Worldcrunch
The Bay of Brest, in northwestern France’s Brittany region, has been an important military port for centuries. I walked a hundred meters or so on a forbidden but unguarded path overlooking a naval base to take a picture of this fine example of our glorious French fleet.
If snake skin and dried llama fetuses are your thing, then La Paz” El Mercado de las Brujas (The Witches’ Market) is a must-see.
Romania was one of the largest automobile producers in Central and Eastern Europe during the Communist period. But that doesn’t mean horse-driven carts were entirely discontinued, especially on a traditional wedding day like this one.
When snow falls on Monesi di Triora, a ski resort in the Alps, it can seem like a perfect winterland paradise. But any kind of winter sports activity has now been prohibited — just because of a big bird. The black grouse in question, say naturalists, could be bothered by excessive human presence, because during […]
Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome’s Piazza Navona, with its four allegorical statues representing the Nile, the Ganges, the Rio de la Plata and the Danube, contains one of the most comical pieces of sculpture I’ve ever seen. Actually, Nile’s head (center) is covered with a piece of cloth because at the time […]
We arrived in our Los Angeles hotel at night, happy to rest after a long trip. The next morning, Easter Sunday, we got a nice Easter egg: This was the view from our hotel room!
Here is a view from a boat trip we took on the khlongs, the canals that crisscross Bangkok. Traffic is so bad in the Thai capital that locals still rely heavily on these water routes to go from one place to another. The many khlongs earned Bangkok its nickname of the “Venice of the East” […]
Five years after Latvia’s independence was recognized by the Soviet Union (one of the last things the dying Union got to do), we toured the Baltic states, still then in the early stages of painstaking de-Russification. But from above, Riga, the largest city in the three Baltic republics, looked as beautifully Latvian as ever.
Back in the 1960s, many Greek widows, like these two in the northern Pindus mountains, still chose to dress in black for the rest of their lives after the death of their husbands. Nowadays the mourning period tends to be somewhat shorter, although traditionally not less than 40 days.
Time to share a little vintage family portrait. This was my daughter Cécile’s first trip outside of her native Franche-Comté; here she’s with my wife and my father, walking along the Promenade des Anglais on Nice’s Bay of Angels. In the background you can catch a glimpse of the world-famous Hotel Negresco.
Niagara Falls are far from being the most impressive waterfalls we’ve seen, but it comes with a couple of neat features. The Whirlpool Aero Car for example, which traverses the river above the Niagara whirlpool downstream of the falls. It’s also one of the few times we crossed a border without having our passports stamped: […]
I knew Wadi Rum in southern Jordan, had been used as a filming location: Much of Lawrence of Arabia was shot there in 1962, which made sense since the British officer himself passed through the region in the early 20th century. What I didn’t know was that since then, several science fiction movies were filmed […]
Legend has it that if you stand at the front gate of Dunguaire Castle and ask a question, you’ll have an answer by the end of the day. I don’t know who’s doing the answering, but I’d be more curious to hear from the ghosts of W.B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, the two Irish […]
If you click on “show story map” at the top of this page, you’ll have a global view of the slides published so far, and begin to get an idea of how widely my wife and I traveled. Still, you may notice some gaps on the map — and Zimbabwe was the closest we got […]
These students’ colorful saris contrasted nicely with the white marble of Ranakpur’s Jain temple, dedicated to Adinatha, the founder of Jainism.
From the Place d’Austerlitz, the statue of Napoleon watches over Ajaccio, the town in which he was born. Some may see a resemblance with Prague’s Stalin Monument, but the statue of the French emperor is significantly smaller — adding to the myth that Napoleon was short in stature when in fact he was 5 feet […]
However neatly and methodically organized my 20,000 slides may be, in more than 60 years of travels I am bound to draw some blanks here and there. So whenever I can’t remember where I snapped this windmill or that mosque, my grandson puts his Internet detective hat on and helps me track it down. In […]
At the end of the 19th century, Saint-Leu’s Stella Matutina sugarcane factory employed some 250 Indian, Cafre and Malagasy workers. It closed its doors in 1978 and has now been turned into a museum. The loading platforms are still functional — a token of the French island’s once flourishing sugar economy.
I’ve already told you about the “women-carrying-things-on-their-heads” recurring theme in my slides. There is no country where I have snapped more such shots than Portugal, including this one near the mysterious Our Lady of Fatima destination for Catholic pilgrims.
Meet Zeldenrust, “the one that seldom rests.” This smock mill is one of the hundreds of its kind in the Netherlands’ northwestern Friesland region.
The beautiful region of Lake Toba, in Indonesia’s North Sumatra, is home to the Batak people, composed of a number of ethnic groups with distinct languages, customs and architecture. The Batak houses rank among the most memorable I’ve had the chance to photograph (this list includes the tongkonan in nearby Sulawesi, Zulu kraals in South […]
I remember discussing the topic of veiled women with a local in the souk of Fes, where I took this picture 40 years ago. He said wearing a full niqab was considered “surprising” in Morocco.
Of all the boats I’ve ever seen, to me the bamboo rafts on the Li River seem the most hazardous.
I’m not exactly an adventurous eater, but I did taste that alligator pie in Lafayette, Louisiana, during a big jazz festival. It tasted like veal. I also nibbled on a fried scorpion in China — tasteless — and, together with 12 fellow travelers in South Africa, ate a gigantic omelette made with a single ostrich […]
No, these monks are not giving food to destitute people, quite the opposite. In Thailand, the giving of alms is not considered charity — it is part of a two-way relationship: The community feeds and clothes the monks, who in return have a responsability to support the community spiritually.
A stone’s throw away from Santiago de Compostela, I took this picture of a hórreo — a kind of granary built above ground and characteristic of Spain’s northwestern Galicia region. The pillars end in flat stones to prevent rats from accessing the grain stored there. When I took this shot in the month of July, […]
Seeing these two girls with their spindles and balls of yarn, going their merry way on a steep path of Lake Titicaca’s Taquile Island, you might think they are among the Peruvian girls and women who create the kind of high-quality handicraft I’ve already told you about. But on Taquile, women are only allowed to […]
Beautiful mountains, colorful wooden houses, costumed Mädchen … The village of Schoppernau, in the state of Vorarlberg’s Bregenz Forest, is a living, breathing Austrian postcard. I guess my wife and I liked this kind of scenery: We went to Austria 23 times!
You can’t tour the world for nearly 60 years without a few rainy days. Sure, rain is annoying — but it also makes for interesting, if gloomy, pictures.
It doesn’t matter how many pictures of the Taj Mahal you’ve seen before, or how often you’ve seen the Iguazu Falls on TV: Seeing the world’s wonders in the flesh will always leave you awestruck. Same goes for Monument Valley’s gigantic sandstone buttes — yes, this speck of dust in the foreground is a car.
It gets harder to feel the weight of history’s most brutal hours when you’re surrounded by tourists soaking in the sun and thinking about lunch plans.
My grandson, who’s just got back from his honeymoon in Brazil, tells me he could have taken a very similar picture there, today. From the cotton candy to the still ubiquitous VW Beetle and Camper, it looks like 1989 Mexico City and 2014 Rio de Janeiro have a lot in common.
Only five years after the end of Word War II, the mayor of Montbéliard (my hometown in eastern France) and the mayor of Ludwigsburg in western Germany started talking about making “sister cities” out of their respective localities. The choir of traditional folk singing I ended up conducting played a significant role in this local […]
In a Tibetan refugee camp in central Nepal, we came across this little boy having a blast with a dungchen, or Tibetan horn.
In 1962, the Sovietization of Eastern Europe was at its height. It was hard enough to get into Czechoslovakia (we had to wait three hours at the border), but getting out was where things got dicey. From a watchtower, a guard had seen me take pictures of the Iron Curtain, and asked me to open […]
Exclusive: A historian has identified Pope Francis’ birthplace in Buenos Aires, after false reports of where he was born circulated following his election last year.
Abu Simbel, Amalienborg Castle, the Acropolis of Athens … Many of the famous landmarks I ended up visiting in real life are featured at Legoland Billund, the original Legoland park in central Denmark. Just to give you an idea, it took 1,500,000 Lego bricks to build this 12-meter-tall (40 ft) reproduction of the Mount Rushmore […]
VENICE — The delicate balance between preserving the beauty of a place and allowing a fruitful tourist business is particularly tricky when it comes to the question of cruise ships in Venice. The Italian government has announced that beginning in 2015, large cruise ships (those weighing more than 96,000 tons) will be banned from St. […]
I was not expecting to find my surname in the list of immigrants featured on Ellis Island’s Wall of Honor. But after all, mallards are migratory birds, aren’t they?