Tag: travel

Wild jungle. Deserted beaches with great snorkeling or surfing. Mountain lakes. Volcanoes. Orangutans. Oh, and did I mention it’s one of the cheapest places on Earth for backpacking? Really, what more could one ask for in a destination?!?

The sad news this week from Sumatra, one of the most seismically volatile regions in the world, has left me wanting to do more to bring attention to this beautiful island and its people. Alas, what follows is but a brief introduction, but I hope that the critical importance of what happens on this, the world’s 6th-largest island, can be better understood as a result.

Take it from the folks at Lonely Planet:

Sumatra is an adventure, the kind of demanding ride that requires a dusty knapsack and tough travelling skin.

Please follow below for a tour of the north of Sumatra, what just may be my favorite place on Earth.

X-posted @ TLP

Lucerne is somewhere close to paradise. In the 14th Century, it helped lead central Switzerland to independence from the Hapsburgs. Today, with good reason, it is a popular tourist destination.  

Behind the town is the 7000 foot Pilatus.

We have a society that is moving very rapidly to the super-, super-, super-consumptive, and I’m proposing that might not be the final answer. So I’m saying, why don’t we try a leaner alternative?

The disheartening slowness of any progress toward freedom from need is mainly fruit  of a greed out of proportion to any justifiable fear of insecurity.

[…]  land conservation will succeed only if and when man creates beautiful cities  wherein he will feel it a privilege to be, live, and work.  

Science rejects the non-rational as unreal.  In doing so, she puts herself in a position  of non-competence in all those fields or things that through existing, inasmuch as  they modify the real, do not avail themselves of any computation or any methodological  inquiry.  

Life is a study of the improbable, not the statistically average.

Nothing is purer than sterility and simpler than death.                        

Paolo Solari          

Amsterdam means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but to me it is the city of Rembrandt van Rijn. More on that, but first the modern city.

Near the town of Nimes, and built either in the last century BCE or the first century CE, the aqueduct and bridge known as the Pont du Gard may be the best remaining example of the genius that was Roman engineering.

Also known as “the land of a million elephants,” Laos is a tiny country in southeast Asia about which most people know less than they do about any of its neighbors (China, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar & Cambodia.)

Join me for a virtual tour of this fascinating nation with videos & pictures galore, and maybe a bit of history and politics too.

Cross-posted @  The Laughing Planet

Fast Facts:

Religions:

Buddhist 67%, Christian 1.5%, other 31.5% (mostly Animism)

Current/environmental issues:

Unexploded ordnance (UXO); deforestation; soil erosion; most of the population does not have access to potable water

Government:

Single-party socialist republic.

The purple asterisks (on the map @ right) can be followed as you read south to north and then counter-clockwise if you care to calibrate along with the photos and vignettes below.

MAY YOUR SKY ALWAYS BE YELLOW
He always wanted to explain things, but no-one cared.
So he drew.
Sometimes he would just draw and it wasn’t anything.
He wanted to carve it in stone or write it in the sky.
He would lie out on the grass and look up in the sky and it would only be the sky and the things inside him that needed saying.

And it was after that that he drew the picture.
It was a beautiful picture. He kept it under his pillow and would let no-one see it.
And he would look at it every night and think about it.
And when it was dark and his eyes were closed he could see it still.
And it was all of him and he loved it.

When he started school he brought it with him.
Not to show anyone, but just to have it with him like a friend.

It was funny about school.
He sat in a square brown desk like all the other square brown desks
and he thought it would be red.
And his room was a square brown room, like all the other rooms.
And it was tight and close. And stiff.

He hated to hold the pencil and chalk, with his arm stiff and his feet
flat on the floor, stiff, with the teacher watching and watching.

The teacher came and spoke to him.
She told him to wear a tie like all the other boys.
He said he didn’t like them and she it didn’t matter.
After that they drew. And he drew all yellow and it was the way he felt about
morning. And it was beautiful.

The teacher came and smiled at him. What’s this? She said.
“Why don’t you draw something like Ken’s drawing?
Isn’t it beautiful?”
After that his mother bought him a tie and he always drew airplanes
and rocket ships like everyone else.

And he threw the old picture away.

And when he lay out alone looking at the sky, it was big and blue;
and all of everything, but he wasn’t anymore.

He was square and brown inside and his hands were stiff.
And he was like everyone else. All the things inside him that needed
saying didn’t need it anymore.

It had stopped pushing. It was crushed.
Stiff.
Like everything else.

[Turned in to a high school English teacher 2 weeks prior to author’s suicide.]