 16-35mm Canon L lens and took a good minute looking it over. I was a little nervous at this point as it would have been pretty tricky taking pictures without it. Eventually, they put it back into my back and waved me past.
- We read of visitors to the DPRK never being outside of the gaze of their minders. Was that the case for you? Did you ever try to slip away for a walk? Did you and your minders speak English? Mandarin?
We were constantly shadowed by our minders. We had two. One who was our translator and guide, the other just hung in the shadows and followed us around, always within earshot. To my knowledge, both of our minders spoke English and Mandarin.
- We always imagine vast, Communist block style buildings with no heat and dim lights, but it looks from your photos like there are some tolerably nice hotels in Pyongyang. True?
The only hotels you see in my images are either the one that we stayed in in Pyongyang, which houses all foreign guests, or ones which house foreign guests at various tourists sights across the country. They weren’t for the average North Korean citizen. Our hotels were opulent, however the reality for most North Koreans is completely different. Regular power cuts, even in the capital, occur. I noticed however, they always leave the electricity running for the lights which light up various portraits of the leaders about town.
- Outside North Korea, it's safe to say we have an overall impression of paranoia and fear there. Would you say that's accurate? And if they'd have you, would you visit again?I can’t really speculate on what the average North Korean thinks because we were given no chance at all to speak to the average person. Sometimes we got close and I was able to grab some images but we were quickly whisked away by our minders before we could interact any further. I know for sure though, that I felt a high level of paranoia and fear there but that was because I felt we were under constant suspicion. Even between groups of other foreign visitors (who we were kept separate from) there was a level of distrust, born from where we were.
Would I like to go back? Sure. It’s a photographer’s paradise really. I’m not sure they’ll have me back anytime soon though.
- One more thing - since you've returned from North Korea, have you learned when the Tower Bridge was built?Ha. I must admit, I went on the internet to check that when I got back. I wasn’t that far off. They were a bit tough on me!
*****
See Sean's photography at his web site Gallagher-photo.com, keep up with Sean at his blog, and if you're in Beijing, check out his workshops for amateur photographers.
(Top photo: Sean Gallagher. The others, of North Korea, are from Sean Gallagher's web site.)
Like in last week's photo quiz, this place is its country's capital and seat of government, but unlike last week, it's not the country's biggest city. It's home to about a million and a half people. This city and Krakow, Poland were the first Cultural Heritage Sites declared by UNESCO in 1978.
The volcano in the photo stands at 5,897 meters, or 19,347 feet and is still active, having erupted more than 50 times since 1738.
Can you name the city? The country?
The answer is after the jump.
A good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey & EarthPhotos.com.
(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)
We write about tourism to North Korea whenever we run across the rare story about it (here, here, here and here, among a few others). Here's an article written by Sean Gallagher, a photographer based in Beijing, about his visit to Pyongyang earlier this fall.
Join us here tomorrow when CS&W talks with Sean about his trip.
The shipyard at Freemantle, Australia.
Find 400 more photos from around Australia in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Get top-notch professional 8x12 Glossy & Matte prints of this and any of these Top Fifty Prints for just $11.50, 16x24 Glossy, Matte & Lustre for $35.00 at EarthPhotos.com.
(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)
Nice guest HDR photo today from our friends Bobby & Carol Long, recently returned from holiday in Japan. It's the Shinjuku Gyoen Gardens, Tokyo, from a single RAW image converted to HDR.
"Feng Zhenghu has been living in the grey zone between arrival gate and immigration for nearly two weeks" at Tokyo's Narita airport, according to the Financial Times.
Mr. Feng says he was physically forced back onto an ANA flight to Tokyo by authorities in Shanghai after being denied reentry to his home country of China.
The FT: "Asked about the incident, ANA said its staff had needed to use "just a little bit" of force to ensure Mr Feng was on the flight, since it was an hour late and Shanghai authorities had made clear it could not depart until he was on board. Shanghai police declined to comment."
Mr. Feng told the FT, as they put it, during an interview in a Narita corridor, "I refuse to enter Japan. For a Chinese to be kidnapped and taken to Japan like this is a humiliation for me and a humiliation for China."
The Standard in Hong Kong reports that at least Mr. Feng has enough to eat: "Christine Chan, a pro-Tibet student campaigner, took one week's worth of food supplies to Feng Zhenghu, who has sat on a couch in front of the exit immigration checkpoint at Narita International Airport since November 4."
You'd like to know Joris Luyendijk personally, I think, at least judging from his book. Likes jokes, tells funny stories, seems to have an agreeable personality. This blog is all about awareness of other cultures, and so is his book.
Joris Luyendijk was a reporter in the Middle East for five years. He's come home (to the Netherlands) and written a book titled People Like Us, Misrepresenting the Middle East. He writes: "News only shows what deviates from the norm, and if the norm is not known, you get a distorted image."
It's a fast moving, easy read of a book, full of brief anecdotes (and jokes). He writes things you always knew, sensed, or should have expected, taking to task "Donor Darlings," government plants and the "BBC hero" who flies in and never has to actually mix with real people to do his story.
Read it in a weekend, or over a couple of cold winter nights.
It's the country's capital. It's seat of government is here, along with it's iconic fort, on the left at the back of the picture. It's the country's largest city and has been known since the first century as an important trading port. Can you name the city? The country?
The answer is after the jump.
A good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey & EarthPhotos.com.
(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)
In about six weeks time, we'll be off on the world's last royal mail ship, the RMS St. Helena, traveling up the middle of the south Atlantic ocean from the Namibian port of Walvis Bay to the islands of St. Helena and Ascension. St. Helena is among the most remote places on earth, some 1800 miles east of Brazil and 1200 miles west of Angola. Ascension, a dependency of St. Helena (itself a British Overseas Territory), lies some 600 miles further north.
St. Helena is most known as the place of final exile, and death in 1821 of Napoleon. It was chosen to hold Napoleon because of its remoteness and in fact, still today has no air field. The only scheduled service to St. Helena is via the RMS St. Helena. Ascension, meanwhile, is a communications center, sending out the BBC's World Service broadcasts to Africa and South America, and is the home of various NASA and satellite tracking stations and military installations. The RAF used Ascension as a staging area during the Falklands War. (Here's the weekly Ascension newspaper The Islander.)
We'll report on our trip here on CS&W. We'll also be guest posting on the blog associated with the travel booking site CheapoAir.com.
In March of 2007 we were booked into a quick trip to Barcelona but a snowstorm prevented us from reaching our flight at JFK airport. With several days off and nowhere to go, we booked last minute tickets to Ecuador on CheapoAir.com, at a good price and everything worked great, so we can heartily endorse them. Check out Cheapoair.com's blog and use CheapoAir.com for Cheap Tickets. We're listing them from today in our travel tools under "Cheap Tickets." Try 'em.
(See photos from Ecuador in the Ecuador Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. See also the South Atlantic News for coverage of St. Helena, Ascension, Tristan de Cunha, South Georgia and the Falklands.)
Last week's post about the Timor Sea oil rig was illustrated with a photo from Pirallahi Island, Azerbaijan. Seeing that again inspired me to judiciously tone map five photos from there (two above, all five larger after the jump) to illustrate this story of our visit there, in June of 2006:
The drilling towers, in groups of twos and threes, mostly long abandoned, cast skeletal shadows on the scrub and brown of the earth, sometimes on pools of oil or grease. Occasionally, heavy metal poles jutted from the ground. If they were longer they would have converged. I guessed these are drilling masts either begun but abandoned, or which had fallen or been dismantled, and the rest of which had been carried off.
In one spot along the causeway that connects the Abseron peninsula to the island of Artyom, now renamed Pirallahi, an abandoned drilling mast stood alongside the broken bases of others, and their rusty remnants laid on their sides in the water beside them.A man stopped his car. His passenger climbed out and glared at us as I took pictures of the gloom. Oil spread at random in shallow pools, and it wasn’t clear if it was there through neglect or if it rises spontaneously from the earth.
A family of mountain gorillas at Parc National des Volcans, Rwanda.
Now you can friend a gorilla on Facebook.
A year ago, last August, we did two very worthwhile gorilla treks in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda. Here are links to some of the stories we wrote at the time: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
There are more photos like this in the Gorillas Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Get top-notch professional 8x12 Glossy & Matte prints of this and any of these Top Fifty Prints for just $11.50, 16x24 Glossy, Matte & Lustre for $35.00 at EarthPhotos.com.
(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)
It may be that no one from Des Moines has ever packed up the kids and set off for a nice three week family vacation to Macau (or Chittagong, N'Djamena or Bago), and the same will be true of Baghdad for some time to come. But at least there are more ways to get to Baghdad than there have been.
Reuters reports that "State-owned Iraqi Airways will sign an agreement with French authorities in mid-November to resume weekly flights between Baghdad and Paris," and "Iraqi Airways recently began direct flights to Stockholm, and is eyeing direct flights to Germany as its next destination, an airline official said."
That might be true, but it's not a cinch for those of us who don't read Arabic to confirm, since the Iraqi Airways site is only in Arabic, with no translations that I can find. (There is an Iraqi Airways site with a UK web address, English and all, but alas, it says "© 2006" and doesn't list any of that.)
Not a cinch to confirm, but not impossible. A look at Stockholm Arlanda Airport's web site sure does show Iraqi Airways flight IA243 scheduled to arrive from Baghdad via Erbil tomorrow at 21:30.
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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