International Herald Tribune has posted an AP story on the new IMAX film The Alps which I've mentioned briefly a few times already. This is the film that follows John Harlin III up The Eiger on the same route that killed his father nearly 40 years ago. The climb was the inspiration for Harlin's book The Eiger Obsession.

The article talks about Harlin climbing in his father's footsteps, even as his own nine year old daughter watches through a telescope from the chalet below. Harlin III was nine years old himself when his father fell off the face of the Eiger while pursuing his dream to climb the "Eiger Direct" route.

This is the first "review" of the film that I've seen however, and it comes across as nothing short of glowing. The film looks great, as you would expect from an IMAX film, and goes to great lengths to capture an accurate portrayal of what it's like to climb a big mountain face in the Alps. The BIGGEST face in the Alps as a matter of fact.

The film sounds amazing, and I can't wait to see it. Unfortunately, it isn't playing in my area yet, nor is listed on the IMAX website, so I'm not sure when it's coming. But I'll keep my eyes peeled, and when I do get a chance to see it, I'll be sure to post my thoughts here. I'm also plugging away on the book, but with a busy week ahead, I'm not sure I'll be able to post a review before I leave for Kili on Saturday. With a little luck, I'll get it finished, otherwise I'll have to post it upon my return.

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Lough Gur in County Limerick is one of the most important and remarkable archaeological landscapes in Ireland. This small, horseshoe shaped lake has been surrounded by human settlements and activity going back over 5,000 years ago to the first farmers in the Neolithic period, though it is likely that this area was occupied even earlier, during the Mesolithic, though as yet no archaeological evidence has been found dating to this period.

The site is possibly most famous for its Neolithic settlement. Several houses, forming a small village, have been excavated on the south-facing slopes of the Knockadoon peninsula, which extends out into the lake. Both rectangular and circular houses were discovered. They were constructed by driving double rows of posts in 1m apart, these posts supported a hipped roof and screens made from woven hazel rods known as wattle. The screens were covered in daub, a mix of dung, clay and straw which when dried, would have been an effective breathable, but water and draft-proof, wall. The houses may have been insulated with a layer of earth sods, reeds or straw. An example of one of the rectangular buildings and a circular building have been reconstructed and now serve as Lough Gur’s Interpretation Centre.  

The Centre itself is very well laid out, with great information on the archaeology, history and folklore of Lough Gur. It has a number of superb reproductions of the incredible artefacts discovered at Lough Gur, and has informative interactive panels and exhibits making it fun for all ages. The visitor centre is an essential introduction to the complexity of archaeology in the region.

The foundations of an early medieval structure and field systems at the 'Spectacles'

From the Visitor Centre, your first stop will be a lovely walk that takes you past ‘The Spectacles’ where you can see the foundations of a number of buildings and field systems dating to the early medieval period. As you follow the path beyond the Spectacles, you climb ever higher and get spectacular views over Lough Gur. From here you can see the castles built by the Earls of Desmond in the later medieval period, and the earlier crannogs, small artificial islands, on the lake.

The foundations of one of the circular stone built ringforts (or cashels) at Carraig Aille

When you have finished your visit to Knockadoon, a short drive up the road will bring you to the cashels of Carraig Áille. These well-preserved early medieval stone ringforts have quite spectacular views, and are well worth the short climb up a hill. I will be featuring these forts in their own forthcoming blogpost.

The Lough Gur Wedge Tomb

 Another short drive from Carraig Áille and you can find a wonderful example of an Early Bronze Age wedge tomb, similar (though smaller) to that of Labbacallee in County Cork. Again, I will feature this tomb in it’s own blogpost as it is a fantastic site in its own right.

 

The lovely and peaceful Teampall Nua

Our next stop again just minutes along the road was the church ‘Teampall Nua’. This church is thought to date to the seventeenth century (though some architectural features look more medieval to me). It replaced an older chapel used by the Earls of Desmond.

 
Our final stop was Grange Stone Circle located just on the west of the lake and very easily accessible from the Limerick–Killmallock Road (R512). This stone circle is just incredible, it  is massive measuring nearly 50m in diameter. It is a near perfect ring of 113 contiguous stones (all the stones are touching). The entrance is marked with the tallest stones that are mirrored on the opposite side of the circle, apparently forming an alignment with the midsummer moon. The site is spectacular and will certainly feature in a separate blog post.
As an archaeologist I found the visit to Lough Gur to be almost like a pilgrimage. It is such a beautiful part of the country, and our visit barely scratched the surface of the sheer wealth of archaeological and historical sites clustered around the lake. A visit to Lough Gur is an absolute must for anyone with an interest in archaeology and history! You can find more information on Lough Gur from their website at http://www.loughgur.com/


If you have a suggestion for a site I’d love to hear it, please let us know by dropping us a line at info@abartaaudioguides.com or on Facebook, Twitter or Google+, where you can keep up with daily pictures and information about Ireland's wonderful heritage sites.

If you'd like to support us please consider downloading one of our audioguides from www.abartaaudioguides.com, they are packed with great facts, information, stories and legends from Ireland's iconic sites. They are designed to be fun and informative whether you are visiting the sites or from the comfort of your own home, so if you are looking to escape to the Court of Brian Boru the next time you are doing household chores download one of our guides and let us whisk you off to ancient Ireland!

I needed something healthy yet with protein tonight, so I ended up selecting this negitoro don from Tampopo's menu. It went down the hatch in a jiffy.

I know, I know, I know, I know, I know... I just got back from a month in Mali and Senegal and I was in Mexico City just a few months ago. But prices in Mexico are so cheap now and two of my friends, Roland and Helen, both have some time off in February and are both jonesin' for a trip to Guanajuato, and another friend, Allisse just got back from there raving about how fantastic it is. And, I feel kind of overjoyed because Obama just announced he's tossing another of Bush's horrible policies, the so-called "Mexico City Policy," into the garbage can of history.

Obama's second full day as president falls on the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the United States.

The sources said Obama may use the occasion to reverse the "Mexico City policy" reinstated in 2001 by Bush that prohibits U.S. money from funding international family planning groups that promote abortion or provide information, counseling or referrals about abortion services. It bans any organization receiving family planning funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development from offering abortions or abortion counseling.

The "Mexico City policy," commonly referred to by critics as "the global gag rule," was devised by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 at a population conference in Mexico City.

So... San Miguel de Allende here we come! San Miguel is a beautiful, artsy, historic town in central Mexico with perfect weather-- today it is 73 F and sunny-- all year round. It was designated an historic landmark seventy years ago and the colonial heritage is preserved and taken seriously. No neon signs or any of the other hideous trappings of gaudy Las Vegas style tourism that have ruined so many places in Mexico. It's all about narrow, cobblestone streets and the architecture goes back and forth from baroque to gothic. The city has a thriving and vibrant community of artists and writers from all over the world.

So this is what I did. I called Mexicana Airlines and made a reservation for a direct flight to Leon, the capital of Guanajuato and then I booked a stunning villa with 4 bedrooms. The roundtrip airfare from L.A. is $321 and the villa costs $1,550 for the week. Now I'm doing my research on the other colonial towns in the area we might want to visit, like Guantajuato, Dolores Hidalgo and San Luis de la Paz.


UPDATE: POSADA CORAZON

A reader, Eric, sent me a great tipfor the trop: a wonderful inn he had stayed at, Posada Corazon that serves organic breakfasts, even to non-guests (with a reservation). It looks like just the kind of place I'd love.

Yes, I took a photo of the in-flight magazine. Why? Because I ordered this dish, and yet didn't actually get it. Apparently they started heating these things when we were getting ready to push back from the gate in Hong Kong. But then we had to deplane while they fixed a mechanical problem...and when we got back on board over six hours later, the food had gone bad already, with nothing left to eat but instant noodles.

So I can only imagine what this Taiwanese three-cup chicken was going to taste like (it was featured in the magazine because UA is starting Taipei flights again). And that was a pretty brutal nearly 40 hours door to door from Boston...I should probably fly Lufthansa via Munich next time (or Turkish Airlines or even Emirates?). BTW, United was serving cioppino in business class on the way out of SFO today. There goes my theory about soup in first class.

Just a quick programming note. I'm out of town the next few days and probably won't be able to update again until Friday. No, I'm not off on another great adventure (I wish!) but instead I have to attend a convention for the day job and earn my keep for a change. It's not all bad though, as I'll be sitting on a panel discussion and making a presentation as well. I promise to be posting updates again as soon as possible.

Nice place. We needed a venue for a team dinner tonight, and this upscale seafood place came up as a suggestion (500 Commonwealth Avenue, 532-5300). It worked, be it the shellfish platters that we had to start or those lobster roe noodles above (to be clear, they were noodles made with lobster roe and hence the color). They had a decent selection of drinks too. It was pretty pricey though.

Photo © Prakash Hatvalne/AP Photo-All Rights Reserved
Photo © Prakash Hatvalne/AP Photo-All Rights Reserved
Two photoblogs, MSNBC's Photoblog and The Denver Post's Plog, featured images from a mass marriage ceremony held recently in the town of Rajgarh, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Both are credited to Prakash Hatvalne/AP Photo.

The top photograph is of Mamta (7 years old) standing with her husband Santosh, who is 11 years old. While the lower photograph is of an under-age newly married couple who refused to be identified.

While Indian law sets 18 as the minimum age for a woman to marry and 21 for a man, underage weddings occur in rural areas, where the law is seldom observed.

Sociologists believe that child marriages originated 900 years ago with Muslim invasions of the subcontinent. Legend has it that invading armies -as was customary at the time- raped and carried unmarried Hindu women off as war booty, prompting communities to marry off their daughters almost from birth to protect them.

This tradition of child marriage, as many others considered by the Western world to be abhorrent, has also been created by necessity. In poverty stricken villages in the Indian subcontinent, Middle East and Africa, securing early marriages for daughters can mean the difference between subsistence and famine.

Sometime last year, I went over to Commonwealth Crescent Market with one objective: to try out Coocci, a Japanese chicken stall run by a former Ichigo guy (118 Commonwealth Crescent #02-92). The food didn't particularly stand out to me at that time, but I didn't get a chance to try the fried chicken either. I suspected that I'd probably like that better than the other stuff that I had, and it turned out that I was right. It was tender and juicy and went down the hatch quickly, even if it was a bit greasy.



In the process, we noticed that a lot of people were ordering wantan mee from Jian Kang Noodles at stall 02-77. We thus got one too, and we liked it, particularly the firm and eggy noodles that reminded me of why I like Mak's in Hong Kong so much. Of course, this was done in a local style (that happened to have disappointingly dry char siu, BTW) rather than how they do it in HK, but maybe next time I'm here I'll try asking for the soup version to really focus on the noodles without other distractions.



We rounded out this little hawker center with a few other items, including those chwee kueh above (not as tasty as the ones at Tiong Bahru, but good enough), as well as a pleasantly sweet oat dessert from Xi Le Ting at stall 70 (look for the stall with the old school porcelain bowls, not the dessert stall in the center). I kinda liked how peaceful this place was. Next time hopefully I can catch the porridge lady too; I recall getting a tasty yu sheng from her last time, although I can't recall specifically what it was that I liked about it.

Yesterday we saw a curious cheetah interacting with a GoPro camera, today its some playful seals. If this video doesn't put a smile on your face, we should probably check you for a pulse. This was shot near the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumbria in England where the seal pups seem to enjoy chasing people.

Seal of Approval from Jason Neilus on Vimeo.

Roland finds 2 monks the junta didn't murder

One thing I found all 3 countries-- India, Thailand and Myanmar-- that I've been visiting this winter have in common is that each is a society with starkly different and parallel worlds coexisting in tandem-- each seemingly occupying the same physical space but not much else. Each has a noticeably growing middle class-- rapidly growing and growingly confident in India and Thailand-- living alongside masses so deplorably impoverished and in such primitive circumstances that they hardly seem to be living in the same epoch. At Down With Tyranny a couple weeks ago, I mentioned that 700 million people in India-- 700 million-- have no sanitary facilities. But the rich are getting richer... much richer-- and more and more people are walking around with cell phones.

Myanmar, potentially just as developable as India and Thailand, is in a world of its own-- and a world of hurt. There is definitely a Burmese middle class in places like Yangon and Mandalay, even if every aspect of the society is held back and hampered by a severely dysfunctional and oppressive tyranny. The junta holds back development as a product of ideology and as a tactic in maintaining its own dominance through brutal authoritarianism. After the recent violent crackdown on peaceful human rights demonstrators-- a crackdown which included the military slaughtering hundreds of peaceful monks-- the regime suddenly increased the cost of satellite TV access to make it inaccessible to the middle class. I mentioned a few days ago that the junta had already banned the BBC and other western news sources, leaving people with nothing but the always inoffensive and tepid CNN-- cookie recipe shows and breathless news reports on Britney Spears latest foibles threaten no one-- on which to depend for outside news. But now, even that will be out of reach for the Burmese middle class.

In Thailand people eat out. I was looking at condos for sale while I was here and noticed all the kitchens had two-burner stoves. When I asked an agent why hat was he said that most Thais rarely prepare meals at home. Food is cheap, varied and incredibly abundant. You see mountains of food everywhere you look in Thailand and you see Thais eating... everywhere. Their cuisine is one of the best-developed in the world, extremely sophisticated... sublime. Myanmar, next door, is a slightly different story. Food, though hardly scarce, isn't nearly as plentiful or as varied. And the cuisine, though good, isn't n the same level as Thailand's. Nor are there the plethora of restaurants in Yangon that you find in Bangkok.

Burmese food, naturally enough, is greatly influenced by Chinese and Indian cooking. It's far milder-- some might even say blander-- than Thai food. We tend to avoid Italian food, French food, Chinese food, and especially "American food" when we're traveling. Eating the native food is a crucial art of the travel experience for me, as it is for Roland-- although he goes to extremes, eating insects and dogs and snakes and God knows what. (I'm happy as a clam when I discover a new fruit, like pomelo or lamut.) In Yangon we stuck to the Burmese restaurants. And we avoided dinners, concentrating on lunches-- something I always do when traveling but which is even more important in a place like Burma where preparation takes a long time and it's fresh at lunch and, basically, left over at dinner.

The best restaurant we found in Yangon is Sandy's right on the shore of Lake Kandawgy (in the Kandawgy Palace Hotel, a hotel as shabby as its restaurant is spectacular). The setting is serene and gorgeous, basically an immense veranda right on the shore overlooking a superb park. The menu is overwhelming and just goes on and on and on. You'd have to spend months there before getting a fair sampling. And the very reasonable prices are in dollars. Their salads are amazing. I went crazy for the tea leaf salad and the pomelo salad. But everything we tried was very good. A close runner-up was the Green Elephant, which is pretty far from downtown-- about a dollar taxi ride. The food was also very good but eating there was basically the only time we were in Myanmar when we were aware that there were other tourists in Yangon besides us. We only saw one other westerner at the Swedegon Pagoda, the most famous site in the country, but the Green Elephant was filled with westerners. There were far less westerners at the bountiful, and relatively cheap, buffet offered at Traders (Shangri-La) Hotel downtown, a place you can get decent Burmese food and a whole hodge-podge of international cuisine.

And the Happy 60th Anniversary referred to in the title? Burma gained its freedom from the British on January 4, 1948-- after a hard-fought struggle led by that country's George Washington, Bogyoke Aung San, father of the currently imprisoned legitimate elected head of state and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Surfing isn't a topic I cover a lot here on the Adventure Blog, but this story is definitely worth mentioning. On Monday, Brazilian surfer Carlos Burle is believed to have set a new record for the largest wave ever ridden. He caught the massive 100 ft (30.5 meter) wave off the coast of Nazare, Portugal, a place that is known for it's giant swells. While the height hasn't been confirmed or made official yet, it is believed to be bigger than the previous record held by Garrett McNamara by more than 22 feet. The video below was shot while Burle was out on his board being chased by the giant wall of water. Definitely some impressive surfing and a scary sight.

Photo © Howard W. French -All Rights Reserved
The NY Times featured Howard French's exquisite portfolio of black & white photographs of residents of old Shanghai's densely packed neighborhoods inside their own homes, which is titled Discovering Shanghai's Secret City.

I was so taken by this type of work (and I guarantee you will too) that I looked for Howard French's other work and discovered his main photography website, and his equally wonderful Disappearing Shanghai: The Landscape Within among other galleries.

Howard French lived in Shanghai from 2003-2008 as chief of The Times’s bureau, and spent many weekends exploring the lesser known areas of Shanghai or the "densely packed place of tumbledown, two-story housing and long internal alleyways" as he describes them. He became a familiar sight for many of the residents, and knew what to expect at every corner, whther it'd be a mahjong game or a regular siting in a chair in his pajamas.

He returned to Shanghai last summer and for three months, he knocked on the doors of homes and asked himself in to document what he encountered.

To me, this is what documentary photography is all about. The photographer as a fly on the wall...seemingly unnoticed by his subjects...who perhaps either ignore his presence, got used to it or tolerate it....and from these frames, one can build a storyline. In the photograph above, the woman on the left is laughing at something/someone outside of the frame, and the younger woman looks at her somewhat pensively, while a third person is lying on the bed, possibly asleep. Can we guess the dynamics in this photograph? The wedding photograph hanging from the wall begs the question: is the bride and groom present in the room? Are they the laughing woman and the sleeping figure? Is the young woman their daughter?

Simple yet complex. I love it.

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy -All Rights Reserved
Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy -All Rights Reserved
Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy -All Rights Reserved
During the Oaxaca Mini Photo~Expedition™ last week, we attended a Guelaguetza performance at one of the town's old hotels. I managed to get our group in the dancers' dressing room just before the performance, where we were introduced to Gloria, an experienced dancer who was dubbed "La Maestra" by the rest of the dancers.

Although heavy-set, Gloria had the flexibility, energy and liveliness of dancers half-her age, and she deafened us with her rhythmic whistling during the most frenetic parts of the dances. A real professional, with a wicked sense of humor.

La Guelaguetza is a perfomance of traditional dances from the seven regions of the state of Oaxaca. The performance is a re-creation of the original dance steps and music passed down through the generations. Dancers, and even musicians, wear costumes representative of their respective district, which are decorated with ribbons and sometimes bells.

The origin of the Guelaguetza dances dates fro pre-Columbian traditions, and the word "guelaguetza" is originally Zapotec Indian which means an offering or gift. In the true spirit of guelaguetza, the dancers at the end of their performance toss gifts, usually of fruits and vegetables, into the crowd. These offerings represent their region's specialty and include straw hats, flowers, mangoes and even pineapples.

This is what I described in my earlier POV post, and the fruits were eagerly awaited by some poor Zapotec children watching the children Guelaguetza.

Here's my gallery of La Guelaguetza photographs, made in 2007, which has additional details.

One of the few remaining expeditions in the Himalaya that we've been waiting on an update from was Chad Kellogg and David Gottlieb's attempt on Lunag-Ri, the tallest unclimbed peak in Nepal at 6895 meters (22,621 ft). We do know that the duo set off on a summit push a week and a half back, but we hadn't heard anything of them since. Yesterday Chad posted an update on their attempt and the difficulties the faced trying to reach the top.

After shuttling gear to ABC on Oct. 22, and taking a rest day on the 23rd, the two climbers launched the summit bid on Thursday, Oct. 24. Ahead of them was a 4500-foot (1371 meter) wall that has resisted all attempts in the past. The route is a mix of snow, ice and rock that is difficult under the best of conditions. Unfortunately for Chad and David, these weren't the best of conditions.

Chad goes into more detail about the ascent and the conditions that they faced on the climb. It seems that things were going about as well as could be expected, with the exception of debris falling down the mountain face due to warm sun and strong winds blasting the mountain. At one point, the men took refuge in a bowl that provided some shelter while they waited for the sun to go down and temperatures to cool the mountain. The thought being that it would be safer to climb once everything solidified as the snow and ice froze again. After waiting about two hours, they then continued up the slope.

Even though the temperatures had dropped, the mountain didn't solidify completely. Chunks of rock and other debris continued to rain down on the climbers and at one point they heard something big rip off the face and start to tumble down. It was a large rock that ended up striking Chad in the shoulder and causing a severe, if not serious, injury. The arm wasn't broken, but Chad couldn't raise it above his shoulder and was having a difficult time swinging an ice axe. There was no way to continue up, so they elected to descend, reassess the situation and decide what to do next.

Chad and David made it safely down to Base Camp where Chad's injury was checked out. It seems he's fine, but quite sore. They are now weighing their options and considering making another attempt along a different route. For now, we'll just have to wait to see if that is possible.

The Marco Vernsachi & The Pulitzer Center "affair" seems to have somewhat calmed down after the considerable airing of divergent views, opinions and debate between photojournalists, photographers and journalists in the blogosphere.

Some of these views were expressed on Lightstalkers, which is a popular no-holds barred forum for photographers. Going through the posts, I saw one that claimed that the story (and its handling) was not only a blow to the credibility of photojournalism (which I agree), but also a blow to the credibility of some blogs (and their authors).

Huh? The Pulitzer Center was forced to formally admit (twice) its mistake in publishing an image of an exhumed corpse of a young Ugandan girl on its site, because of the bloggers' criticisms that it violated the rights of a child to dignity and privacy. If it hadn't been for the bloggers, these offensive photographs would be still on the Center's website, circulated on social networks and possibly worse.

I view this story and its results as vindication for those bloggers who had the courage of their convictions, and demand that these offensive photographs be pulled from the Pulitzer Center's website. It's hoped that the Pulitzer Centre will stand by its promise of redoubling its "efforts to authenticate every claim and to insure the privacy rights of individual victims".

The appropriate way to look at it is that the bloggers stepped in and redressed a wrong that would not have been committed had the parents of these unfortunate African children have recourse to a sophisticated legal system preventing such liberties with privacy rights.

Filmed entirely on the island of Le Palma, the western most point in the Canary Islands, this timelapse video captures some amazing footage of that beautiful place. I particularly enjoy seeing the movement of the clouds as they wrap around a mountaintop observatory, which in turn opens up as time passes. I'm not sure why these timelapses are so compelling, but they certainly do a great job of capturing my imagination.

El Cielo de La Palma from Daniel López on Vimeo.

Polar Explorers Børge Ousland and Thomas Ulrich are up to their old tricks, launching a very ambitious expedition today. According to ThePoles.com the boys have teamed up once more for another epic journey that won't end at the North Pole, but will just begin.

Both men were guding teams to the North Pole at late as last week, but now they've been dropped at the Pole together to set off on their own. This time, they'll be traveling by skiis across the frozen Arctic Ocean to Franz-Josef Land, in Siberia. A trip of more than 900km. From there, they'll drop the skiis and move into kayaks as they travel another 350km to Cape Flora. The journey won't end there however, as they'll board a sailing ship that will take them back to Norway, but not to warm beds and lovely nordic women. Instead, Ousland and Ulrich will be dropped off at the North Cape, and they'll trek back to Oslo on foot.

When it's all said and done, the pair expect the journey to take about three and a half months, and they'll carry all of their supplies with them, as they'll be doing this one unsupported. This should be another amazing expedition to follow. Travel safe guys!

For some reason, my earlier post on this got deleted...

So here it is again:

I thought a little trumpet blowing would be appropriate this Sunday morning...so here goes.

The Travel Photographer blog is ranked 1st when searching using Google for "The Travel Photographer" (it's sort of obvious, but it's still cool)...

Using Google, it ranks 2nd when searching for "Travel Photographer" which is really phenomenal.

And it ranks 4th when searching for "Travel Photography" which is really really phenomenal.

I also found out that the blog has over 1300 feed subscribers!

I came across this short film this morning and thought it was well worth sharing. It is an 11-minute documentary about climber Andy White, who suffered a major injury when he fell while climbing a few years back. That accident impacted his approach to the sport, so he turned to bouldering to get his fix without having to deal with higher heights. Lucky for him, he has a great bouldering playground in his backyard in the form of the Boulderfields outside of Kelowna, British Columbia in Canada. The video shares Andy's story and gives us a glimpse of his passion for his new climbing obsession.

The Fields - A Bouldering Film from Clayton Arnall on Vimeo.