History of toilets? Inner workings of the kiwi? Lawnmowers? More than you ever wanted to know about things you might not even want to know anything about. Unless you do…
Tag: tourism
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Redundant Dunes
The road to El Oued is paved with good intentions! We’ve seen our share of strange road signs over the years, but being told to beware of sand while you’re driving in the middle of the Algerian desert definitely takes the cake.
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Something Pretty In The Kingdom Of Denmark
Helsingor’s Kronborg Castle, in the background, is perhaps more famous as “Elsinore,” where most of Shakespeare’s Hamlet takes place. Maybe this is where our braided 8-year-old daughter Cécile got her love for all things English?
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Custodians Of Style
At the height of Greece’s economic crisis, Syntagma Square was the site of mass protests, but it is also where the presidential Evzones perform their peculiar changing of the guard. Watching their exaggerated movement as they marched around in kilt-like fustanella and red shoes with black pompoms was indeed a treat.
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Looks Can Be Deceiving
These conical hats, or capirotes, and white robes were worn by Spanish penitents during Easter celebrations long before the white supremacist Ku Kux Klan began donning them. But they’re still spooky.
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Istanbul, USA?
In 1965, Istanbul’s Galata Bridge, which spans the Golden Horn, was still a floating bridge. And the cars and street signs made the whole scene look like we were on U.S. Route 66. Istanbul was just an impromptu part of our trip to Romania and Bulgaria with our 6-year-old daughter Cécile. In the lobby of […]
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Buddha vs. Banyan
The city of Sukhothai in central Thailand, which used to be the capital of the ancient Siam Empire, is now in ruins. I went digging for this slide a couple weeks ago after I saw an image of this same buddha’s head being “swallowed” by a banyan tree on a French television reportage about Thai […]
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French Prestige
“Restaurant,” “haute couture,” “cuisine,” “raison d”être…” There are many examples of the linguistic prestige of the French language worldwide. But in Denmark, the perfectly acceptable Danish word for urinal, “pissoir,” is also tacky French slang for the john.
CAIRO — The desperation that causes such aggressive tactics is understandable. Nowadays, Egypt is in the headlines more for sporadic bombings, rowdy demonstrations and security crackdowns than for its wealth of tourist attractions. Unsurprisingly, tourist arrivals have tumbled, from a peak of around 14 million in 2010, to just 9.5 million last year, most of […]
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Postcard View
The Taj Mahal mausoleum is, to me, the most harmonious building man has ever designed, which is why I have a large version of this photo framed in my home. The shape of the domes, the colors of the marble ornaments, and the views through the refined archways make it second to none.
MUNICH — In many places in the northern Alps, the winter sports season is already over before Easter. Some view the mild winter as a kind of foretaste of climate change, but experts warn against reading too much into any single year’s weather. “What was extreme is that the weather this winter on the whole […]
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The Jacaranda City
It’s no wonder Pretoria is known as The Jacaranda City. The streets lined with thousands of jacaranda trees are definitely a sight worth seeing. The beautiful purple blooms tend to coincide with year-end exams at the University of Pretoria, and legend has it that if a flower drops on a student’s head, it’s a sign […]
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Russian Temperature
Up until we went on a cruise on the Volga, the very name of the river brought images of iciness, Czars, snow, and tales of folklore. But on this hot summer day along “Russia’s main street,” as they call it, babushkas had given way to bikinis.
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A Peruvian Painting
Strong foreground, nice depth of field, striking colors, llamas … What more could you ask for in a picture?
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The Floating City
On this beautiful spring day, little did we or these two gondoliers suspect that only five months later, on Nov. 4, 1966, the most disastrous acqua alta — “high water” — would hit the city, with canals rising by almost two meters (6.5 feet).
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The Solemn Sweeper
When we went to Thailand, we chose not to go for the usual touristy spots along the coast, exploring instead the beauty of the country’s inland regions and their adorned buddhas. Upon rediscovering that slide, I couldn’t help but think: What did this devoted sweeper do with the gold leaves he picked up from the […]
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Bad Weather Makes One Crank-y
We were usually rather lucky weather-wise on our travels. But it rained so much on our 1961 trip to Denmark (as shown in the above picture of cloudy Copenhagen) that our Peugeot 203“s automatic windshield wipers broke — forcing us to use the hand-crank wipers that cars back then still featured as a backup.
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The Pharaoh’s Battle
Though you can already catch of glimpse of the city in the background of the picture, in 1990 Cairo was still separated from the great pyramids of Giza. Nowadays the city almost completely surrounds them.
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Waxy Ex-Votos
Fifty kilometers (30 miles) west of Barcelona stands the beautiful Santa Maria de Montserrat Benedictine abbey. Like many holy places, it features ex-votos, or offerings — but I had never seen such a profusion of wax body parts, most of them given as a gesture of gratitude for having been cured from a disease afflicting […]
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Time Travel With A Top Hat
This picture is not as old as it seems. Back when I was a philosophy student at Besançon University in eastern France, we put a great deal of effort into our Carnival costumes. In 1951, the theme for the festival was “the 1900s.” That’s me on the left, in my father’s wedding suit, on my […]
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International Presents
Wherever my wife and I went, we always tried to bring something back for the rest of the family. We bought one of these little wooden acrobats for my grandson Bertrand in Brazil, although musical instruments were his favorite. He still has a large collection that includes a pan flute from Peru, maracas from Colombia, […]
TEL AVIV — Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah made an official visit to Indonesia last month. While a number of economic agreements were signed on the visit, one stood out for its huge tourism potential. Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, has an increasing number of would-be pilgrims interested in traveling to Palestine’s religious sites. […]
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Retirement
Black-and-white photos suit the ruggedness of life in Northern Greece’s Pindus mountains. Back in 1961, it certainly didn’t occur to me that one day I would be as old as these men — and yet I have now been retired for 23 years. But it hasn’t meant bench-sitting for me!
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The Road Back To Turkey
I will be going back to Turkey next month, some 46 years after I took this photo. One of my two granddaughters, Véronique, now lives near Izmir with her Turkish-born husband Mutlu and my great-granddaughter Ada.
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Hindu Hues
You never forget the colors of India. The intense gaze of this pilgrim in the foreground takes me back instantly to ghats of the Ganges.
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Tacky Architecture
Not everything famous French architects build is tasteful. Jean Nouvel, the Pritzker Prize winner behind the Arab World Institute in Paris and Barcelona’s Torre Agbar, is also responsible for this “colorful” Las Boas complex on the Spanish island of Ibiza.
As Wittenberg, Germany, prepares to celebrate the 500-year anniversaries of two major historic events, it has invested millions to transform itself into a world-class venue.
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300,000 Miles Without A Scratch
I find it amazing, in hindsight, that over the 300,000 miles or so I’ve driven during my lifetime, I’ve only had two flat tires — one in France and one in Czechoslovakia. That’s it. No accident, no bumping into a hippo in South Africa or a camel in Algeria.
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Very Old Habits
I don’t remember what the lady in the foreground was doing, in front of Teotihuacan’s majestic Pyramid of the Sun. Maybe she had come up with an early version of the e-cigarette, trying to break free from her Mayan ancestors’ tradition of smoking tobacco …
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Ancestral Shade
Fellow travelers from our organized tour were catching some rest in the shade of the tongkonan, the ancestral houses of the Toraja people in southern Sulawesi (the Indonesian island formerly know as Celebes). This was one of the first package holiday tours we went on, after having started to experiment with this form of group […]
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Period Costumes
This is how Nazaré’s fishermen used to dress every day, back in the 1950s. What was then an unassuming fishing village has become the Portuguese equivalent of France’s Saint-Tropez. The throngs of tourists looking for a little authenticity can still catch a glimpse of the traditional costumes today — courtesy of the town’s visitor center.
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Mystery From Up High
Travelling the world for more than 50 years as we did, you are bound to see some incredible sights. The Nazca Lines, in southern Peru’s Nazca Desert, rank high among these unbelievable wonders. No one really knows why and how the geoglyphs — some of which are over 200 meters across — were made … […]
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An Oasis Of Tradition
At Ouargla’s traditional market in southern Algeria, this merchant was selling wooden bowls carved from single blocks of wood. Even though palm trees are ubiquitous in the several oases surrounding Ouargla, Saharan craftsmen prefer to use Atlas Cedars, found in the nearby Algerian mountain range of the same name.
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It Doesn’t Get More Irish Than This
A pint of Guinness maybe?
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A Forest Without A Tree
Fires caused by people are thankfully still relatively infrequent in the vast Yellowstone National Park, with just six to 10 per year. Most wildfires, such as the 1988 blazes that destroyed almost 40% of the park, are instead caused by lightning. In 1994, driving through a recently burned patch, we could only imagine what that […]
Chinese tourists flood in, leaving behind filth and stretching public resources. And that’s just scratching the surface. A Hong Kong writer dissects growing tension between two cultures.
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Fishing Through The Ages
Among the most beautiful countries I’ve explored is my own. This is what we call la France profonde, literally “deep France” — the heartland. Aptly enough, the Château de la Bussière in the background is nicknamed the Fishermen Castle and features a collection of works of art related to freshwater fishing. There is still a […]
SIMFEROPOL — Crimea’s economy is built on two main engines: tourism and agriculture. The current unrest and pending secession of Crimea to become part of Russia could dissuade many would-be vacationers from both Ukraine and Western Europe. A serious drop in tourism numbers could translate into a serious hit for the peninsula’s economy, which is […]
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Bright China
I remember being mesmerized by Shanghai at night — maybe even more than by Las Vegas. Twenty years ago, the Chinese city also seemed to be at the vanguard of technology. That’s where I saw people using cell phones in the street for the first time.
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The Lion’s Share
We haven’t seen much of Sub-Saharan Africa over the course of our travels, except for Zimbabwe, Swaziland and South Africa, where I took this picture, in one of the continent’s largest game reserves. This lion was feeding on giraffe remains by the side of the road. As grim as it sounds, there is something about […]