WorldcrunchBertrand Hauger is a graduate of La Sorbonne Nouvelle school of bilingual journalism, and joined Worldcrunch after working briefly as a reporter in a local newspaper in his native eastern France. He now serves as Worldcrunch’s deputy editor-in-chief and director of content.
Some of the stunning stained glass panels from France’s Cathedral de Chartres date back to the 12th century. And if I was able to see — and photograph — them, I’ve got to thank the people who had the good idea of removing and stashing them away during both World War I and World War […]
According to legend, the rocks of Petra tou Romiou in southwestern Cyprus, is where the Greek goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite, was born. I’ll spare you the full (and quite graphic) myth of her birth — it may spoil the serenity of this coastline.
My wife Claudine wasn’t immune to the charms of the stunning red coral jewelry made by artisans in the northwest part of the Italian island of Sardinia. If memory serves, she bought a bracelet at that very shop. With time, the brand of film I was using back then gave my Sardinian series, fittingly enough, […]
I speak German, so I’m no stranger to the way some languages will simply slap words together. Stopping at this yurt-looking visitor office on my drive up north through Norway, I eventually realized that the apparent gibberish Polarsirkelsenteret meant “The Polar Circle Centre.” Still, neither German nor Norwegian has got anything on neighboring Finnish. I’m […]
Marvel all you want at Californian surfers, but this one-man Li River retailer on his bamboo raft is the real deal.
Just a friendly walk by the pier? Perhaps. The machetes, or “coupe-coupe” as we French call them, are a multi-purpose tool, and were ubiquitous through much of our Central American travels. But looking back at this scene was also a chilly reminder that Guatemala was, and still is, one of the most violent countries in […]
The remains of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus can be found in present-day in the southwest Turkish city of Bodrum. It was once one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World before it was destroyed by earthquakes. Tant pis ! Some 700 kilometers north is Ankara’s tomb of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first […]
In my 60+ years of driving, I was never involved in any kind of serious accident — barely a flat tire. Not everyone is so lucky. This was the scene a day after a bad turn along the coastal road from Fréjus to Cannes in southern France. I never did find out the fate of […]
My wife and I were ahead of the times with this selfie from the early 90s in the Butchart Gardens near Vancouver.
Show this picture of red lanterns in the gardens of Suzhou to any Tintin reader, and there’s a good chance it’ll remind them of the cover of The Blue Lotus.
Mauritius has developed a certain fascination for the craft of ship modeling. In the island’s massive-miniature workshop, some 3,000 people make sure that every tiny detail, from mast to hull, is faithful to the original vessel of the past.
Neither Mormon, nor Amish — just some actors bringing 19th Acadia back to life in the open-air museum of Village Historique Acadien in Canada’s New Brunswick.
Our first and only visit to South Africa was three years after the end of Apartheid. In Durban, we stayed in five-star style at The Royal, the city’s oldest hotel, which first opened in 1845.
My daughter Cécile has a troubling history of playing with archeological treasures. Though in her defense, at the time tourists were allowed to roam freely among the ruins of Ostia, the harbor city of ancient Rome.
-Analysis- PARIS — Compete, don’t kill. The idea that peace might be achieved through sporting is an old paradox. Pitting athletes and countries against each other in a non-lethal — and cathartic — demonstration of skills, is at the very core of the Olympic ideal, going all the way back to ancient Greece. The timing […]
I took a step away (and back) from our guided tour, to better immortalize the size of Gyllene Salen, the Golden Hall in Stockholm“s City Hall. This is where the Nobel Prize ball is hosted, under the glow of millions of glass and gold mosaic pieces.
Our various road trips through North Africa almost always included encounters with caravans of Berber nomads and their camels, making their way to bigger cities to resupply.
An experimental television show on France’s Canal+ relies more on sounds than images to scare the daylights out of people
In the puszta grassland valley of eastern Hungary, this csikós wrangler was just warming up before performing an incredible stunt show on galloping horses.
Glastonbury Abbey, in southern England, is held by some as King Arthur’s final resting place — the mythical Avalon. When I photographed his fabled tomb, I was experimenting with a different brand of film that, as the decades went by, turned the green grass a strange tinge of blue and the red sign pink.
To beat the gloominess of a rainy winter afternoon, I put aside my book and went through my sunny slides of Turkey. This one shows the road leading to the Library of Celsus in Ephesus.
PARIS — A short time ago, in a place not so far away, Star Wars fans in France were treated to a special Darth Vader drama, with a courtroom plot. Ahead of the release of the franchise’s latest installment,The Last Jedi, a public trial was held in Paris for the father of all villains. The […]
Conical hats are not limited to China. In Indonesia, where they are called caping, they protect workers from the sun — and make colorful souvenirs in the stalls of Bali“s markets.
Over the years, I took pictures of license plates — they’d help me remember where I went without having to write things down in a notebook. But there was a different, more personal reason for photographing this motorbike plate on the Greek island of Corfu: “Ety,” short for Etienne, was what my mother called me […]
The Courtyard of the Maidens is one of the most popular destinations in Udaipur, in the Indian state of Rajasthan. With its marble elephants and its lotus fountain, the garden was a perfect oasis of peace and quiet in the middle of the bustling city. For maidens and thirsty travel photographers alike.
It took 14 tourists — including my wife and I — to eat a gigantic omelette made with a single ostrich egg. But when it came to riding one at this South African farm, I thought better to let my fellow travelers make fools of themselves!
Whenever I go back to the boxes of slides from my two trips to Syria, in 1972 and 1996, and look at the archeological wonders, I inevitably ask myself: Is this still standing. Sadly, the answer is usually “no.” Years of civil war and looting have left the ancient capital of Apamea with a similar […]
-Analysis- A boat is drifting along the coast. There’s no captain manning it, no visible passengers on the derelict wooden vessel. The “ghost ship” is missing its rotor blade, making it look like it’s facing the choppy waters on its own. Eventually, it washes up on a Japanese beach. In its hull, eight bodies — […]
Over my years of travels, I’ve seen major changes to cityscapes around the world as new buildings arrive. Manhattan is obviously a different story.
In rural Russia, in a rustic dacha very similar to this one, the man who’d become the first person in outer space was born. The town of Gzhatsk, midway between Moscow and Smolensk, was renamed in 1968 to honor Yuri Gagarin.
PARIS — Why does a nation of 75 million share a name with a holiday fowl? Is it mere linguistic coincidence? Some unsolved historical-ornithological riddle? A bad idea for a cookbook? Here is how Reference.com’s dictionary talks turkey: In the 1540s, the guinea fowl, a bird with some resemblance to the Thanksgiving avian, was imported from Madagascar through Turkey by traders known as Turkish merchants. … Then, the Spaniards brought turkeys back to the Americas by way of North Africa and Turkey, where the bird was mistakenly called the same name. Europeans who encountered the bird in the Americas latched […]
This recent photo of nestling storks at an open-air museum in eastern France’s Alsace region shows that even 85 years after the stork brought me … I still can be quick with my camera!
That’s not snow: During the summer, Lake Tuz in central Turkey dries up, revealing a thick layer of salt. My wife Claudine and daughter Cécile were gearing up against the August sun as we pulled our Peugeot 404 over to the side of the road.
This is the capital of Belize, the tiny state in Central America. Unlike colorful cities in neighboring Mexico and Guatemala, I remember the capital Belmopan as a particularly uninspiring subject, its drab streets dotted with banks and jewelry stores — and this one theater.
On two separate trips, we visited the Hofburg imperial palace you see here in the bustling center of Vienna, as well as the emperors’ exuberantly baroque summer residence at Schönbrunn. Even if this photograph is better, my memory is quite clear that the summer palace was far more stunning in person.
My wife and I were able to enjoy the view on the snowy Sierra Nevada mountain chain from our room at the picturesque Hotel Los Angeles, in southern Spain. You can check out any time you like.
These veiled girls enjoying recess greeted us as we passed by their Islamic boarding school in the capital of the world’s biggest Muslim nation.
If you wanted to take a break from wandering the streets of Aleppo, in a then peaceful Syria, you could buy tea from this colorful vendor about to set up shop.
This rock formation in Guilin, southeastern China, reminded me a lot of similar karst caves in Ardèche, in my native France. This one’s name is translated as, Elephant Trunk Hill. Do you see it?
The twisted Trinity Column in Sopron, northwestern Hungary, is what they call a “plague pillar.” It was erected to give thanks, in the late 17th century, for the end of one of the various recurrences of the Black Death that struck central Europe over the years.