Common Sense and Whiskey

Adding Insult to Injury (from Crocodiles)

This photo, from the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi, is as close as we got to the UN/NGO-dominated town of Goma, Dem. Rep. Congo. U.N. charters flew in almost constantly. Click the photo for a larger version you can actually see.

 

To and from Gisenyi, long haul trucks from the Indian Ocean ports of Mombasa and Dar es-Salaam brought goods to supply eastern Congo. Congo itself, mind you, fronts the Atlantic Ocean. But the state of its infrastructure is so dismal as to require the eastern half of the country to be supplied from the other side of the continent.

So it's no real surprise to see this article from the AP: Wildebeest roadblock? Highway planned in Serengeti. Along with the crocodiles in the Mara River, it's one more obstacle the wildebeests really don't need.

*****

Right now the annual wildebeest migration across the Masai Mara is in full swing. Here are a couple of sites tracking wildebeest movement:

Annual Wildebeest Migration
The Great Migration

Tallinn, Estonia

HDR of an oh-so-cute tourist train around the old town. Perhaps the driver's very tired after driving all day.

 

It's from the new and as yet unfinished Estonia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Ethnic Food Blog

Nicely done food blog centered around Central Asian & Turkish cuisine: It's called Kebabistan.

Just What We've Been Needing

Geez, you leave town for just a couple of weeks and come back to find the entire world of travel revolutionized:

"Tripbase has hired a pair of twin sister astrologers, one based in New York and the other in Seattle, to write customized travel horoscopes for every month," says MSNBC. 

Friday Photo Quiz #82

We resume the Friday quizzes with a panoramic photo from a country we've just visited. Can you name the city? The country? 

The answer is after the jump. 

After you've made your guess, you can make this photo much bigger or really huge. It's a multi-image panorama stitched together with PTGUI stitching software.

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

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)

More North Korea Tourism

Koryo Tours is your contact for travel in North Korea. Under certain conditions, Americans can visit the DPRK, and the biggest (only) tourist event of the year, the Mass Games, runs now through early October.

Foreign Policy has a new interview with an American business professor, Patrick Chovanec, a recent tourist in North Korea:

"At dawn, the whole town wakes to recorded patriotic songs and messages blared from loudspeakers. During the day, people walk around pushing their belongings -- including their children -- in makeshift wheelbarrows. At night, police jeeps cruise the dark like sharks, shouting harsh commands over their megaphones at passersby."

Read the whole article.

Noted in Passing

The Intercontinental Hotel Presidente Puebla's web site says, "Both business and casual travellers delight in our close proximity to Finsa and Chachapa industrial parks and the area’s cultural centres."

Well, sure....

Vilnius, Lithuania: Wednesday HDR

We're back on the farm after our summer trip from Finland through the Baltics and Belarus, the Alps and Munich. Everything here is, agreeably, as we left it.

Everywhere along our route except Murren, in the Swiss Alps, was unusually hot. In Finland they grumbled, but we enjoyed swimming in the lake - actually warm for once. Vilnius, Lithuania, in particular, baked in the sun. We were persuaded, as we sat under umbrellas at a terrace café there, to take a bus to Minsk rather than the train.

The train was old and Belarusian and stopped forever at the border, they said. It would take the better part of five hours, while the nice modern bus took something over three.

They were quite right about the length of the trip. Thing was, the air conditioning on the nice modern bus barely made it the 33 kilometers to the Lithuania/Belarus border. And naturally, the windows were structurally shut. Hot in there.

Builds character. Makes a good story. 

Tons of photos are coming. For today's Wednesday HDR, here's one I like from Vilnius, Lithuania. It's old town was packed with tourists like us on the afternoon we hit town, so I decided to get up early the next morning and do the same walk before the tourists. This photo looks up an alley around the corner from the Presidency building. It's a single shot re-exposed at +2 & -2, combined and tone-mapped in Photomaix, tweaked with Nik Software.

EarthPhotos.com will have new Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus Galleries soon. For now, here are some low-res photos from all the countries we visited on our August trip.

Lee Harvey Oswald in Minsk

I'm told that Lee Harvey Oswald lived here, across the Svisloch River from Janki Kupaly Park in downtown Minsk, Belarus. The person I spoke with indicated Oswald's apartment was on the top right in this shot. There's another photo elsewhere that indicates it was around on the other side.

Oswald in Minsk is an episode I don't know the first thing about. Here's some background, though I can't vouch for it's accuracy. Photo from EarthPhotos.com. It'll make its way to the Belarus Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, coming soon.

Munich Rathaus HDR

Remind me next time - Munich is full of tourists in August. Every third person is American. Not normally our preferred situation, but the weather is gorgeous, and as compared to the Baltics and Belarus it's a perfectly shoulders-down, upscale end to these past three weeks.

Culture? You name it, we've done it: The higher brow kind - art museums (both the Alte and the Neue Pinakothek, which makes for a long day of standing), and the local kind - beer, sausages and sauerkraut at the beer garden at the Chinesischer Turm in the Englischer Garten.

Count the red jerseys. Public opinion is squarely behind Bayern Munchen, the home team.

Here's an HDR of the rathaus with it's famous glockenspiel - city hall from all 306 steps up Peterskirche. Click the photo for a bigger version.

Friday Photo Quiz...

......... resumes on 27 August.

Tallinn, Estonia Old Town HDR

Panorama: Switzerland

Panorama of the Bernese Alps from Murren, Switzerland. The lights at the distant left are the village of Lauterbrunnen. The snowy peak on the left is Mt. Eiger (3970 meters, or 13025 feet). You can make this much bigger or really huge.

Riga, Latvia and the Daugava River

Part of the Riga, Latvia skyline. I'm promising some nice panoramas later using PTGui stitching software, but this little MacBook's just really too small to do it now. For now, you can make this photo much bigger.

Riga HDR

There's a little basement walkway outside the Riga Dom, the Catholic Church, in which they seem to store a bunch of things they don't have anywhere else to put. No idea about the story of this clock face.

It's a three exposure HDR, handheld. All photos from our current trip to Finland, the Baltics, Belarus and now the Alps, are going up here as I work through them.

[Note, 31 August: The Rigas Doms is in fact a Protestant Church. My mistake.]

The Seditious Sausage Caper

Evil totalitarian planners built imposing eight-lane boulevards that run ramrod-straight for miles. They commissioned monumental buildings, too far back from the road. And they did it all to make you know the power of the state, and to remind you that the Soviet government was very big and you are very, very small, little man.

In Minsk every building is a monument, and there are monuments besides. Two are vast Communist spaces – the Soviet Square and the Victory Square (photos to come, here). There’s a government sports complex, a part of town that goes on for miles, topped off down at the end by the new hockey stadium, home to the European hockey finals in 2014.

The GUM department store, at the corner of Lenin and Nezavisimosti streets, is properly big and still broken down into discreet sections, almost individual kiosks, selling various products, just like the GUM in Moscow in 1986. It’s wooden, with big wide staircases and women wearing banners. I don’t know what the banner thing was.

I committed the treasonous act of photographing the deli case in a Gastronom on Nezavisimosti Street. I was caught, and I would have to pay. I thought I could wear down the authorities, but it was hopeless. I was made to delete the two photos on the spot by an insistent pair of young deli employees.

At Hafez Assad’s Baath Party headquarters in Beirut, I played the “I’m just a dumb tourist with a camera” routine long enough that the soldier tired of me and let me keep my photo.

I may have outlasted the Baath Party, but not the deli case duo in Minsk. I am sorry I do not have the two samizdat photos of Belarusian sausages I was hoping to seditiously circulate to the outside world.

*****

Some very nice folks in Minsk, where the pace of life was relaxed even amid the monster edifices. Trouble is, the rationale for the whole town’s design has come and gone, but the city is still there, and they still have to live in it.

Farmhouse HDR, Switzerland

In the Alpine village of Murren.

Travel Day

More about Belarus (top) as soon as we decide a little better what to think about it. For now, we've just arrived at the Hotel Eiger, Murren, Switzerland. View from the balcony, bottom.

All photos here.

32 or 33 yesterday, 12 now. Besides the temps, these are two pretty different places.

No Comment

Not to skip past Lithuania, except for now, because Vilnius was handsome and hot. But just quoting from the literature here in the Minsk Crowne Plaza about its Next Night Club: "The luxury and colour of the club will allow you to feel truly significant and successful."

Friday Photo Quiz...

......... resumes on 27 August.