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Too many posts to handle? If you missed out on a great post from last month, here’s a quick digest of the top posts that you may want to check out:
- Exotic Travels Stinks (Literally)
I don’t mean exotic travel stinks as in, don’t go. I mean, it stinks. Smells. Could use a bath tonight. People know this about places like Paris; it’s a well-worn joke. But show them a picture of something exotic, like a tiny village in Vietnam’s remote Northern Highlands (pictured here), and the assumption is that this is the lost Shangri-La, all magical and pristine.
This week, Pics Remix is delving deep into the underwater world of crustaceans. The photo here was taken during a classic weekend cruise on the famous Halong Bay in northern Vietnam. I will write more about Halong in the future; this picture is about the cuisine offered by the Bay. The crabs pictured here were the only recognizable creature served to us during the entire three days aboard the boat. Every other crustacean that appeared on our dining table for lunch and dinner looked like some mad scientist experiment gone woefully wrong: shrimps cross-bred with centipedes, lobsters shaped like cockroaches, crayfish colored blue and pink. Even our Vietnamese guides would pick at the tentacles and drily comment that after a lifetime of living three hours away from this place, they had never before seen such, ah, cuisine. Far worse was the fact that all of these unfamiliar and unnatural looking creatures either lacked any flavor at all or tasted like a combination of dirt and gelatin.
This is my shadow against the sand dunes of the Gobi Desert, taken in the height of summer and the heat of the day. You can almost feel the sun reflecting back off the sand and roasting me when you look at the picture. What you cannot see or feel in this photo is that this is the only signficiant sand dune in a desert land mass one third the size of the continental United States. Yes, the Gobi is largely a gravel desert, not a sand desert. This one set of large, roving dunes is an exception to the normal geography of the place, so much so that the dunes themselves are something of a tourist attraction, by Mongolian proportions of tourism. In fact, the Mongolian desert is so flat you can actually drive across it rather unimpeded by the landscape. I did it twice, and it was one of the most rewarding travel experiences I have ever had. Mongolia now is what the American West in the 1850s must have been like. And traversing it is the closest thing to time travel that I have ever encountered.
In the third Indiana Jones movie – The Last Crusade – the characters spend most of the film searching for the place where the Holy Grail is believed to be buried. After much drama – and some cheesy laughs – we learn that the Grail is inside a temple, itself located inside the Valley of the Crescent Moon. The reveal aof this temple is, in my opinion, the best scene of the movie. Indiana, his father, and their friends come clattering on horseback through a narrow gorge, turn a corner, and stumble upon this spectacular temple set right into the rock wall. The soundtrack at that moment is grand and sweeping (classic George Lucas) and the cinematography of the reveal is so picturesquely done I still enjoy watching it 50+ viewings later.
I don’t mean exotic travel stinks as in, don’t go. I mean, it stinks. Smells. Could use a bath tonight. People know this about places like Paris; it’s a well-worn joke. But show them a picture of something exotic, like a tiny village in Vietnam’s remote Northern Highlands (pictured here), and the assumption is that this is the lost Shangri-La, all magical and pristine. I have news for you: Shangri-La smells like a combination of raw sewage, burnt tires, and puke. Because that is what you are walking on when you go. Yes. Really. Lots and lots of puke.
Too many posts to handle? If you missed out on a great post from last month, here’s a quick digest of the top posts that you may want to check out:
- Celestial Dancing in Cambodia
This bas relief is literally one of the thousands on the 79+ temples that make up the ancient city of Ankgor Wat, though it is one of my favorites. I have about 200 photos of different wall carvings, and I find the color contrast and expressions on these heavenly dancers, or apsara as they are called in Khmer, the most moving. The white is actually a byproduct of lichen growths on the stone.
Writing about Indonesia, or anything in Indonesia – like these two Sumatran orangutans – is always hard. Indonesia is a place of dramatic contradictions, far more so than China or Vietnam. I realize this last statement sounds exaggerated to most people: isn’t China the land of harsh contrasts? isn’t Vietnam the place where culture is being revolutionized in just a generation? Yes, and yes. And still, Indonesia is more complicated than either of those two places. The briefest way I know how to describe it is to point out that the work amok – as in: to run amok or to be “mad with rage” – is an Indonesian word. And for good reason.
This temple photo is a perfect candidate for the Pics Remix pledge to take you… behind the photography. I look at this picture and can’t help but imagine a serene and quiet place with bald monks clad in saffron robes wandering in and out of of its corridors. Then my memory wakes up and kicks that lovely image right to the curb, replacing it with the reality that…
…when I walked over to investigate this Vietnamese temple after photographing it from the other side of the lake while on a tour of a liquor distillery (really), what I found was a building under village construction. Village construction, you ask? What is that?
This bas relief is literally one of the thousands on the 79+ temples that make up the ancient city of Ankgor Wat, though it is one of my favorites. I have about 200 photos of different wall carvings, and I find the color contrast and expressions on these heavenly dancers, or apsara as they are called in Khmer, the most moving. The white is actually a byproduct of lichen growths on the stone. When they were first created, they would have been painted in a beautiful array of colors.
Flaming Cliffs, Gobi Desert, Mongolia ©Amanda Morrow Jensen
The Flaming Cliffs are host to one of the largest collection of dinosaur bones in Asia. They were the first location to ever yield dinosaur eggs, and also have several Velociraptor skeletons of interest to archaeologists. The bones are everywhere, and lay exposed to the sun and wind, as you can see below:
Dinosaur Bones
The interesting thing about the Flaming Cliffs is that they really are this beautiful and the dinosaur bones really do litter the ground there. The picture does the magnitude of the scene justice. What it doesn’t show you is how very hard it is to get here.
