Tag Archives: blog

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 […]

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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 […]

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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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Trip Advisor gives it a good rating. “Fort Khejarla offers guests an enlivening experience,”says the official website. I still think of it as the hotel that tried to kill me. Well, shock and asphyxiate me; “kill” might be a bit extreme. I was looking forward to our stay at the heritage “resort”, Fort Khejarla Hotel, 85 km east of Jodhpur in […]

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Woods and water are the central features of Canada’s Sunshine Coast. This rugged, mountainous, landscape on the southern-mainland coast of British Columbia (BC) in Canada’s west is bounded by the Coast Mountains on one side and the Strait of Georgia on the other. Although it’s just a stone’s throw from Vancouver, no access roads have been built around the fjords or through the […]

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