Worldcrunch
Two peaceful windmills in the Spanish countryside? For Miguel de Cervantes” colorful character Don Quixote (a favorite of mine), these would be ferocious giants — and he would promptly proceed to attack them!
VENICE — Venice and its 80,000 regular inhabitants are drowning in tourists. Some 30 million flock to its famous canals every year, stressing the infrastructure. Fed up, the lagoon city’s businessman-turned-mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, has a simple but controversial plan to stem the tide: turnstiles. City authorities recently set up turnstiles on four bridges that connect […]
After six decades of good old film photography, I decided a couple of years ago that it was time to switch to a digital camera. One of the first series with my new gear was in Albania — this particular photograph under the watchful eye of Albanian soldiers.
After voting to ban metals mining, residents in the mountainous area west of Bogota are staking their future on farming and tourism.
A popular tourist destination in the Adriatic sea is bracing for the construction of a floating, 400-million-euro regasification facility.
The only thing more impressive than beholding the ancient troglodyte structures of Turkey’s Cappadocia region, was realizing that yes, some people still actually lived in them!
The language situation in Canada“s predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec can lead to baffling bilingual signs like this one at the Montreal airport.
Our trip to Sicily came just as legendary Italian magistrate Giovanni Falcone was launching the widest-ranging anti-Mafia probe ever. This light-hearted moment in Palermo reminds me of the famous photo of Falcone and fellow magistrate Paolo Borsellino, each assassinated soon afterward by the Mafia.
My trip to Nepal was definitely one of the most dépaysants, as we say here in France. This open-air cremation in front of Kathmandu“s famous Pashupatinath Temple was certainly not a sight a Western traveler like me is used to seeing.
These “birds of paradise” flowers are native to South Africa. And indeed, they thrive near the Drakensberg mountain range. Alas, these one are not of the Mandela’s Gold variety — the rare yellow form named after the anti-apartheid leader a year before we went there.
It may not be Europe’s biggest trend setter, but in subtle ways, the land-locked, quadrilingual republic is fashioning a hipper, more confident cultural identity.
I guess for some, it’s a jungle out there in Manhattan.
I once visited a foie gras farm in southwestern France, years before goose liver became one of the world’s most controversial delicacies. Désolé, but foie gras still is a péché mignon of mine.
Wandering the narrow streets of Peniscola, a village in eastern Spain, I stumbled upon this quaint — if kitsch — house. Not only did it get me wondering how long it took to plaster all the shells on the facade, but I could almost smell the plates of seafood paella that came first!
LAUSANNE — “We struck off, heading for the horizon with a fever we thought could be cured by accumulating kilometers. But it just riled us up even more. Still, moving quenches something. It eases our melancholy at not having done anything with our lives, at having been born too early and having failed at everything. […]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 […]
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.
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.