Common Sense and Whiskey

Common Sense and Whiskey Chapter One

Look for Chapter one of Common Sense and Whiskey - the book, Lake Baikal, here tomorrow.

What More CAN They Do?

I had occasion to hire a locksmith this week, and as he went about his work he observed that this would be quite an election, this next presidential one. I agreed that was surely true. He said about the President's birth certificate, "Now if they can just prove it's true...."

I was confounded by that. I suggested (perhaps lamely) that if it IS true, what more can they do!?

The energy we expend to prevent reconciliation. Of course, it's not just here in America.

In my book Common Sense and Whiskey, I write about our trip through Tibet:

Just before Xegar stood an imbecilic checkpoint where we waited on the side of the road in the LandCruiser while the local three we’d accrued scampered off into a little squat building that sat, I mean, in the middle of absolutely slap-me-blind nowhere.

Now, man may do worse things to man than to restrict movement in a place so utterly barren, vast and empty, but hardly anything more stupid. So many rules in a place so empty.

That's Tibetans versus Han Chinese.

The Tibetans in exile have just elected a new Prime Minister who has never been to Tibet in an effort by the Dalai Lama to preempt Chinese control of succession after his death. Meanwhile the Chinese insist on vetting the next Dalai Lama.

•••••

As we stood in Armenia near at the Turkish/Armenian border, our guide Levon pointed out

A really big statue on a hill, Georg somebody, Armenian partisan, (who) stands and taunts the Turks still.

That's Armenians versus Turks.

This week Turkey has begun to tear down a Turkish/Armenian friendship statue in the eastern city of Kars, formerly home to a large Armenian population (and the setting for Orhan Pamuk's book Snow). American presidents try to reassure the Armenian diaspora on an 24 April anniversary important to Armenians. This week, President Obama appears to have pleased no one. The Armenians stand, and feel, alone, save for a dubious partner in Russia.

•••••

The Tibetans have clearly and obviously come under come under the Chinese iron hand. The killing of Armenians by Turks (whom I dearly love, and I will argue anywhere that Istanbul is one of the top five cities on the planet) is well established.

If it IS true, what more can they do?

- Photo of the Potala, Lhasa, Tibet from EarthPhotos.com.

Friday Photo Quiz #112

The prayer flags at the entrance to this village must be a clue. But they may not help much, since this place doesn't exactly look to be tucked up in the  Himalayas. Hmmm. So we have a tough one. 

Can you name the country? Oh go ahead, take a guess.

The answer is after the jump. And a good weekend from Common Sense and Whiskey and EarthPhotos.com.

Of Dams and Ecosystems - and Wednesday HDRs

Conflicting stories about a dam across the Mekong: On Monday the Vancouver Sun ran the story Laos agrees to delay dam that neighbours say threatens Mekong. From a story today via Vietnamnet, "Thailand’s second largest contractor is pushing ahead with the controversial Xayaburi dam in Laos despite concerns voiced by environmental activists."

Can't claim to be an expert on Laotian hydroelectric needs or possible ramifications in the Mekong Delta, but having visited both the general area of the dam and the Delta, I can say both are lovely and unique and you'd hate to see the character of either change.

Here's the Mekong upstream from Luang Prabang, Laos. Entirely pristine:

And from farther south at the Mekong Delta below Saigon, here are this week's Wednesday HDRs, a couple of photos from Can Tho, Vietnam's eighth largest city. First from the really big floating market, then a textured photo of the terrace at the Victoria Can Tho Hotel:

Both HDRs shot with Nikon D-200, processed in Photomatix Pro and finished in Photoshop CS4.

All these photos click through to larger versions on EarthPhotos.com. Check out the Vietnam Gallery and Laos Gallery there for more. And there are over 300 photos in the HDR Gallery.

And while we're on the subject, read an excerpt from our story Hurtling Through the Mekong Delta.

 

The Little Opthalmologist Who (Maybe) Couldn't

Stratfor's head man George Friedman has his critics, but this post on Stratfor today seems like real inside-the-country sentiment from Syria.

Excerpting the Book

We'll start excerpting Common Sense and Whiskey, the book, with chapter 1 here on the blog in a few days. Chapter one is a brief story about crossing Lake Baikal, Siberia. Watch for it this weekend.

Nambia, Namibia ... Whatever

Former Finnish President, international fixer and Nobel laureate Martti Ahtisaari once gave a talk in our town and we went to see him. The distinguished gentleman who introduced him to the distinguished crowd at Atlanta's distinguished Piedmont Driving Club listed among his achievements "helping to achieve independence for Nambia."

We visited Nambia a few years back, and found that the locals actually call it "Namibia."

•••••

Late in the afternoon our pilot, a very young girl with blond hair and blazing blue eyes, took three of us up in a Cessna for a trip out over the dunes. She explained that at the coast (55 kilometers away), sometimes they run safaris on the beach, so if we saw any cars we had to let her know immediately!

That was curious. Why?

They could spoil our fun, she grinned. We were required to fly at 3000 feet, but out there she said she would drop us illegally to 500.

Where in the world can you flaunt rules like this if not on the desolate coast of bloody Namibia!? And so we did.

We retraced the morning’s route from the airstrip across the road from our lodge, into the park and down along the tar road.

They’ve numbered the dunes, 1 to 70 or 80, and we did a pinwheel around Dune 45, somehow an icon. Bernard had stopped for us to see it, too, driving us in the morning, and indeed, folks had been already there and climbing it.

Before sundown, though, dune 45, and all of the dunes, stood deserted. Everyone had to be out of the park at night.

We did a long turn around “Big Daddy,” which they repute to be the world’s tallest sand dune, and in the same sweep took in the dead vlei and Sossusvlei, and the dune we’d climbed in the morning. They call that one “Big Mama.”

The road ends here and beyond, nothing but dunes, horizon to horizon, and no place for engine trouble.

The coast gained focus, and in time we cruised over a fallen-in diamond mining settlement. The sight of it was jarring, its man-made perpendiculars entirely out of sorts with the natural swirls of the desert, which often resembled nothing more than crumpled bed sheets.

The shipwreck on the Namibian beach.

We came down low along the water’s edge to see seal colonies, dozens, that stretched for miles, up to a shipwreck and then back over the dunes to a curious landscape, low green vegetation spotted with circles they called fairy circles. They reckon trees died and somehow poisoned the soil, and nothing grows in the circles.

•••••

For complicated reasons we had one way tickets to Namibia. Those thin, slick, mimeographed handwritten ones.

Down Down Assad

In 2000 when Hafez al-Assad died, we were in Vietnam, and curtailed a day of tourism to watch the news play out on CNN. Since having read Patrick Seale's definitive Asad: The Struggle for the Millde East, I've had a special appetite for his little eye doctor boy's regime to go. Let the chips fall where they may, and let us hope we can all visit a free Damascus soon. We can hope, can't we?

The Belgravia Dispatch weighs in.

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book, is now available at Amazon

Buy it now! 

Crossing the Black Sea

From 2007:

Today we’d sail on the Yuzhnaya Palmyra, a ship of the UKRFerry shipping company, on once weekly service Istanbul to Odessa. It was to be an approximately 28 hour crossing of the Black Sea south to north, although we’d have to see about the timing.

Departure was set for 9:00 on the web, 10:00 on our ticket (a hard copy they insisted on sending via DHL for $70 from Ukraine to the U.S.), and 11:00 by the people at the hotel, who made some calls on our behalf. So arrival as well, I suspected, ought to be approximate.

We presented ourselves down at the Karakoy docks shortly past 8:00 a.m. “Actual Time,” as the reception clock had it. We had ample time for a spin up and down ship, stem to stern, and an extended goodbye to the mosques filling the Istanbul skyline, lying at anchor, as we were, just meters across the Golden Horn from Topkapi and Sultanahmet. There would be breakfast service before heaving ho, part of the “three meals a day provided all passengers.”

It may have still been Istanbul outside but it was full Ukraine in the песторан (restaurant). Most of the good Ukrainian women were fat as those Americans they worry about on the news, most everyone smoking wherever possible, and a bunch of smoking and horseplay over a 9:30 breakfast of Slavic breakfast staples, cheese and meat slices, an egg dish and a sausage, a tea bag and aching-sweet juice the color of kvass.

Kvass was a Soviet era concoction a young man named Еѵгєлу (Evgeny) once showed me how to sample back in 1986 in a kiosk outside Red Square – served with the nice Soviet touch of a single, shared glass. Here each got our own glass. Mirja and I shared our table with a family of three women, all in print dresses, and a video-taping man.

Even as you gazed out onto working ships with good Turkish names like the Turgut and The Osman, and teeming local ferries of the Tur Yol line, here came women indefinably Ukrainian, with name tags Iruna and big 'ol Svetlana, slinging plates for six or eight stacked right up their arms. There were pats of butter, and a jug of кетчуп (ketchup) on every table.

Syrupy ballads from the steppes blared straight out of Slavic central casting. They were just enough too loud to notice they were a little too loud.

It took half a year for word to reach the Atlantic coast that gold had been discovered in California. Here, it took three minutes to be jostled by regular, abrupt announcements, way too loud. In the style of receptionists back home, whose announcement echoes across, say, the parking lot of the car dealership, they never thought to put the handset down gently, but instead rattled it around in search of its cradle.

Turkish, Turks will tell you, is useless outside his country's borders. Even inside in this case, as even at the Istanbul dock, the only announcements were in Ukrainian with just an occasional partial English translation.

Further humiliating, the Ukranian home currency, the hyrvna, and the dollar were just about the only ones in play. I had extra Turkish lira, and while they'd trade in them on the Palmyra, I put them away in the (probably idle) hope I could convert them later at a less usurious rate than on the ship.

Lots of smiles among the passengers. A country crowd, I thought, except for young men, most in sleeveless T's or undershirts which apparently pass for cool or maybe virile hereabouts, all painted with the permanent scowl of defiance you see on 17 or 20 year olds worldwide.

I wish I could have telepathically conveyed, on behalf of every other man, the simple notion, "We don't want your (brightly painted) woman."

And While on the Subject of the Middle East...

Robert D. Kaplan has a piece in Foreign Policy today whose most salient point, "Peaceful or not, the future of the region will be one of weakened authority," is perceptive, I think. May have to defer that trip to Damascus for now ("Dozens reported dead in bloodiest day of uprising so far,") but I'm hankering for a visit to the Erbil Rotana Hotel, below, in nearby Kurdistan. 6x/week nonstop service from Vienna on Austrian Airlines flight OS 829.

Photo from the hotel web site.

Friday Photo Quiz #111

This week's quiz is inspired by current events. Care to take a guess?

The answer is after the jump.

Tomorrow morning we'll be posting a story about crossing the Black Sea from Istanbul to Odessa. Meantime, a good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey and EarthPhotos.com.

 

Common Sense and Whiskey Available Now from EarthPhotos Books

Buy Common Sense and Whiskey - the Book, now.  Available next week at Amazon.

Excerpting Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book

Common Sense and Whiskey, the book, will be available in the next several days direct from EarthPhotos Books or on Amazon.com (link soon). It's a series of fifteen adventure travel stories from forgotten corners of the planet. It's all here: Africa, the Arctic, atrocious food. Headhunters and evil spirits, liars and thieves. From Tbilisi to Tibet to the Trans-Siberian, it's a crisp survey of what it's like in the real world.

The photos in the book are in black and white, but we've posted them online in color, along with others from all the places in the book, at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. Follow along at the Companion as you read the book for additional photos and commentary.

And we'll be excerpting the entire book here on the blog, a chapter every week or two, all summer. Chapter one, a very brief visit to Lake Baikal, Siberia, will coincide with the book's publication, in the next couple of weeks. Watch this space!

Wednesday HDR: Spring!

Click this bee to make him much, much bigger. Nikon D700, tonemapping in Photomatix Pro, finishing in Photoshop CS5. See the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com for more HDRs.

A Mildly Uninspired Afternoon in Phnom Penh

There’s not a hell of a lot to say about Phnom Penh, really. You’ve seen one hardscrabble, impoverished, backward, big, poor, provincial city in Southeast Asia, you’ve seen Phnom Penh – except this one is a national capital.

Phnom Penh is the place on the globe most exactly opposite in every way to Vienna. It’s haphazard as Vientiane, the capital of Laos, but it’s ten times the size. It has a sort of genial, low-rise sprawl that wanders on into the outskirts until you find yourself in uninterested rabble and uninspired local markets with livestock in between.

We hired a Corolla and pointed our way down Preah Monivong onto Mao Tse Tung Street. The official street signs look official, but behind them on the sides of buildings you get an occasional peek at the French colonial “Rue Mao Tse Tung” versions, in peeling paint.

Mao Street itself, as we swung right onto it, greeted us as a warehouse district stocking steel bars, tubes, channels and shapes, and then PVC pipe and tubing. It stretched several kilometers this way, away from the river, and while most businesses were open air, there were occasional enclosed A/C restaurants, the odd “hand phone” shop, and a bright new sleek Intercontinental Hotel.

I pondered the Suki Soup Wedding Hall.

The drive was more of an amble, even when the road was flat, maybe thirty-five kilometers an hour, because of the crush of scooters and the vague driving rules. The Cambodian left turn across traffic is really a gentle, gradual veer that can take up hundreds of feet and introduces oncoming traffic directly into your lane at any given moment.

The third road off Mao Street wasn’t really tarmac, and with rainwater filling the pot holes, it’s a marvel how the scooter riders’ clothes stayed spotless.

I’m a little disturbed how under-disturbed I was by the Cheong Ek Genocidal Center. It’s a simple place with a glass stupa filled with skulls, and clothing in the bottom, and sections like “elderly woman” and “young man.”

We took pictures of monks taking pictures of themselves. There was a souvenir shop. How garish. It just had all the usual stuff, and “Beware Land Mines” t-shirts and “Pol Pot Money.”

It took almost an hour to get out the fifteen kilometers to Cheong Ek, and the same to get back.

- From the archives, impressions of a previous trip to Cambodia. Click the photos to make them bigger, and see more photos in the Cambodia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Friday Photo Quiz #110

 

It's a place with an Islamic community, that's a fair bet. Here's another clue: The pastels in the buildings - they're a characteristic of this city.

Can you name the city? The answer is after the jump.

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

It's been a little scant here on the blog during these last few days of birthing my book, Common Sense and Whiskey. It's still on schedule to be up on Amazon right around May first.

Meanwhile, I think this is just a delightful story in the New Yorker about a group of Chinese tourists on a package tour of European cities.

I'm Not Going

With this post and this link, Doug Merrill agrees with me on the dubiousness of the whole idea of the Sochi Olympics. For general background, watch The Caucasus Report.

Friday Photo Quiz #109

Tough quiz today, but here's a big clue: In the spirit of the previous post, this provincial town, which - last time we saw it - was in no hurry to change, is located in one of the countries in the greater Balkans.

Can you name the town? The country? The answer is after the jump.

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