Travel Photography

On a remote and tiny island in the middle of the South Pacific ocean, just below the Tropic of Capricorn and mere metres away from nowhere, sits a line of gigantic beetle-browed statues with their backs to the sea. These are the Rapanui moais, representations of dead ancestors, who sit on ceremonial platforms (ahus), with stern Picasso-cubed faces and pugnacious jaws, exuding serious mojo.

Of course the burning question is how they got to their ceremonial platforms in the first place. Most of these babies weigh 14 tons and the largest of them, El Gigante, weighs over 140 tons and stands 22m (70ft) high. Read the rest of this entry »

Whoever put the mozz on King Tut’s Tomb should have done a refresher course in cursing, because something went horribly wrong with this one. While it’s true that a certain amount of untimely death followed the opening of the tomb, the only person who lived to a merry old age and died of natural causes was the one person who actually opened the crypt, one Howard Carter.

In 1922 the Egyptian town of Luxor was a pungent brew of spices, heat, and swaggering Indiana Jones tomb raiders, fighting over spoils from the newly-discovered pharaohs’ necropolis near the town. Carter, more fresh-faced administrator than maverick raider, was convinced that one more tomb remained undiscovered: that of the relatively unknown and minor Pharaoh, Tutankhamen. Read the rest of this entry »

My two friends and I planned a safari to Masai Mara for two days. We camped outside the park. Our guide brought us in and out of the back way of the park both days to divert paying the fees, but still took US$30 from each of us as well as his daily earnings. We were on to his scamming so we demanded receipts (apparently, Kenyans take receipts very seriously). The driver (not so cleverly) gave us receipts with incorrect dates that were out of sequence. Our driver must have been doing this for years. Read the rest of this entry »