The capital of a former republic of the Soviet Union, Minsk was erected from the rubble of German occupation during WWII, and rebuilt in the name of Stalin and his architecture, with its wide boulevards and large public squares. Minsk has been home to numerous outsiders including Lee Harvey Oswald, who lived there for two years and was closely monitored by the Soviet intelligence committee, the K.G.B.
Filmmaker Andrew Mudge recently completed the first feature film shot on location on Lesotho, a developing nation surrounded by South Africa with little exposure to movie-making. He recounts the efforts to make this audience-award-winning film, everything from hauling equipment on horseback over unpaved roads to witnessing the Wild West atmosphere of the Central African Republic, and compares filmmaking in new territory to swimming with piranhas.
It is March in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley. The sky is an ominous shade of blue-grey. The driver of our tiny tour bus glances upwards. He puts the pedal to the metal. Humid, sticky air blasts in through half-open windows. It forms a thick paste on exposed skin. He looks at the sky again, as if to say “What are you waiting for?” He laughs. He says something in Swahili. It is the rainy season but our road, thankfully, is paved – and our landscape is electric.
We are visiting a Maasai village today. We are tired. We spent the night before safari departure in tents atop a Nairobi office building. We awakened early. Thousands of people in Nairobi live on rooftops permanently. We were a small part of the morning rush: washing up, packing up, getting ready to join the crowds in the streets below. If The Great Rift Valley is the birthplace of civilization, Nairobi is the engine that propels it forward.
The bespectacled limerick writer Edward Lear was terrified of both horses and dogs, disliked ships and loud noises, and lived with epilepsy and recurrent asthma. But throughout the mid-20th century, while he was winning fans both young and old for his nonsensical and comic verse and sketches, he also established himself as a renowned topographical artist and writer, travelling and exploring the far corners of Egypt, Malta, India, and the Mediterranean.
In his book Travel: A Literary History, Peter Whitfield writes that the travelling Lear was “an eccentric, an oddity, and he knew it, representing no tradition of learning, no imperial or nationalist agenda, no viewpoint but his own.”
It is a hot and dusty Sunday afternoon in Madurai, India when I hop a bus downtown with my tween-age host brother. We are meeting with an American friend and her host brother to see Titanic, James Cameron’s magnum opus, at the local movie theatre.
Both of our host brothers are Bollywood aficionados. Titanic is the most Bollywood-like movie I can conjure, epic in scale and scope. It speaks to the vicissitudes of adversity and human triumph – a little like karma. Titanic is a disaster movie replete with class conflict and just enough dancing to keep things interesting. Jack and Rose exchange lingering looks during many a starboard stroll. The budding romance advances like an apple kissed and passed between paramours in Bollywood love stories. Several Titanic scenes, I imagine, will warrant attention from the censors. Social commentary, romantic intrigue, controversy – a little something for everyone. I think they will like it.
Elephants have long been victims of human exploitation, whether hunted for ivory or corralled for spectacle, performing in shows or offered for joyrides through jungles. In regions of Africa and Asia, elephants constitute a significant part of the tourism industry; in Thailand, for example, it’s difficult to travel far without being offered the chance to see an elephant kick a soccer ball. [Read more →]
Atlas Obscura, self-proclaimed “definitive guide to the world’s wondrous and curious places,” is a collaborative project with user-added locales. Perfect for finding places to explore both near and far, the site is navigable by both the what (craters, churches) and the where (Turkmenistan, Tallahassee).
There are photographs, maps, and historical information about an 80-year-old house constructed entirely of newspapers in Rockport, Massachusetts. Or, across the country, a glimpse of the gnarled arches of Little Finland near Mesquite, Nevada, nicknamed “Hobgoblin’s Playground” for its shadow-happy rock formations.
Photo by Philippe Schuler
There’s Moonhole, the 1960s brainchild of retired New Yorkers Thomas and Gladys Johnston, who crafted a cliff-nestled enclave of 19 homes in the Caribbean Grenadines islands using whalebones and hardwoods scavenged from the beach.
And, on the west coast of Scotland, there’s the 72-foot-tall Fingal’s Cave, composed of towering hexagonal basalt columns—an ancient legendary site mentioned in the music of both Mendelssohn and Pink Floyd.
Drawing by William Daniell
Submit your own sites and get lost in the database here.
—Erica Berry
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The word Ayahuasca means “vine of the souls.” It is considered by many to be the queen of all hallucinogens. The substance, which is imbibed as a tea, is an infusion of an MAO inhibitor and dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a psychedelic compound produced naturally by most living plants and mammals, including humans, whose brains are flooded with it during REM sleep and in high stress situations like when they are dying. It has been consumed for divinatory and healing purposes for millennia in the Amazon region of South America. In the 16th century when Christian missionaries from Spain and Portugal first encountered indigenous peoples using the drug, they thought the locals were possessed by devils.
13:00 - The shaman comes into the hut like something out of a dream. His body is covered by a black tunic. Fanning out from his face, erect, with iridescent colors, is a plume of scarlet macaw feathers. A long cape of green feathers hangs across his back and a blue parrot feather pierces horizontally through his nostril. Some ten pounds of glass beads and charms and lavalieres and bones and jaguar teeth swing from his neck all tinkling and chinking as he approaches with the whishing scratch of his leaf bracelets. He sits down in front of me. His face is tattooed, his pupils black. They revealed nothing, betray nothing, are emotionless.
“His dress mimics the spirit of the Ayahuasca,” Louis, my guide, says from behind me.
“Wanderlust arises as an emotional epidemic,” writes Daniel Garrison Brinton in his 1902 book The Basis of Social Relation. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, his usage is one of the first English appropriations of the German word– he describes it as a “goading restlessness” that drives tribes “into aimless roving.”
Ulaanbaatar is the coldest capital city in the world and home to nearly half of Mongolia’s population. What was founded as a nomadic Buddhist monastic center is today a cultural and financial hub; plus, it’s now stationary.
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