Yesterday we arranged a visit to Chernobyl, about 110 kilometers north of Kyiv. You must have a permit to travel inside the 30 kilometer "exclusion zone" around reactor number 4. Here are a few first photos. Starting with the second one, they're all from inside the exculsion zone.
Click through for more.
In the center: Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square, Kyiv, Ukraine.
Top: Cash register at Middle School Number 3, Pripyat, with gas masks, and bottom, a copy of Soviet Patriot newspaper dated April 23, 1986. The accident occured just after midnight on the morning of April 26.
More to come.
Taksim Square and the view to the Sea of Marmara, Istanbul, Turkey.
We're climbing aboard British Airways tomorrow. Next batch of posts from one of the world's great cities, Istanbul. Later on next week we'll talk with you from Kyiv, where, as I write this, it looks darned cold.
Photos will go in the Turkey and Ukraine galleries at EarthPhotos.com.
Cheers for now!
A fountain in a pretty urban park, main street and Independence Square. Can you name this European capital? The country? A good weekend to
all from CS&W
and EarthPhotos.com.
We'll be off at the end of the week on a trip that will take us to Istanbul and Kyiv, so we'll close the book for now on Easter Island. Here's just a portion of an article, more of which will show up later in a much longer form.
Oral tradition has it that Rapa Nui’s first colonizers arrived in two ships, one led by Hotu Matu’a, the other by Ava Reipua, either Hotu Matu’a’s wife or sister, probably in double canoes, although petroglyphs like the one at Orango are the only evidence.
The little museum outside Hanga Roa town points out that navigation solely by the stars has long been supplanted by charts, science and precision, except in Micronesia, where the by-the-stars tradition is still handed down orally.
The stars needn’t have been an ancient Polynesian navigator’s only tools, however. If they’d spent the previous centuries sailing from island chain to island chain, farther and farther out from indonesia to the Solomons, Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga, the Societies and Tuamotus and Hawaii, a fair encyclopedia would have accreted to their collected body of their lore. There are many ways the ancient navigator would have been able to see land before he could see it.
Strictly speaking, for discovery, a precise location isn’t required. The curve of the horizon limits islands’ visibility to a distance of about 60 miles at best. At 510 meters, Rapa Nui’s highest peak was spotted from 35 sea miles by a 1882 German expedition.
This is a national capital. Can
you guess the country? The name of the city? And a good weekend to you from CS&W
and EarthPhotos.com.
We're hitting the road again soon, for Turkey and Ukraine, and there is just enough time for a quick fly-in fly-out to somewhere else, so we made a bid to visit our first "'Stan."
We'll arrive at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul late in the evening, and Turkish Airlines' flight schedule works out great. It would allow us to keep pushing east. Just a brief layover in the raved-about new Turkish lounge, and off we'd go to Ashgabat.
Alas, it was not to be.
The Turkmen government requires a letter of invitation (loi) in order to grant a tourist visa. They're available through travel services (Uncornered Market blog does a good job describing how to get an loi), and we applied through a friendly, helpful service in Ashgabat.
We didn't invest much of our hearts in our quick little prospective visit, and it's just as well, because Turkmenistan didn't invite us, at least on the dates we could visit. This morning brought an email from our man in Ashgabat:
"Please, be informed, the Migration Service of Turkmenstan has announced some limitations on issuing LOIs (for tourist visas) for the period between March 11 till March 25. Now, we must shift the dates of your travel to Ashgabat before March 11 or after March 25.
Please, advise if it is possible for you to travel to Turkmenistan during the period of March 9 till March 11?"
Here's Miraflores Beach in Lima, Peru:
It's not all that beautiful, really, and this time of year it's almost always overcast. Zoom in on the shoreline down there though, and you get abstract art:
More HDRs here. Here's one more HDR while we're here, an empty city street in the San Isidro district of Lima:
Processed in Photomatix and Photoshop.
Top: Infamous palace built by this country's former leader, whose gruesome demise was broadcast to the world. Bottom: The delightful mountainous region of the same country. Can
you guess the country? Its capital city? A good weekend to
all from CS&W
and EarthPhotos.com.
Here's a little weekend reading, an excerpt from a coming article on Easter Island:
See more photos from Easter Island here.Conjuring up the downfall of the civilization can drive you mad. Puzzling out the timeline of Rapa Nui’s colonization can cause fits. Then there’s the whole moai thing, the conundrum of their abandonment.
Thankfully, imagining how the settlers got here is a beautiful thing, thanks to the work of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and a canoe called Hōkūle‘a, the inspired project of an artist and historian elected a Living Treasure of Hawaii in 1984, a man named Herb Kawainui Kāne.
Precious little evidence remains of the physical form of original Polynesian canoes of exploration. Drawings from the same 1773 Cook expedition that called at Rapa Nui show double-hulled canoes at Tonga. Fragments of ancient canoes have been excavated on New Zealand.
A bog on Huahine, near Tahiti, has yielded pieces of a canoe. A petroglyph of a canoe found at Orongo on Easter Island (the center of the birdman cult, about which more later) suggests the possible ancient design. Beyond these tantalizing bits, as Herb Kane tells the story, there is no hard evidence.
So in designing the Hōkūle‘a, Kane made some guesses. He came up with a double-hulled voyaging canoe 62 feet four inches long, 17-1/2 feet abeam with a draft of two and a half feet and a total sail area of 540 square feet. This is the vessel that, since 1975, has traveled the Polynesian Triangle, New Zealand to Hawaii to Rapa Nui.
A member of the crew named Sam Low kept a dairy of the sailing to Rapa Nui, and it’s a gorgeous thing to read. Freedom and expansiveness flow from Low’s pen as he writes of the measure of a sailor’s days - sunrises, stacks of cumulus, “smoke,” a gray haze of salt and seaspray stirred into the atmosphere by strong winds, and sunsets.
Seeking to "discover" Rapa Nui, the Hōkūle‘a sailed from Mangareva, and called for a few hours at Pitcairn Island, Rapa Nui’s nearest inhabited neighbor, where the entire island, 42 inhabitants, put on a potluck dinner. Low writes of “VHF radios squawking in every home -- the island’s only reliable telephone service,” of “freezers and shelves crammed with tinned goods to tide people over between supply ships, which arrive once every 4 months,” of how mail is delivered by passing freighters, in watertight containers thrown overboard.
Pitcairn was the refuge of the HMS Bounty mutineers in 1789, and Fletcher Christian’s Bible survives in the 7th Day Adventist church. Brenda Christian lives on Pitcairn still, generations on.
Nainoa Thompson, the Hōkūle‘a lead navigator, devised a scheme for finding Rapa Nui at once ambitious and straightforward. Approaching from the west, the canoe would target a block of ocean starting 300 miles from Rapa Nui and extending two degrees on either side of 27 degrees south latitude, the island’s latitude.
Targeting a box 300 miles by 240 rather than a 64-square-mile speck would compensate for any mistakes the crew may have made in dead reckoning how far east the Hōkūle‘a had sailed from Pitcairn, or in estimating the canoe’s latitude. Beginning at the western edge of the block the Hōkūle‘a would sail up and down to the top and bottom of the box, zigzagging back and forth, and eventually, the crew hoped, pass within sight of Rapa Nui.
Sam Low's diary is written with grace and no affectation, and we’re as thrilled as the crew members when, just before dawn on October 8th, seventeen and one half days out of Mangareva, Max Yarawamai, standing lookout, spots Rapa Nui as a vague black line on the horizon, and the crew celebrates with garlic eggs for breakfast.
•••••
The country in this week's quiz looks modern enough, especially the capital (top). That's a pedestrian mall in the capital (middle), and hey, no scouring the signs for a giveaway. Trouble is, when you get outside this country's capital, you realize it's got some modernizing to do (bottom).
Possible caveat: These photos are from 2006, so everything might be all shiny and new now. But I'm skeptical. Can you guess the country? Its capital city? What's that body of water in the top photo? Continue reading below for the answer. A good weekend to all from CS&W and EarthPhotos.com.
Click this photo to make it much bigger. These statues on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) are called moai. They stand on ahus, stone platforms, some of which are ossuaries. The moai on the right in this photo is Ahu Ko Te Riku. Farther out is Ahu Vai Uri and in the distance, that's the island's only town, Hanga Roa.
This photo is an HDR created with Photomatix, Nik filters and Photoshop CS5. It's overlaid with a texture. See more photos from Easter Island here and more HDRs here.
Here's a page from a menu in the Miraflores district of Lima, Peru, seen in December. Consider the Lasana Vegeteriana. There's a closer view below:
Yum. Maybe they meant aubergines?
Three more fancied-up moais from Easter Island:
Top, the quarry at Rano Raraku, where these guys were carved out. It's a long way and a lot of effort to finally stand in this quarry, but if you ever make the trip, it feels like pretty much no other place. Too many mysteries. How did they move these guys all over the island with no modern tools? Why did they stop as if in mid-hammer blow, put down their things and walk away, leaving dozens and dozens of these guys at the quarry? And what happened to cause the downfall of Rapa Nui in the first place?
Middle, This is one lone guy standing by himself near Ahu Tongariki, the biggest single collection of standing moai on the island. It's as if he just didn't get along with the rest of the gang. The long ahu is sort of behind and to the right of this shot, and looking away from them like this makes for a pretty desolate scene, don't you think?
Bottom, Ahu Ko Te Riku, near Hanga Roa town. This fellow's eyes are replicas. He's the only moai with eyes, and it's to demonstrate how much more imposing (creepy?) the moais all must have looked back when they all had eyes. There is one moai fragment with its original eyes in the Father Sebastian Englert Anthropological Museum near Hanga Roa.
All are HDRs processed in Photomatix and CS5 using Nik plug-ins. The top two are texturized. The texture in the middle photo was shot on the same trip, in Lima. Click them to make them bigger. There are 50-something photos in the Easter Island Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
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.
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