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One of Ireland’s true hidden gems, Kilcooley Abbey is a simply wonderful place to visit. It is located in the beautiful Sliabh-Ardagh region of Tipperary, and is located within the walls of the Kilcooley Estate, an impressive Georgian house with over a thousand acres of land.

Kilcooley Abbey was founded in 1182 after a grant of land to the Cistercians by Donal Mor O'Briain, King of Munster. It was the ‘daughter house’ of Jerpoint Abbey in County Kilkenny, and Kilcooley is without a doubt one of Ireland’s finest Cistercian abbeys and is a wonderful example of Gothic architecture. 

The Cistercian Order was founded by St. Bernard of Clairvaux in Burgundy, Central France in 1098. St. Bernard believed that the other monastic orders had become dissolute and undisciplined, and he founded the Cistercians as an austere and hard-working order who focused on a life of prayer. The Cistercians were initially extremely successful in Ireland, and spread rapidly from their first foundation at Mellifont in County Louth.

I haven’t been able to find much on the next couple of centuries of Kilcooley’s history, but the Abbey is recorded as being attacked and burned in 1418 and later again it was recorded as being almost completely levelled by an armed force of men in 1444. After this attack, the Ormond Butlers instigated a programme of reconstruction which removed the nave aisles and added a new north transept and tower. Most of the stunning sculpture around the Abbey dates to this period of reconstruction and renovation under the patronage of the powerful Ormond Butlers. The works were carried out under the eye of the Abbot, Philip O’Mulwanayn, and his graveslab dating to 1463 shows him holding his bishop’s crozier and book of prayer. He appears to have been part of a dynasty, as his son William, and his ancestors after him, were abbots of Kilcooley until the mid sixteenth century.

The Butlers were rewarded for their patronage, by having their tombs placed inside the sacred areas of Kilcooley. The most stunning of which is the incredible tomb of Pierce Fitz Oge Butler. The tomb likely dates to 1526, and depicts Pierce Butler in his armour. At his feet a small dog indicates his faithfulness and loyalty, and ten of the twelve apostles are depicted below (from left to right) Saint Peter holding the keys to Heaven, Saint Andrew, Saint James (major), Saint John, Saint Thomas, Saint James (minor), Saint Philip, Saint Bartholomew, Saint Simon and Saint Matthew. Unusually, we know who actually created the tomb, as the name of the sculptor Rory O’Tunney (Roricus O Tuyne) is clearly marked.

The Sedilla

The wonderful screen wall

The beautiful eastern window

Medieval tomb effigys, with that of Abbot Phillip O’Mulwanayn highlighted

It is almost impossible to do justice in this short blog article to the sheer wealth of incredible sculpture at Kilcooley, for example the beautifully ornate Gothic east window is so delicately carved, with the stone formed to look almost like flames or delicate foliage.  The ‘abbots chair’ (or sedilla) is also incredible, and is matched on the other side by another, slightly plainer example perhaps for a prior. As far as I am aware I believe them to be the only examples in Irish Cistercian monasteries.

The screen wall separating the southern transept from the sacristy is also elaborately decorated with a number of scenes including Saint Christopher crossing a river with the infant Jesus, the crucifixion with Mary and Saint John on either side, a pelican feeding its young within a chalice, a charming mermaid with a comb and mirror, and the Butler coat-of-arms.

The cloister area

Beyond this area you can enter the cloister. The cloisters was an important feature of Cistercian monasteries, and were always located to the south. They were usually a covered walkway enclosing an open square area. Very little remains of any covered walkway at Kilcooley, and it appears that perhaps the cloisters were converted to a courtyard in its later history. You can see other more domestic quarters at Kilcooley though some of these are kept locked and inaccessible to the public for health and safety reasons. Outside of the abbey you can see a small circular tower, this was a dovecote where the monks kept pigeons. The pigeons were a handy source of protein and the pigeon dung also made good fertilizer, very little was wasted in a medieval monastery! In its heyday, the Abbey would have also had other agricultural buildings like mills and a large lay population to work the land.

Stairway to domestic quarters

Kilcooley Abbey ceased to be a place of monks and contemplation when it was surrendered during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1540. However the lands were granted directly to the Butlers, and it is recorded that they allowed monks to remain at Kilcooley, until they sold it to Sir Jerome Alexander in 1636. After the Catholic Confederacy rebellion in 1641, Cistercian monks returned to Kilcooley, until they were finally removed from the site by Cromwell’s forces in 1650. Ten years later the Alexander family regained the Abbey and when Elizabeth Alexander married Sir William Barker of Essex in 1676, the Abbey was converted into being a domestic house.

In 1790 the grand Kilcooley House was built and replaced the abbey as the main residence. Today the site is a National Monument, and under the care of the Office of Public Works. The site is gated, but the gate is often left unlocked during the day to allow visitors to enjoy one of the finest heritage sites in the country.

Kilcooley is located around 20km east of Thurles in County Tipperary at co-ordinates 52.67206 -7.5644, off the R690. It’s just east of Gortnahoe. When you go up the drive of Kilcooley Estate you’ll see signs for the Abbey, but before you get there be sure to park your car at the relatively modern Church of Ireland and take a moment to see the quite remarkable 18/19th century pyramid shaped burial monument of the Barker family. It’s well worth a look! The abbey is just further along the track, less than a five minute walk from there.

Kilcooley is one of the sites on our free to download audioguide The Derrynaflan Trail, that leads you around the beautiful Slieveardagh Region of County Tipperary and helps you to explore the wonderful ancient monasteries and churches that you will encounter along the way. Download directly to your smartphone or tablet with our free audiovisual app (for Apple and Android), please see here for a preview.

Alternatively you can download directly onto your desktop or laptop as a free MP3 album, please visit here to download your free copy.

The dovecote

The fantastic Historic Graves group have also visited Kilcooley and have recorded the custodian of the Abbey eloquently describing the history and features of this remarkable place. You can find this here

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 wonderful heritage sites in Ireland.

If you’d like to support us please consider downloading an audioguide from my website www.abartaaudioguides.com. They are designed to be fun and informative whether you are at the site or from the comfort of your own home. Try our audioguide to Viking and Medieval Dublin, or if you’re in Tipperary try our guides to the Rock of Cashel or the formidable Cahir Castle. Available for just €1.99 from www.abartaaudioguides.com

The unusual pyramid monument of the Barker family

 

The impressive Kilcooley Estate, dates to the 18th Century and available for €2.1m

It took a while, but I completed setting up two websites based on the popular WordPress F.8 theme that will run in parallel to my current website.

The first WordPress-based website contains 15 photo galleries, which are also iTouch and iPad-compatible.

The second WordPress-based website contains 8 audio-slideshows.

The Travel Photographer's original HTML/Flash-based website still remains as is.

When I first saw this place (1 Vista Exchange Greem #02-25), I was excited to see yet another mala xiangguo stall at a foodcourt, hopefully being a sign of more to come. But this one was kinda nasty, as it lacked the punch of Sichuan peppercorns...and was surprisingly watery at the bottom! One of these days we should try that stall that I saw at Jem to see if it is any good.

Addendum: I just came back to this place four weeks later, and realized that if one requests the spiciest level, then the dish finally becomes bearable enough to eat. I'd still prefer to go elsewhere, but if I'm stuck here, then the trick is to request the highest level of heat.

Not all bankers work for "great vampire squids wrapped around the face of humanity". Well, some may enjoy doing just that, reaping millions in the process...but others may be like Albert Kahn.

Certainly a product of a different age but Albert Kahn was a wealthy French banker and philanthropist, who started an visionary project to create a color photographic record of the peoples of the world.

Described as an idealist and an internationalist (aren't these two words synonymous?), Kahn used a new photographic process called autochrome, to promote cross-cultural peace and understanding.

Camera-shy himself, Albert Kahn used his fortune to finance the travel of intrepid photographers to more than 50 countries around the world, at a time when age-old cultures were on the brink of being changed for ever by war and the march of 20th-century globalization. His objective was to record the differing customs of the human race for posterity, and his Paris museum houses 72,000 autochromes of these travels.

Although Kahn was one of the richest men in Europe in 1929, Wall Street's crash that very year ruined him, and in 1931 he was forced to bring his project to an end.

A BBC book The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn was published, bringing Kahn's autochromes to a mass audience for the first time. A wonderful world indeed.

Perhaps Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs will pick up Albert Kahn's baton?

(The vertical autochrome is of a Vietnamese couple in Tonkin in the northernmost part of Vietnam, while the horizontal is of a hunter in Mongolia).

I first blogged about The Crazy Kayker last week when he announced his plan to kayak the length of the Mississippi this Summer. Well, our friends over at The Oudoor Weblog have gone a step further by posting aninterview with him.

In the first installment of a new section entitled "The Outdoor Enthusiast Next Door" they put the questions to Jacob van der Merwe, a.k.a. The Crazy Kayaker. This is part one of the interview, and Jason answers questions about how he got his nickname, why he loves kayaking, and why he wants to kayak the length of the Mississippi River. His answers are interesting and insightful and give us a nice glimpse at his personality.

It should be fun to follow his progress this Summer, and if I still lived along the Mississippi River, maybe I'd head out to join him for a day on the water.

Update: Part 2 of the interview has now been posted as well.

I was hoping for something cheap and spicy tonight, and the hotel concierge pointed me to a string of shops across the street. This chain looked really promising at first, featuring things like my favorite red oil wontons and some mysterious thing called a "tiger sauce," which I figured had to be spicy (or at least something like that "tiger vegetable" stuff). But it was not spicy at all, and in fact was rather goopy and sweet. Even those little dishes of cold appetizers at the front of the shop were sweet. Ugh - I did not like that at all.

Our friend Dave Cornthwaite has released a fun little video which is the culmination of a project that started more than 1000 days ago. Starting on January 1, 2011, Dave, who we followed down the Mississippi River on a stand-up paddleboard and on a1000 mile swim down the Missouri River (amongst other adventures), began taking a photo of himself everyday for 1000 days. He has then strung them together in the video below, which is equal parts inspiring and entertaining. That time span overlaps several of his big expeditions, so you'll see Dave in a variety of situations. The message here, as the title implies, is that we should make ever day – every moment – count.

On April 30 I was flying between L.A. and Jacksonville. There may be other, less horrible, airlines that fly that route, but I wound up on Delta, the flying garbage can. I guess I should be thankful it takes off and lands. The stewardii insisted we all toast Delta because they came out of bankruptcy that day. I don't drink. And I hate Delta.

Not that Im a big fan of any of the U.S. airlines anymore. I just flew from L.A. to DC to Chicago to L.A. on United and it was generally as bad as Delta. "The overall performance of U.S. airlines worsened in 2006, its third consecutive year of decline, according to the 17th annual Airline Quality Ratings released here Monday. Its performance fell in three of the four categories measured by the study: on-time arrival, involuntary bumping and mishandled luggage. The customer complaint rate was flat."

Hawaiian Air was #1 and JetBlue was #2. All the big airlines stunk. United was #8. American was #10 and Delta was #12. I fly "first class." The so-called first class sections of all three of the big three are not particularly better than JetBlue's economy class. On my United flights last week there were no foot-rests on any of the cramped seats. The staff was unprofessional to the max on each flight, as though they had never gone through any training at all. The food was abysmal and the seating areas filthy. The planes took off and landed on time.

Today's New York Times examines one sordid aspect of the industry in depth: overbooking policies; it doesn't look good.

The summer travel season is under way, and so many planes are expected to be full that, if you are bumped, you could end up waiting days for a seat on another flight to the same destination.

The number of fliers bumped against their will is expected to reach a high for the decade this year.

How could that happen? The industry's "widespread practice of airline overbooking... Airlines, of course, overbook to avoid losing billions of dollars because of empty seats. Inevitably, though, they guess wrong on some flights and too many people arrive at the gate."

Airlines would overbook far more than they do-- they certainly don't give a rat's ass for their passengers-- but fear of passenger anger holds them hold to 6 or 700,000 a year.


JULY UPDATE: IT GETS WORSE

The NY Times is reporting today that delays are getting worse this year. Maybe it's just too simple to blame Bush-- although, instinctively-- I do.

The on-time performance of airlines has reached an all-time low, but even the official numbers do not begin to capture the severity of the problem.

That is because these statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays-- those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights-- involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted. Researchers and consumer advocates have taken notice and urged more accurate reporting.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did a study several years ago and found that when missed connections and flight cancellations are factored in, the average wait was two-thirds longer than the official statistic. They also determined that as planes become more crowded — and jets have never been as jammed as they are today-- the delays grow much longer because it becomes harder to find a seat on a later flight.

That finding prompted the M.I.T. researchers to dust off their study, which they are updating now. But with domestic flights running 85 to 90 percent full, meaning that virtually all planes on desirable routes are full, Cynthia Barnhart, an M.I.T. professor who studies transportation systems, has a pretty good idea of what the new research will show when it is completed this fall: “There will be severe increases in delays,” she said.

Very severe-- and longer-- 39% longer than last year, to be precise. Republican anti-union ideological mania has wrecked the air traffic control system and the general anti-union permissiveness of the Bush Regime has made some airline employees... "grumpy." As the Times put it, "after taking big pay cuts and watching airline executives reap some big bonuses, many workers are fed up."

Stijn Pieters is a self taught freelance photographer based in Gent, Belgium whose work focuses on under-reported social, political and environmental issues. He completed projects in Nepal, Kashmir, Palestine, Northern Ireland, Swaziland, Yemen, Morocco, Iran, Vietnam, The Philippines, India and Bangladesh; most of which tackle diverse issues, from HIV/aids in Swaziland to the pervasive gun culture in Yemen, from Agent Orange victims in Vietnam to stateless people in Bangladesh.

For his projects in Yemen in 2006 and Morocco in 2007, Stijn received respectively grants from the Pascal Decroos Foundation and the King Baudouin Foundation. His work has been published in Belgian magazines like MO*, Vrede, Menzo, Tertio, Vacature, Varen and Isel Magazine.

The above slideshow is on the Durga Puja in Bangladesh, and is very nice work by Stijn. It's an annual Hindu festival in South Asia that celebrates worship of the Hindu goddess Durga. You can click on it for a full screen experience.

The most celebrated Durga Puja is in Calcutta where more than 2000 pandals (temporary structures...like thrones) are set up for the populace to venerate. Durga Puja in Calcutta is often referred to as the Rio Carnival of the Eastern Hemisphere.

I'm off for a long weekend, but this time I won't be doing any work. It's all about escape and relaxation for the next few days. I'll be back to the normal routine on Monday, but until then I plan to have some fun. If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you'll probably figure out where I'm at pretty quickly.

In the meantime, I have several posts in place for today with some good stuff to share. I hope you enjoy and I'll be back with more updates soon.

Howie at Iguazo after the "safe incident" in Buenos Aires

The most regular Google hits this site gets come from people finding a piece I wrote last Christmas called Is Morocco A Safe Place To Visit?. My conclusion, having visited the country a dozen times since 1969, is that it is. Now you don't have to go traveling around the world to find trouble; trouble'll find you anywhere, and certainly in Paris, London, New York, L.A., San Francisco, Sydney... yeah, anywhere. My luckless friend Roland has been to Marrakech three times and was robbed the first two times he was there. But I rate Marrakech safe, as well as the other big cities listed above, and Buenos Aires unsafe. Let me tell you why I came to that conclusion.

A few weeks ago, just before leaving for Buenos Aires, I was laughing about how Bush's drunken daughter was robbed in San Telmo, a Buenos Aires hotspot (while surrounded by her Secret Service bodyguards). I was laughing because there's no amount of grief that could come to that infamous family that I wouldn't find amusing-- and because the daughter is just like the father: an irresponsible jackass who can't figure out how to behave among people. However, once I spent some time in Buenos Aires I started feeling badly that I had laughed. Everyone gets robbed in Buenos Aires. Everyone? Well, no, that was an exaggeration. I wrote something the other day about how Americans that are afraid of anything foreign can stay at the Park Hyatt and be in a virtual plastic bubble of American-ness (including a safe and prophylactic environment).

On the other hand, I haven't met a single Argentine without a story about crime in Buenos Aires. Everyone who hasn't been robbed has a brother or sister or best friend who has. My friend in bucolic Posadas has two sisters who moved from Misiones to cosmopolitan Buenos Aires. Both have been robbed numerous times; one was robbed 6 times! Buenos Aires crime isn't all directed at tourists. It's directed at everyone, including tourists.

Conventional wisdom for travelers is always to be alert and use common sense and then you won't be a victim. Mostly that works. But it works less well in Buenos Aires. The stories are legion! You get everything from the mundane stuff: pickpockets, purse and camera snatchers, crooked taxi drivers... to some really exotic shit: roofies in the drink at night/naked and penniless in a strange place in the morning. I ran into a guy from Milwaukee who had driven his motorcycle all the way down from Wisconsin to Argentina. You have to be pretty tough to do that. And then he got to Buenos Aires. Tom has a great web site about his trip, and the whole thing is worth reading just because he's such an engaing writer with a refreshing perspective. But here's a segment about his misadventures in Buenos Aires:

Sadly, the two most entertaining things to write about are also the most unfortunate for me. First, I was robbed. And, second, I flirted with the possibility of serious personal injury.
 
The robbery took place in the morning at a small park in one of the three medians that separate the lanes in the 14-lane avenue I referenced earlier. I was reading the paper, enjoying some breakfast, when I suddenly realized that a bird had just pooped in my yogurt and on my leg. I figured this to be revenge for not sharing my donut with the crowd of birds gathered around my feet. At right around this time, a man in his 50's walked by and motioned to the birds in the tree directly above me. I stood up to survey the breadth of the poop, at which point the man directed me to a cement post a short distance away where he claimed there was water. Near the post a woman in her thirties noticed my leg and offered some of her Kleenex while addressing me in an apologetic tone. I was not in the mood to have people wiping poop off my leg, so I brushed them away. It was on the way back to the hotel that I realized that my camera was not in my pocket.
 
I also had had a video camera and some cash on me, so they didn´t fleece me completely But I was pretty irritated, and I had evil thoughts of breaking all of that woman´s fingers one by one.  Strangely, the more I thought about it, the less upset I got. It's one thing to be robbed, but to be bamboozled by a three-person (including the deuce squirter in the grassy knoll) squad in an elaborate artificial poop ploy is quite another. I admired their audacity and originality, and, as an aside, I believe that the fake poop recipe involved a spicy mustard.

Actually, it isn't all that original. They were doing the exact same thing in Delhi in the 70's, around Connaught Place. It's just one of countless schemes Porteños have come up with to separate people from their money and possessions. Why Buenos Aires?

There are a lot of theories, although I should point out that most of the huge Latin American cities are crime infested and relatively unsafe. Argentina is a very materialistic place and somewhat superficial to boot. Everybody who's anybody-- or wants to be-- wants to at least appear to be on top of things. That costs money. And of the 11 million residents of the city, a great many millions of them are poor. It looks like a very prosperous city, a very, very prosperous city. But you don't have to go far from the core, away from the Microcentro, from Palermo, from Recoleta, Belgrano, Retiro, Barrio Norte before you run into some serious poverty. Shanties surround the city. And there are sections right in the heart of it you don't want to walk through. A ten minute stroll from the 4 Seasons and Park Hyatt you could stumble onto Villa 31, a ghetto that many Porteños claim is at the root of a good deal of the street crime in town. Along with urban myths about how teenage murderers cannot be legally punished and that kind of thing, you get a picture of Villa 31 being filled with young people sitting around and listening to cumbia all day-- think rap and hip-hop-- and very addicted to Paco (think crack). You'll be hard-pressed to find too much sympathy among Argentines for the residents of Villa 31 and the other villas miserias and their unfortunate inhabitants but here's the other side of the story.

So what about me? You know how I walk everywhere-- and at all times of the day and night. I walk for miles and miles in any direction and sneer at anyone who tells me it's unsafe. Did I run into any of the famous Buenos Aires street crime? Not first hand. But that doesn't mean I wasn't robbed. I wasn't robbed in one of the villas miserias though; I was robbed in Recoleta, Buenos Aires' "Beverly Hills." I was the victim of a trick at least as old as the one that Tom fell for with the pigeon poop.

I rented an apartment through a "reputable" Argentine agency that connects landlords with tourists who are spending at least a week in the capital, ByTArgentina. I picked an apartment in an upscale building on Posadas, a pretty posh street. I figured I would play it safe for my first week. What a joke! The landlady, Graciela Ujaque de Narnesi (Grace Ujaque of Buenos Aires and Miami) met me at the apartment and gave me a key to the safe so I could leave my money in it. When I left a week later, $500 was missing from the safe. ByTArgentina promised they'd get back to me; they haven't. Does that mean I won't go back to Buenos Aires? of course not. I'll just be... more alert next time.



WHAT ABOUT MEXICO CITY? IS THAT ONE SAFE?

Like I said, there are problems with all the big Latin American cities, not just Buenos Aires. New Years Eve's Washington Post did a story on the safety of traveling to Mexico's gigantic capital. The article talks about politically motivated problems and common street crime. "Street crime also has long plagued this 580-square-mile, traffic-clogged metropolis of more than 20 million residents. The list of crimes encountered by travelers is daunting: pickpocketing, purse snatching, mugging, armed robbery and rape, according to the U.S. State Department's consular information sheet on Mexico. 'Instant kidnappings,' in which the victims are abducted at gunpoint and forced to empty their bank accounts to pay a ransom, also are common. Even hailing taxis is considered risky. Is a trip to a place with so many sore spots worth it? And if you go, how best to stay safe?"

The writer insists that Mexico City has a lot of draws recommending it. He recommends avoiding certain neighborhoods and suggests avoiding oft-used scams and ye olde bullshyte line about taking "every precaution you would in any large city." As well as carrying minimal cash, leaving the bling back home and trying to "blend in." (The jewelry business in Argentina is ruined because no Portenos in their right minds wear anything real anymore.) He thinks you'll be safer if you avoid areas around the airport and central train station-- a good idea in any big city anywhere-- as well as Garibaldi Square, Pensil, Tepito, Buenos Aires and Santa Julia, the area behind the National Palace and the Zocolo at night.

Everyone says the green and white VW bug taxis are to be avoided. Even a U.S. Embassy employee in Asuncion warned me against them! The hotel concierges say the same thing about the non-radio hotels in Buenos Aires, although I found them problem-free (and less expensive).


UPDATE: GUANGZHOU IS WAY WORSE

Hong Kong is as close as I ever got to Guangzhou (Canton when I was a geography student), although I always wanted to go. After reading about the Hand Choppers, a motorcycle gang that doesn't bother removing a purse or ring but opts for severing the whole hand, I've decided to stick to Shanghai and Beijing.

Not all of the cold weather adventures are taking place in Antarctica at the moment. Case in point, the just launched Pole of Cold expedition that got underway last week which plans to cross Northern Europe and Siberia on a three-month long, 30,000 km (18,641 mile) journey to reach the coldest inhabited place on the planet in the dead of winter.

The three-person team on this expedition include veteran polar explorer Felicity Aston, mechanic Gisli Jonsson and filmmaker Manu Palomeque. The trio were the winners of a Land Rover bursary which provides funding for this expedition. They set out from the Royal Geographical Society headquarters in London and are now making their way through Norway, where they encountered their first bits of snow. Eventually the journey will take them into deepest Siberia however, where they will make their way to Oymyakon, which is widely considered the coldest inhabited place on the planet. How cold you ask? The thermometer once recorded a temperature of -67.7ºC (-89.8ºF). Now that's cold!

The journey will be a road trip of epic proportions. The route will take the team into some of the most remote places on the planet where temperatures will routinely plummet to dangerous levels. They'll have to deal with non-existant roads, plenty of snow and ice and a complete lack of infrastructure once they get out into the heart of Siberia itself. This will be a round-trip journey that begins and end in London, with a stop at the northernmost point in Europe and plenty of other cold places along the way.

The purpose of the journey is to explore cultural attitudes toward winter while also assessing how lifestyles are different in places that deal with extreme ends of the climate continuum.

You can follow the Pole of Cold team on their website and Facebook page.

Just a quick programming note for what could be a very cool TV show. The Discovery Channel will air a special called Adventure Bhutan that promises to be quite interesting for anyone who is the Himalaya and that part of the World. The show will air this Sunday starting at 9 PM Eastern/ 8 PM Central time.

The tiny Kingdom of Bhutan has been diffucult for Westerners to gain access to in general, and some areas are completely shut off to Westerners altogether. But for the first time, cameras were allowed into the Mangde Chu River valley as Discovery Channel expeditions kayaks this remote and largely unexplored area.

The two hour program will be reaired later in the evening as well, and will likely feature some amazing scenery and wiil probably chronicle an incredible adventure for the paddlers. I'm guessing that they'll encounter Class V+ rapids and crazy conditions. The only downfall is that I don't see it listed on the Discovery HD channel, so I guess we'll have to settle for our first glimpse of this amazing place in standard definition. Bummer. So set your Tivo's and enjoy the show.

Photo © Jonathan Maher-All Rights Reserved
It's not often that I feature European travel photography, so I thought I'd break the mold today by featuring the work of Jonathan Maher on Venice and its Carnival.

I've not been to Venice during Carnival yet, but know a number of photographers who've been and returned with splendid work. I visited Venice a few years ago, ill prepared for its acqua alta season, and still recall walking in soggy shoes.

Jonathan Maher is an English travel photographer currently based in Italy. His work is principally based around travel and documentary projects and themes. His biography describes his style as being "reductive" or narrowing the frame down to the critical and essential components.

Aside his work in Venice, Jonathan has travel galleries of Namibia, India, France, Italy and Asia.

The folks at Keen, the company that makes some of my favorite shoes, clothing, packs and other gear, are outdoor lovers through and through. To prove it, they're giving away $100,000 to nonprofits across the globe and they're looking for our help in jumpstarting this new program which they've dubbed the Keen Effect.

All of the details can be found at the link above which gives instructions for to nonprofits that are interested in applying. All of the required criteria are listed as well and include such stipulations as any funded projects must attempt to increase participation in the outdoors and should have clear goals and measurable objectives. Applicants can request $2500 for Tier 1 consideration or $10,000 for Tier 2.

As outdoor enthusiasts Keen is enlisting us to help get the word out to nonprofit that we think are deserving. They can be operating on a local level or on a larger scale, but they should be doing something to engage more of us in the outdoors. If you have a favorite organization that you think deserves some funding, then encourage them to visit KeenEffect.com to apply.

For some reason, there aren't many Mongolian BBQ places up in the city nor even into the Peninsula. But once one goes deeper into the Valley, there are quite a few of them around. (BTW, does anyone know why Great Khan's closed at some of the malls around here?) We took a gamble by coming to this shop: after all, a place called "President Restaurant" doesn't exactly sound like much of a Mongolian BBQ place (1190 Hillsdale Avenue Suite 100A, 978-7188).

Fortunately, it was, complete with the giant round grill in the center of the restaurant as well as the grimey and greasy interior that usually accompanies this stuff. Now, the food wasn't exactly anything to get excited about, but it was still better than I thought it would be. I'll come back (interestingly, these guys also serve phở), but perhaps with a change of clothes given that I'll come out of here stanking like grease.

You don't think being in the country for like 8 hours makes me an expert yet? Me neither; but until today I don't think I recall ever meeting anyone who had been here longer. It sure is different from Buenos Aires! Montevideo is a kicked back town, almost rustic compared to sophisticated Buenos Aires, just down the Plata (and on the other side of that wide river).

This morning I took a fast ferry-- there's also a slow ferry-- to Colonia de Sacramento (bka- Colonia). It took an hour and it was comfy and pleasant. I met a really nice woman in the lounge before boarding, Ana, who works for HSBC. It's a whole other story but I can't emphasize enough that traveling solo affords opportunities that are rarely available to people who travel with someone. I like it both ways but I always talk with Americans who can't seem to fathom the idea of traveling alone. While I was waiting at the bus station I ran into a guy from Milwaukee named Tom who had ridden his motorcycle all the way down here. What a trip he's having!

Anyway, Colonia, which was founded by the Portuguese and chose to stay with Brazil instead of joining Uruguay-- although it doesn't share a contiguous border with Brazil-- is always raved about by everyone as a picturesque jewel of colonial architecture and so on. It's nice and it took me about an hour to see it all. I could have seen it in 30 minutes if I were in a hurry.

The bus to Montevideo took two and a half hours through the gently rolling Uruguayan countryside. It's a small rural country with 3 million people, half of whom live in Montevideo (which boasts a tree for every person, something I am willing to attest to from what I've seen so far).

Uruguay is far less cosmopolitan than Buenos Aires. Everyone looks like they came from Spain (whereas Argentina looks like a real hodgepodge-- a good one-- of Europe). Buenos Aires is a vertical city, tall buildings and stunning architecture everywhere. Montevideo's people seem less inclined to live in apartment buildings and the city is more horizontal. The public spaces are less ship-shape, although the private houses and their gardens look ver well-kept-up.

Uruguay is a social welfare state and everyone is kind of middle class. There are no great disparities in wealth apparent, the way there are in the U.S. and Argentina. I mentioned a few days ago that Argentines dress up and are ultra fashion-conscious. Here in Montevideo people are casual and even a little slovenly-- tee shirts, shorts and flip-flops everywhere.

I'm staying at the new Sheraton Hotel, which is supposed to be the best in town. The staff is friendly-- and very young. Sometimes in a new city I ask a concierge to recommend the best eating experience in town. Some concierges know; others don't. I should have been more thoughtful about this one when I realized he was the busboy and the concierge. He suggested a seafood restaurant called Francis. It's run by a bunch of kids and it isn't bad by any means but I know there are better restaurants in town. There have to be! This chef seemed to be having a good time experimenting with combining whatever came to mind. Some of it worked well, some of it worked less well. I have to admit that I was distracted from my meal by the manager furiously picking his nose the entire time I was there. No one else seemed to notice.

I've gathered that what people do here in laid-back city on a Saturday night is go for a walk along the shore (the Ramblas). The weather is beautiful and I think I'm going to do that now. After that I'm going to turn in early and soak up the Sheratoness of my new living situation. And tomorrow... they have an indoor rooftop swimming pool. I'm so glad I brought a pair of trunks!

NationalGeographic.com has posted an update for Will Steger's Global Warming 101 Expedition. You'll recall that the Global Warming Team set out to visit Inuit villages in the Baffin Islands to collect data on the direct effects of global warming on their lives.

The expedition has come to an end, after 78 days, and 1000 miles, of trekking across the sub-arctic region of Canada. Along the way the team collect hard data on temperatures and the thickness of the ice, but also spoke with the tribesmen living in the area, and getting their anecdotal reports of how life is changing as the temperatures increase.

They found some interesting results, such as previously unknown species appearing in the area like dolphins, robins, and other birds common further South. They also noted that the number of days the Inuit have to hunt is decreasing, and less snow and ice has made it more difficult to build igloos while on their hunts.

This is only the first of this type of expedition as well. It seems that Steger and his team will be heading out to other polar regions to collect more data, and interact with other native tribes in those areas. One thing is for certain, the planet is getting warmer, and it's going to have some profound consequences on the environment and how we live.

A little subtle Myanmar propaganda across from the U.S. Embassy

I loved driving through Bulgaria in 1969, and not just the bit that was on the "Hippie Trail" between Nis and Istanbul. I took the better part of a month and drove from Sofia to the Black Sea, met up with some fun-loving Bulgarians and drove all over the country with them. Earlier I had decided I liked Budapest more than Vienna; it seemed freer and more... romantic, less uptight and stuffy. I was blind to the oppression and tyranny in Hungary, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria even though it pervaded these places. I just didn't notice. Years later I was living in West Berlin. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time before the wall dividing the city was coming down. There were already holes in it and most of the guards looked the other way-- at least when West Germans went back and forth. I persuaded some West German friends to take me across one night. It didn't look free and romantic; the oppression, tyranny and decrepitude were apparent and tangible... and chilling. It scared and repulsed me. I was happy to get back to West Berlin.

A few hours ago, decades later, I just returned from a place like that, a place you read about in books by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley: Myanmar.

Myanmar was Burma when I was a small boy (and avid stamp collector). I remember there were military coups when I was in elementary school. It was one of those closed off places-- exotic, mysterious, impenetrable, vaguely dangerous, like Albania, Mongolia, North Korea... places no one ever went. In the 80s the military junta took the name SLORC (an unfortunate-sounding acronym for State Law and Order Restoration Council). It sounds like something from a James Bond movie. For the people there, I just discovered, it doesn't feel like a movie. It feels like a nightmare that never ends. Paid Republican lobbyists and operatives in DC got the military dictators to ditch the SLORC moniker for SPDC (State Peace and Development Council, which sounds far less ominous-- like Bush's Clear Skies Act).

One of the first things I noticed is that the oppressive, paranoid tyranny in Myanmar exists in a parallel world next to a beautiful traditional Buddhist culture. The gentle people, predisposed to kindness, seem a little nervous-- hundreds of beloved and revered monks were brutally and ruthlessly murdered by the regime a few weeks ago after peaceful demonstrations-- but when you shoot anyone (except some of the soldiers) a mengalaba (hello) their wariness invariably breaks down and they smile. They are friendly and the reserve often vanishes quickly and, at least in Yangon, more of them spoke English than anywhere else in Southeast Asia I've ever been.

The whole city seems to be rotting and breaking down, although it may also be a work in progress of sorts. The city is immense-- but kind of slow and quiet... kind of left behind as the rest of the region rushes headlong into the 21st Century and globalization. Roland says Yangon reminds him of Havana in many ways.

It is easy, fast and cheap to get a visa directly from the visa section of the consulate in Washington, DC-- way smoother, quicker and far less expensive than working with the outsourced visa company India now forces you to work with to get a visa for that country. We flew Air Asia from Bangkok, a kind of Southwest Airlines for SE Asia. It is cheap and only takes an hour and a 15 minutes. (The flight back was delayed for a few hours and they gave us a signed chit so that we can get our money back, an Air Asia policy for flights that are delayed for over 3 hours. (The guy who runs it, Tony Fernandes, was the head of our Malaysian company when I worked at Warner Brothers. He learned a lot more about customer service than most music industry execs ever did.)

The currency exchange system in Myanmar is a real mess. If there even is an "official rate" it's around 500 kyats for a dollar. But dollars are the preferred currency in Yangon-- as long as the bills are new and crisp and have no marks or tears-- and even taxi fares can be paid with them. The street rates of exchange vary between 1,000 and 1,500 per dollar (depending on your bargaining ability)-- a very wide disparity. The whole thing is kind of shady and bizarre and, for a normal tourist probably pretty disorienting. Few places accept credit cards and the ones that do, charge an exorbitant fee. When you leave the country you pay a $10 airport exit tax. They want it in dollars. If you insist on paying it in worthless kyats (which can't be exchanged outside the country for any real currencies), they charge you 16,000-- not just far more than the "official rate," but more than the best black market rate!

On the other hand, we found the December weather absolutely fantastic-- warmer than Delhi and cooler than Bangkok. Bangkok is hot and steamy, never under 90 with lots of humidity. Yangon is dry and in the 80's. It gets hot in the sun in the afternoons but it's pretty comfortable and without the hellish man-made weather of Bangkok.

Part II next time I get to a computer.

Just as the fall climbing season in the Himalaya begins to wrap up, the 2013 Antarctic expedition season is just about to get underway. As usual, there are a host of explorers heading to the frozen continent this year, most of whom will be making the journey on skis to the South Pole. The first of those explorers will hit the ice today, officially launching another season of adventure at the bottom of the world.

The first team to hit the ice is will be Ben Saunders and Tarka L'Herpiniere, the two men who are taking part in the Scott Expedition. They are on a plane out of Punta Arenas, Chile this morning and are now making their way towards Patriot Hills in Antarctic to start their journey. As you may recall, Ben and Tarka will attempt to make an unsupported round trip excursion to the South Pole and back, starting and ending at the Ross Ice Shelf, while following along the same route that Robert Falcon Scott took on his fateful expedition more than a hundred years ago. If successful, they'll be the first to complete the 1800 mile (2897 km) sojourn that claimed the lives of Scott and his men.

You can follow the expedition on their website, Twitter feed and Facebook page. The team is carrying a lot of communications gear and plans to making daily updates and dispatches to keep everyone informed of their progress. That's a far cry from Scott's days when the ultimate fate of the men wasn't known for months. But for those of us who enjoy learning about expedition life in the Antarctic and the challenges the explorers face, these updates should prove extremely interesting. The next time we hear from them, they will hopefully be in the Antarctic and preparing for the start of the expedion.

Ever wonder what kind of logistics are involved with getting an expedition such as this one off the ground? Then you'll want to watch the video below which shows Ben and Tarka preparing some of their gear. More importantly, it shows them packing their food, which is a painstaking task that takes a great deal of time but is absolutely necessary for survival out on the ice.