Worldcrunch
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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?
In Afrikaans, the name of this South African mountain range means “the dragon’s mountain.” The closest thing we saw to dragons were wooden hippos. In Drakensberg, much like everywhere else, peddlers made their way to even the most remote places.
In 1966, it was still affordable to stay in the center of Venice. We went there twice in the 1960s, and both times we rented a room from la Signora Nardi (I remember her well), just five minutes from the Rialto and Piazza San Marco whose Santa Maria della Salute church is in the background.
I’ve already told you about Rajasthan’s colorful nomadic culture, but this close-up allows us to better see how society standards vary from one world to another: For instance, the huge nose ring this woman was wearing is regarded as a mark of beauty and social standing there.
This is probably one of the oldest pictures you will see here. I was 5 when we drove to Villersexel in eastern France, in my dad’s brand new Peugeot 201. We visited the city’s famous château, which you can see in the background and which is said to have been partly built by both Charles […]
How about a selfie instead?
Don’t worry, I haven’t traveled that far. This was just one of the tourist attractions at Universal Studios Hollywood back in 1988.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well that’s lucky, because I don’t really remember what happened here. I’ll let you imagine the misfortunes of these two Swazi men.
By the end of the 1990s, it was decided that flowing rivers were not the best way to transport timber, and log drives were gradually abandoned in Canada — much to the dismay of local kids who had to bid adieu to their log rolling competitions. But in 1994 logging was still going on along […]
I had only been retired for three years when we visited this school in eastern Nepal. As far as teaching goes, this felt very far indeed from my career as a high school philosophy teacher in France.
The Madeira Flower Festival takes place every spring. For the main parade through the streets of Funchal, 30 or so floats are decorated with thousands of flowers by associations, schools — and even hospitals and the local police take part.
Though Petra is awe-inspiring, I’m not sure I’d go back today. A trip to Jordan must be very different now than it was 18 years ago. The colors on this shot of the Ad Deir monastery shows well why the archeological site is nicknamed “the Rose city.”
The Toraja people in Southern Sulawesi, Indonesia, are famous for their elaborate funeral rites. Not only do they tend to mummify the deceased — they also store coffins in caves carved up on rocky cliffs and place a wooden effigy of the departed, called Tau tau, to guard the burial site. Spooky.
People travel around the world to discover different cultures and see new sights. Some also hope to pick up some extra luck along the way, visiting (and often touching) the supposedly magical stones and statues said to work wonders according to local traditions and urban myths. Here are nine places where you can go to […]
The port city of Sfax was a mix of coastal ease and urban grit. Here, 10 local fishermen split the land/seascape in two.
When people hear the word “cajun,” they automatically think about Louisiana. But a small community of these descendants of French-speaking Acadian exiles also lives in Texas. The association “Les Acadiens du Texas” was founded in Beaumont in the late 1970s to preserve their history, which included traditional dances in not-so-traditional outfits.
From a distance, mountains look more or less the same height. But in this picture, I’m pretty sure the summit on the right is none other than Mount Everest.
This Galapagos marine iguana looks like he was just fed up with living on a volcanic archipelago.
Can you spot the Citroën deux chevaux parked next to that boat in the port of la Rochelle? Built from 1948 to 1990, the iconic “deuche,” as it is known here, leaves no room for doubt: It really is “la France.”
This nun walking under St. Peter’s Square’s colossal colonnades was looking at copies of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper founded in 1861. Zooming in, I was able to see that the front page was about Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Mater et Magistra on the topic of Christianity and social progress — written four years […]
Russian travel agencies are going bankrupt as the Ukraine crisis clips the wings of tourism and keeps Russians at home. Many who have ventured abroad have found themselves stranded.