Author Archives: Ursula The best way to immerse yourself in a new culture is to spend time where local people congregate and worship. In the early morning of my first day in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, I took a taxi across the busy city centre from my hotel in the east, to the country’s largest monastery, Gandantegchinlen (“the great place of complete joy”) Khiid, west of city […]  Irony: the future of the little city of Hội An has literally been saved by it’s own past demise. Hội An (會安) means “peaceful meeting place”. Once upon a time, particularly between the seventh and 10th centuries, this strategic port near the mouth of the Thu Bon River was part of the Chăm Pa Kingdom (192-1832). The Cham, who were seafarers and traders, controlled the spice […]  California, the third largest state in the USA, covers some remarkable terrain. With almost 900 miles (1450 km) of Pacific coastline and several mountain ranges, the topography ranges from magnificent forests of giant redwoods to the subtropical Mojave desert. The state is also home to two of the US’s top-five most populous cities, with their notorious fogs and smogs, and home to […]  It is a primordial landscape, born out of the very heart of the pre-Jurassic Gondwana super-continent. The Kunene Region in Northern Namibia is dry, mountainous, and underdeveloped. It is home to semi-nomadic tribes whose ways of life have barely changed for hundreds of years (see: Women of the Himba, and Himba Model Shoot). The Kunene River, which starts in the […]  The Swiss city of Bern is indelibly associated with bears. The bear has featured on the city seal and coat of arms since at least the 1220s. Stories relating to the keeping of live bears in a Bärengraben (bear pit) in the centre of the city – in what is still called Bärenplatz (Bear Plaza) – date back to the 1440s (or 1513 – depending on your […] |
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