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If you set out straight south from this island harbor, you'd next encounter land in about 2700 miles - on a continent geographically entirely different. Can you name this city? The island it's on? It's country?
The answer is after the jump.
A good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey & EarthPhotos.com.
(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)
The idea here is to sell two economy seats, and then the empty one in between them at something like half price.
Read about it at:
Flightglobal, View from the Wing, and The Wandering Aramean.
Photo credit: Air New Zealand
I commend to you Towers of Stone: The Battle of Wills in Chechnya by Wojciech Jagielski.
Edward Lucas writes:
"FORMIDABLE, useful in war and, though picturesque, impractical in peacetime, the stone towers that dot Chechnya’s mountains could be regarded as symbols of its people. Wojciech Jagielski’s book sets new standards for gritty reporting of Russia’s most miserable corner, and the dreadful damage done to it by both outsiders and the Chechens’ own leaders."
Before and since our drive up the Georgia Military Highway to the Georgia/Russia border three years ago, we've read a lot about Chechnya. This book may be the most compelling. It's under $14 in paperback. (See also The Man Who Tried to Save the World by Scott Anderson and Chienne de Guerre by Anne Nivat.)
The stone towers in the photo below, which appear across the Georgian countryside as well, are situated along the Georgia Military Highway in the Republic of Georgia, maybe 50 kilometers or so south of the border, north of which the Chechen capital of Grozny is maybe 100 additional kilometers.
See more photos from the Republic of Georgia in the Georgia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. Read more about our visit to Georgia here on CS&W.
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range photography, a technique in which multiple exposures are combined to produce a greater range between the lightest and darkest parts of a photo than in standard digital photography. The most popular software for creating HDR images is PhotoMatix, a $99 download for Macs and PCs.
Here's an HDR photo I particularly like, taken last August of the shipyard at Freeo, as the locals call it - known to you and me as Freemantle, Australia.
See a larger, higher-res version of this picture at this link, more HDR photography in the HDR Gallery , and more photography from Australia in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Looking into possibilities for some Arctic travel this summer. Here's the early stages of an expanding reading list:
- Who Owns the Arctic?: Understanding Sovereignty Disputes in the North by Michael Byers
- After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic by Alun Anderson
- Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica by Sarah Wheeler
Some web resources:
- Svalbard Tourism - Cruise Handbook for Svalbard - Longyearbyen (capital of Svalbard) airport information - Tromso, Norway flight information - Wideroe Norwegian airline - Faroe Islands photography - Faroe Islands transportation - The Smyril ferry line - Arctic Small Ship Cruises
And related:
- Alaska bear viewing - The Northwest Passage (1, 2, 3) - Canadian polar bear tours - more here, including the aurora forecaster.
Prior to our August 2010 visit, our trips to the region have included Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The links are to their galleries at EarthPhotos.com.
There's a dusting of snow on the mountains around the farm. Feeling like a pioneer woodsman (I must buy some big flannel work shirts) this morning, I fed a fire until it crackled furiously in the wood stove, situated a mug of coffee so that little rings of steam rose between me and the window, and settled in to take in all the world's overnight developments via our so-called DSL, way up here at the far end of the last twisted pair on this entire gravel lane.
While reading "6 Reasons Bacon is Better Than True Love," I remembered that sometimes the internet can be just a wee bit of a time waster. But, if you knew where to find it, there was real news; It seems the U.S. is lifting it's 21 year ban on sheep offal!
And this is news because?
Because of haggis.
"... butchers in the US have tried, and failed, to make their own versions of the pudding without using the vital ingredient: sheep. "It was a silly ban which meant a lot of people have never tasted the real thing," said Margaret Frost, of the Scottish American Society in Ohio. "We have had to put up with the US version, which is made from beef and is bloody awful," reports the Guardian.
No need for bloody awful haggis anymore. And to top it off, the news comes in the same week as the observance of Robert Burns night.
*****
A week and a half ago Mirja and I took a London Cab over to the Royal Academy of Arts for the new exhibit, The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters. The only trouble: that exhibit started the following Saturday. So we walked back out across the street and into Fortnum & Mason (Piccadilly since 1707) and there, in cans just as readily available as Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, were rows and rows of haggis.
Not knowing they were contraband, it was good that we didn't buy any. The next day was our flight home and big metal cans were going to have a hard time finding their way into our laden bags. Instead, our shopping cart was filled with smaller, handy travel-sized extra strong English mustards, special flavored Welsh sea salts - and, of course, crunchy Cambodian crickets (baked, not fried) and Scorpion vodka.
Although funny, if you search the Fortnum & Mason site this morning, you don't return any results for crickets or scorpions - or those chocolate covered tarantulas that shared the same display case. All of which looked more appetizing than these chickens from Nepal or these dogs in Hanoi.
Browse through nearly 300 more photos in the Food and Drink Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
The Friday photo quiz is back. The church in this week's quiz is the principal landmark in this capital city, towering, as you can see, above town. Can you name the church? 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.)
After three days in the open ocean, Captain Rodney Young of the RMS St. Helena spies land - the island of St. Helena, some 18oo miles east of Brazil and 1200 miles west of Angola. Below, the RMS St. Helena at anchor off Jamestown, St. Helena Island.
The Brits do museums great. Last week we spent an afternoon at London's British Museum which, thanks in part to a legacy of colonial occupation, contains some seven million artifacts. You could devote an entire week's vacation to that museum alone.
Unfortunately, the British Natural History Museum has found itself in the midst of a bit of controversy. Its 2009 Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition attracted some 43,000 entries and the winning photo, above, has been disqualified.
Officials said the judging panel "concluded that it was likely that the wolf featured in the image was an animal model that could be "hired for photographic purposes." There will be no winner for 2009.
According to the BBC, the photographer, Jose Luis Rodruiguez "had, throughout the investigation, denied "hiring" (the wolf) for the photograph. The disqualified photographer maintains that his subject was a wild wolf." There's more in the Guardian.
The 2010 competition is now open.
I met my friend Nick on the two day run up from St. Helena to Ascension Island. Tourists don’t much visit Ascension, so this was a ferry full of “Saints” like Nick, residents of St. Helena, on their way back to contract work up at Ascension. Nick has a shop in the village of Two Boats.
Nick and I sat drinking beer in the open air aboard the RMS St. Helena, out on deck behind the indoor sun lounge. We were escaping the games inside, bingo and the like, meant to entertain passengers grown weary of no sight of land for a couple of days.
Nick spoke in quick half-sentences. He’d make a point and give a knowing nod and a smile, like he’d just heard himself and agreed with what he said. An altogether agreeable, upstanding presentation. And he had some things to say:
“St. Helena got its problems, y’know? Some people makin’ a fortune. Guy goes off to the Falklands to work, lives almost like a slave. Livin’ in dormitories, cleanin’ up after the Brits. He gets free travel, now, but he makes what, five grand a year, comes home and a house gonna cost him twenty. No way to live.
And a man ought not have to go away to earn a living anyway. Here I go to Ascension, been there eleven years. Now the good thing: the way you can raise kids. It really is good. I’m bringin’ my son because I have a little shop and my wife, she teaches. No lockin’ doors, keys in the car. 900 people, maybe a thousand, right? Somebody ever takes something, eventually you find it.
Now they have these clubs, a man doesn’t need money, just sign and have a beer, pay for it on payday. He don’t pay, he can’t leave the island, they take his last paycheck or somethin’.
Sometimes I say no at my shop. A boy come in, wants a case of beer, if he can’t pay I say no. Otherwise I end up with no beer and no money to buy more. But my father taught me never say no if a man is a couple a pounds short for his kid’s shoes.
Makes him a loyal customer. I only need forty, fifty, then I can keep my family and go on one good holiday a year. No great place, South Africa on the ship. But too many people tryin’ to make too much, messin’ up everything. Makin’ a false economy.
But if you leave St. Helena and your kids behind, Grandma has to raise ‘em and she can’t keep up and they go wild like feral cats. You come back they’re a problem and the next generation bound to be worse.
Like down at Donnie’s. It’s a shame they have to play that music, black American thing, sayin’ “bitch” and all. Kids don’t have to grow up that way. Used to be different. Used to have respect. Now a kid behaves bad and you tell him, he say “that’s for my Mother to tell me.”
They don’t need all those cars. They should do a park and ride. Crazy everybody rushin’ to the middle of town. Some of them drive there in the morning leave their car there all day. They could have just walkin’ there and tables instead of cars and you could eat….
(Cars and trucks line the tiny main street in Jamestown, St. Helena Island.)Can’t make a parking lot. Can’t tear this down, can’t tear that down, cause it’s always been there. And some businesses don’t need to be there, y’know? Wholesalers oughta move out, quit cloggin’ everything up. But the idea is, I bought this car and you can’t tell me where to go. Same thinkin’ everywhere. They build an airport and you go up to the gate and whistle, your friend come over and the bag never gets on the plane. Y’know? That’s the kind of thinkin’.
Grinds people down. Some people make too much money, some people really poor, best thing they want is maybe a broken down second hand car. They just never gone anywhere, never seen anything in the world.
Now I been eleven years on Ascension. I been lucky. Time for me to go back to my business on St. Helena. My father died young. Not young, 62. My mother died in her 50’s. Lucky, my Auntie keeps my business back home. Won’t say I’ll never go back to work on Ascension. You get really big fish there, you know?”
*****
(More photos from St. Helena Island in the South Atlantic Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
These photos were so much fun to produce I thought I'd post another. A few days ago I posted one of these in a separate post, and here's a second, similar one.
We were walking down Oxford Street near Hyde Park in London last Thursday just around 4:30 in the afternoon, dark coming on. We looked up and saw these titans of industry a few floors above us. They spend all day looking down on the street, so we thought it would be fun to return the favor.
I ran back to the hotel, grabbed the tripod and returned to a parallel street where the building could be seen from a little more of a distance and put the D700 through its paces, shooting various exposures in RAW. I've been post-processing off and on since, and I hope to have a few more variations over time. These two are tone-mapped HDRs with the strength set really low.
See them larger and in higher-res here and here at EarthPhotos.com.
The question of whether there will ever be an airport on the British Overseas Territory of St. Helena is a perennial. Judging from the opinions of the crew of the RMS St. Helena (which has a vested interest, since it provisions the island), the consensus answer is no.
The Christmas issue of the St. Helena Independent weekly newspaper chastised the current British Labour government for kicking the decision six months down the road (and likely, into the Tories' laps) with yet another study (Download the issue "20091218.pdf" here.) This empty building, on the island's main street down near the harbor, also suggests frustration:
As we boarded the RMS St. Helena at Jamestown for the two day run up to Ascension Island Saturday a week ago, some customers at Ann's Place, our favorite little lunch spot, saw our camera gear and asked if we might be BBC. A BBC crew was expected, but we'd been told they weren't due for another week.
Now they've been there. Read their story on their web site. Be sure to watch the video featuring Mia, the ship's second officer. She gives the bridge tours on the ship, too.
(More photos from St. Helena here on EarthPhotos.com.)
Photographers who fancy a trip to Cuba: Painet, the picture resource service for photo buyers, sends this, which I pass along in its entirety:
"Successful travel and stock photographer Bill Bachmann will be directing another Cuba Photo Mission from March 28th thru April 9th, 2010. This trip is Bill's third 13-day directed trip with the opportunity to see time stand still in Cuba from the 1950's before the embargo started. This will be a wonderful opportunity to take photos of all the old Classic 50s autos, colorful people, colorful music, and fabulous old buildings before the embargo gets lifted and Cuba changes forever.
His group will have a special Humanitarian Visa to fly directly via 45-minute charter American Eagle flight to/from Miami to Havana. Bill has traveled extensively throughout Cuba four times and several Painet shooters just returned from a wonderful adventure with his last trip in October, 2009. The price is right and we also will bring much-needed medical supplies to this colorful country and people.
This trip will fill up quickly, so for more information, look at Bill's website www.billbachmann.com . Bill is on assignment this month in Tunisia in the Sahara Desert, so if you want all the information about the trip, email him at his traveling email billbachmann@yahoo. com and he will get back with you with the itinerary, pricing, and all other information. This is a rare opportunity, so don't pass it up."
A couple of travel days (Oxford to London to Atlanta back to the farm) and a couple of days of rest, and we're back. Housekeeping notes: We'll keep the South Atlantic Gallery (which contains about 120 photos) where it is on EarthPhotos.com, and we'll add new St. Helena and Ascension Island galleries to the EarthPhotos Countries page over the next couple of weeks. That will bring the total number of countries and territories represented to 97.
A fun photo, I thought, of busy, busy men in an office building on Oxford Street near Hyde Park, London, today. We'll have all these up in higher-res in a few days on EarthPhotos.com.
At Long Beach, Ascension Island, and the next day,
in the month long snow siege of England, near Oxford:
Waiting in a little chain-link pen on the tarmac at Wideawake Airfield, Ascension Island, for the interminably delayed RAF flight to England. We're precisely twelve hours late just now (after being hauled here to sit in our pen four hours ago) and won't leave for two more hours, or so they say most recently.
Listening to British armed forces radio from somewhere up in the U.K. just doesn't fit: "Snow spreading slowly north this morning...." Outside the pen here are palms and blooming tropical flowers, and there's sunshine and a light, fresh breeze. Fresh in contrast to the transit passengers from the Falklands who, already ten or twelve hours into their ride back to England, are here with us, and face ten more hours at least.
But there's wifi, and so to pass the time I thought I'd put up a couple new photos. First, a view down from Green Mountain, the island's peak, which really is green and maybe a degree or two cooler than down here at sea level:
And second, road signs. However many boats you want, Ascension's got you covered:
You think this place ain't a hot holiday destination?
*****
See you soon (or at least eventually) from back north in the snow.
One quick note from Ascension Island before we fly away. Took a drive around today and saw, among other striking landscapes, this one:
Heading for England on the overnight RAF/MoD flight, now scheduled for in the morning. If that holds, we'll have more to say from there, where we'll stay until Sunday. Saw a turtle laying eggs last night on the beach. Want to wait until there's time to give that it's due.
Our home away from home for now, the Obsidian Hotel, Ascension Island.
Ascension Island. Volcanic, 100 kilometers west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the tip of a 3,200 meter high, 60 kilometer wide shield volcano. Most recent lava flows are thought to be in the last 1,000 years but there have been none since 1501. It’s some eight degrees south of the equator.
While Ascension had been discovered previously, it took the arrival of Napolean in 1815 to prompt the British government to set up a camp here, to prevent the French from attempting a rescue mission.
The waters off Ascension are home to spotted and bottlenose dolphins, humpback and Gervais’ beaked whales and the big attraction, the green turtle. The green turtles are laying right now (December to June) and then begin an incredible swim across to Brazil, returning in time to the very same beaches here to once again lay their eggs.
We're booked into a walk with the Conservation Service tonight to see nesting turtles, and it doesn't look to be too much of a challenge. On a quick walk to the beach when we arrived we saw four or five turtle trails from the water to the holes they'd dug last night, I guess, right by the jetty.
There are frigate birds, petrels and my favorite, the silly-looking masked booby. About 25 species of plants are thought to be native, ten unique to the island. 135 species of invertebrates have been recorded here, including Psuedoscorpions, flightless crickets and the blues-singing Endemic Blind Spider.
Ascension is home to butterflies, including the African Monarch, geckos and land crabs, feral cows and sheep and chickens, and grey rabbits. And Obsidian. In fact, the only hotel here is the Obsidian Hotel, our home for a couple of days.
All the way around the bottom of the island is barren, but a mountain rises toward the east of the island informatively named Green Mountain, atop which are nature walks and trails. The island’s only naturally produced water comes from up here.
We have a car hired for tomorrow morning to check it out up there. Too hot down here.
Note: I've posted several more photos to this trip's Gallery at EarthPhotos.com this afternoon. Many with no captions yet, some duplicates, all out of chronological order. Not very organized just now. Sorry for that, but they're there.
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.
The Photos:
