Common Sense and Whiskey

Ethiopian Street Life - Wednesday HDRs

HDRs from a trip to the Mercado open air market in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. All shot with a Nikon D-700, processed with PhotoMatix, Nik filters and Photoshop CS5. Click 'em to make them much bigger. And see 360 more HDR photos here, at EarthPhotos.com.

Arrival in Bhutan

 When time came to drop through the clouds into Bhutan, the pilot announced, “We will maneuver the aircraft in the valley. This is a little different from large commercial aircraft. It is standard procedure. You will see the houses and trees a little closer than you are used to. The scenery is beautiful. Please enjoy the ride.”

He just picked a hole in the clouds and dove through. He did a 180 into the Paro valley. The automatic sensors called out, “too low,” and for the record he kept repeating, “acknowledge, override,” into the cockpit recorder.

This was George, bluff, barrel-chested, a real dude with a wide gray mustache, and one of just fourteen people ever to fly for Royal Bhutan Airlines, aka Druk Air.

- From the Bhutan Chapter of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book (Amazon) (Kindle) (BN).

Here, see it for yourself. Here's video of an actual landing at Paro airport, Bhutan. Kind of exciting:

Weekend Reading • Assorted Links

The French island of Reunion, east of Madagascar, looks just gorgeous (see photos). And yet, they're rioting.

The cost of living in Barrow, Alaska, in pictures, via a visit to the grocery store. Frightening. Check out, for example, the hundred dollar leg of lamb.

In the early days of the internet I saw an ad offering to sell passports for $15,000 (Not that I was in the market for a Mozambican passport). Here's a report titled Passports ... for a price. And it's legitimate.

As a rule, Finns are easy-going folks. Some things, though, are apparently out of bounds. "More than 40,000 people have signed an online petition demanding the resignation of Interior Minister Päivi Räsänen...."

And in the pantheon of internet time wasters, this ranks near the top.

Enjoy the weekend.

 

Friday Photo Quiz #142 - Where in the World?

This is city hall in this country's third largest city and regional capital, once home to a famously troubled Summer Olympics.

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

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

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - Paraguay, Chapter Twelve

Here is Chapter Twelve of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We're publishing each chapter here on the blog (Track down previous chapters here). You can order the entire book at Amazon.com, at BN.com, or direct from EarthPhotos Publishing. Here's the Kindle version (just $6.99). Click these photos to make them bigger. More photos and additional commentary are available at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. And here's the Paraguay Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

12 PARAGUAY


The farthest back water washes to a national capital must be Asuncion, Paraguay. It’s as if its residents didn’t ask for the honor, but the capital had to be somewhere so they amiably accommodated.

Maybe parts of Africa are less vital. Think Ouagadougou, maybe, or Bangui. Even somnambulant Vientiane, which is in Laos, shows more vitality than here, smack in the middle of South America.

They’d rolled up the streets by the time we installed ourselves in the Sabe Hotel. The front desk spoke not so much as “hello.” No English. Here in the national capital.

The TV wouldn’t work until tomorrow because it was New Years Day and they couldn’t get anybody out to fix it, but it was a nice enough place. A picture hung partly over the window in the hallway. That was a little strange.

I was out early in the morning, through the business district and down to the Paraguay River. It wasn’t very big, downtown Asuncion, and it wasn’t very busy.

There was the main Plaza de los Heroes, down a few blocks, and Asuncion had a building modeled after the Pantheon. Sales ladies’ tables along Avenue Palma offered up the usual languid market fare: watches and underwear and (allegedly) Nike clothes and plastic toys. Birds were loud and it was hot hot hot by 8:45.

Down at the river, General Francisco Solana Lopez’s white-washed mansion, started in 1860, stood shuttered. Beyond it, children pumped water at a clutter of squatter shacks. A sand spit stretched out to two rusting shipwrecks, resting over on their sides, just on the edge of the water. Here in the national capital.

The breathtaking Asuncion waterfront.

But let’s start at the beginning, which was a few days earlier.

More from the Book Tomorrow

... when we'll publish chapter 12, Paraguay.

Taksim Square, Istanbul - Wednesday HDR

If you click this photo you can see a much bigger version, which is good because there's a lot to see - all the little people and the yellow cabs around Taksim Square, the Galata Tower further on down toward the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara in the background.  Just a few of the countless things that make Istanbul one of my top five world cities.*

It's a confluence of civilization, continents and cultures in a breathtaking physical setting. For a kid from the American south, the sound of the call to prayer from all different directions at dusk is hopelessly exotic. Istanbul. What's not to like?

More photos from several trips to Istanbul and Turkey here, and more HDRs here on EarthPhotos.com.

* My top five list: Hong Kong, Istanbul, Paris, San Fransisco, Sydney. Your results may vary.

Rainy Wednesday HDR

The Wednesday HDR this week is the much swollen Mekong River during the rainy season, upstream from Saigon, Vietnam. I wrote this little story about the trip at the time.

Click the photo to make it bigger. This photo comes from multiple exposures of a single RAW, shot with a Nikon D-700, combined in Photomatix & finished in CS5 with Nik tools. There are 355 more HDRs here and 385 more photos in the Vietnam Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

New Photographer Link

I've added Justyna Mielnikiewicz to the category Photographers, with Respect in the sidebar, below right. When you have a few minutes, please go see her work. Her bio says she began her career in Poland before moving to Tbilisi. Our photos of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan don't match the grit, the real, I-live-here feel of hers.

 

Friday Photo Quiz #141 - Where in the World?

Okay... Where would somebody in a pointy hood be walking around at sunrise? With some kind of watchtower or fort thing on the hill? Looks positively old world, doesn't it?

In fact, a university here, founded in AD 859, claims to be the world's oldest continuously functioning university.

This photo is currently ranked number 54 of 976 in the Most Popular Gallery at EarthPhotos.com (but make your guess before you click through to the Popular Gallery).

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

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

Unsettling Weekend Reading

We've all done trips that were ... less fabulous ... than others. (Funny: Search "worst travel" on Amazon and the Lonely Planet guide to Ukraine comes in at number twelve.) Let's just say these are trips that involve more trials than, oh, losing your luggage. I can nominate my friend who had to have an emergency appendectomy in the Soviet Union in the mid-80's, for example. No, no, he didn't speak Russian.

Farther along on the scale, maybe, here's the Amazon description of the book The Worst Journey in the World: "hoping that the study of penguin eggs would provide an evolutionary link between birds and reptiles - a group of explorers left Cardiff by boat on an expedition to Antarctica. Not all of them would return. Written by one of its survivors, (this book) tells the moving and dramatic story of the disastrous expedition."

But the really worst worst trip might have been this one. Enjoy reading about it in front of your cozy, warm fireplace this weekend.

•••••

And then there's Cruise Passengers Overboard. Somebody out there has it in for mega-ships even more than me. They describe their site as "a comprehensive list of known cases of persons falling or jumping overboard since 1995. " This thing must take a lot of work. It's up to date as recently as seven days ago.

 

The Katherine Gorge, Australia's Northern Territory - Wednesday HDR

Here's the photogenic Katherine Gorge in Australia's Northern Territory. There was about a half day stop on the Ghan train between Darwin and Adelaide, and the only way to get in in that amount of time was with a kind of paddle boat thing with twenty or so others.

With a little determination, you could get out ahead of the others in time to set your tripod down and fire off a few photos without getting Phil and Marge from Brisbane in the picture.

As usual, it's multiple shots with a Nikon D-700, combined in Photomatix, finished with Nik plug-ins and CS5.

There are 354 more HDRs here and 405 more from Australia here at EarthPhotos.com.

 

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - Tibet, Chapter Eleven

Here is Chapter Eleven of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We're publishing each chapter here on the blog (Track down previous chapters here). You can order the entire book at Amazon.com, at BN.com, or direct from EarthPhotos Publishing. Here's the Kindle version (just $6.99). Click these photos to make them bigger. More photos and additional commentary are available at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. And here's the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

11 TIBET

Ashray Raj Gautam waited in the dark before dawn. Men worked under the hood of his Toyota Corolla while we stuffed our things in its trunk. We pushed the car down the hill to get it started, and little Gautam took us to a town called Banepa, north of Kathmandu. Mirja bought junk food, I bought cheap Indian whiskey, and Gautam disappeared.

We waited for a long time, and when he came back, Gautam had a confession. He did a sheepish, dusty little shuffle.

“We came here with no fan belt.”

He was sure we could get one in Banepa but he couldn’t find one.

“Excuse me sir, we have to wait for new car from Kathmandu one hour.” He went to find a phone.

So we were off, sort of, driving from Kathmandu to Lhasa. Our Tibet travel permits would be waiting at the border. The fellow who booked us said don’t bring pictures of the Dalai Lama (I had five), and don’t be surprised if the police follow you - they’re not too used to private visitors.

Banepa, Nepal, was a lane and a half of bad tarmac twenty kilometers outside Kathmandu, with twenty meters of dust on either side of the road, and businesses the length of town with their garage-door-fronts rolled down closed.

Buses bumped into the dust and blasted their horns. They shared the verge with chickens, goats, kids, bags of grain, metal rods and tubes, the general refuse, and us.

Two old folks worked the length of town with rough straw brooms, whipping up a dust tornado, moving trash from here to there to no use. Boys held up bread into the windows of the buses. They spit and coughed all the time.

It’s no surprise life expectancy is 55 in Nepal. In Banepa the air was opaque. You couldn’t even see the neighborhood hills. Forget the Himalayas, you couldn’t see out of town.

 

Banepa, Nepal.

New Affiliations

You can now read CS&W as part of Open Salon and we're on Scribd.com, too. I'll share Chapter One of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book (Amazon.com, BN.com, Kindle), at both places today.

Meanwhile, later today we'll publish Chapter Thirteen of Common Sense and Whiskey, Tibet, here on the blog.

 

The Vatican, Rome - Wednesday HDR

 

Here's an HDR combined from three exposures, not exactly hand held, but propped up on the wall at the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome. That's the Tiber River on the left, and the dome in the background, center, is the Vatican. Click it to make it bigger.

There are 354 more HDRs here at EarthPhotos.com.

Shot with a Nikon D-700, made HDR in Photomatix, finished with Nik plug-ins and CS5.