Common Sense and Whiskey

Wednesday HDR: Hippo Family

Hippo family in the Kazinga Channel, between Lake Edward and Lake George in the Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda. Click it to make it much bigger.

See related photos in the HDR Gallery, Uganda Gallery and Animals and Wildlife Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Hard to Beat This Photographic Effort

Just an outstanding effort and a pleasure to watch. Time lapse photography from Dominic Boudreault.

Timelapse - The City Limits from Dominic on Vimeo.

Friday Photo Quiz #113

This church is an icon in its capital city. Past leaders are buried inside.

The country itself is in a tough neighborhood. It's surrounded by four countries and the sea. One of its neighbors succeeded from it after war. Another has a barely functioning government. The leader of the third country has been charged with genocide by the International Criminal Court, and leaders of the fourth have been questioned by the ICC about violence in their own country.

Can you name this capital city? The country?

Tha answer is after the jump.

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

Words You Can Use

How to say cheers in fifty languages.

The Other Side of Sydney - Wednesday HDR

We're all taken by the view the other way, across the Sydney harbour bridge, with the opera house and the city skyline, but there's actually a proper city on the other side of the bridge - North Sydney, as seen here in HDR.

Nikon D700, Photomatix Pro and Photoshop CS5. Click it to make it bigger.

See 321 HDRs in the HDR Gallery and 400 photos in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Blog Recommendation

Check out Uncornered Market, a blog by Audrey Scott and Daniel Noll. Good stuff.

Just now, they're convalescing. Toward the end of a trip to Bangladesh, as they write,

"As I began researching online, I saw photos of cute bungalows in lush green gardens with “breakfast served on the porch” and thought, “I want that.” I want quiet. I want peace. I want green. I want a place where I can read, where I can write. I want to stretch and exercise my body.

We leave for Bali tomorrow."

I know the feeling. During our three month trip we, too, spent time on a "vacation from our vacation," just a couple days off the road to mend and gather our thoughts. After one longish trip that ended with a couple of days of bad local trains, we celebrated our own personal Liberation Day in the unlikely city of Ulan Bataar, Mongolia.

But back to Uncornered Market - They've traveled this world extensively, the authors have, and I admire and envy them for some of the places they've gone to see. Drop by their nicely done site and I bet you'll spend some time with it.

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - Chapter One

Here is Chapter one of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We'll publish each chapter over the course of the summer. You can order the entire book direct from EarthPhotos Publishing, or at Amazon.com. The accompanying photos, and additional commentary are available at The Common Sense and Whiskey Companion.

 

1 LAKE BAIKAL, SIBERIA

Like always, the eastern shore of Lake Baikal, the Sacred Lake, the Pearl of Siberia, was shrouded in mist all the way up above the peaks. Out on the water, in the morning, the wind cast a determined late season chill.

The captain stood broad shouldered, square-faced and hale with a crew-cut and a Reebok jacket, and I liked him right away. Not a lick of English, but he made us coffee with water from a big painted teapot below decks and offered pelmini that we coveted but politely refused. Couldn't be sure we wouldn't be eating his own lunch.

Over the weekend the jetty at Listvyanka, a bedraggled tourist town on the lake, had been packed with trinket vendors and mongers of exotic Siberian fish like omul and grayling. On Monday morning it stood deserted except for a drunken bottle recycler and three or four ships' mates and dockhands, loitering around stale cigarette butts and discarded wrappers.

The new week crept up in autumnal dampness, the clouds in stratified layers. Surveying the dock and our little ship, the Poruchik, the Gilligan's Island theme edged into my head. Ours was a four-hour tour – a simple west to east crossing of one of the world’s great lakes.

The Poruchik, white, blue and red tricolor flapping above, was a diesel-burning forty-foot cruiser with two cabins below decks and a separate galley and mess. Must have started life as a fishing boat before they'd retrofitted it for charters, with benches, tables and chairs, and there were liqueurs and vodka and a TV below.

Pine forest stretched around rocky outcrops up the hills along shore. An hour after the Poruchik set sail, we came alongside a settlement called Bolshoi Koti, the last, tenuous human imprint, and then, north for miles of lakeshore, lonely primeval forest reigned.

For some time the Poruchik aimed for a promontory that wasn’t on my map, and then swung hard to starboard for the crossing. A low blanket of gray from the west, from Irkutsk, replaced the sunshine of the last few days.

There were arrangements for later. Someone from Ulan Ude "will meet you at Kluevka (a place you are going to). This is definitely." Made it seem like the Russian Autonomous Republic of Buryatia was a foreign country, not simply the other side of the lake. And who knew, maybe it would be.

The temperature plunged when we swung away from the protection of shore and into open water, and after an hour and forty minutes, the mountains of the Ardaban Range on the far side of Baikal loomed tantalizingly close, breaking above the clouds.

Back home, imagining exotic Siberia, I naively thought it would be fun to "get out on the lake," like it would be fun to have a nice piece of candy. But out in its gray middle, Baikal slapped me humble, tossing and pounding the Poruchik to grab our attention and insist that it's a mighty inland sea. Finally, all you could do onboard was just hold on.

We ate a lunch of bread, tomatoes, sausage, cheese and onion down below, and wished we hadn't. We went out for air. When I went back down to clean up, bottles, plates and chairs littered the floor.

Eventually we made the eastern shore, and found our way into Ulan Ude with just enough time to walk to the parliament square before dark. Kids giggled at a massive Lenin head there. ("It looks really funny with snow on top.")

The hotel still employed Soviet-era floor ladies, whose job it was to mind your business. Ours drolly noted our extraordinary good fortune. Because of “environmental conference” with “important delegates” (the lobby buzzed with them), they’d turned on the hot water.

So, a day at an old Soviet hotel in Ulan Ude and a quick trip out to a Buddhist monastery. Tomorrow we’d climb onto a train to Mongolia. We’d been on the road for days. Just needed a little rest. We were battered and a little worn as we slumped into chairs after dinner and tuned in the ten o'clock news.

There was a sports report. It was interrupted by curious pictures we didn't quite understand - it was all in Russian, of course - and then sports returned. Minutes later they interrupted the sports again to show pictures of the second plane slamming into the World Trade Center.

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