Tag Archives: sculpture

Fog! About an hour into our trip south across the English Chanel from the Bailiwick of Jersey to Brittany, France, everything outside the ferry windows disappeared. It didn’t seem an auspicious start to our day trip to Saint-Malo, the mediaeval walled city of explorers, privateers, and pirates. But, just like magic, dolphins appeared – leaping and diving along-side the boat […]

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Buddhist temples in Myanmar are clearly loved and well cared for. Offerings of gold, flowers, and incense are everywhere, and the walls and floors are so shiny you can see yourself reflected in them: often the product of donated labour. Mahamuni Temple, Mandalay, and Soon U Ponya Shin Pagoda, in the nearby Sagaing Hills, which I visited one day […]

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The Wild West is a place of legends and stories… Few are more moving than that of Sacagawea (Bird Woman), the Lemhi Shoshone woman, kidnapped in 1800 by a raiding party of Hidatsa when she was about 12, and a year later, given or sold, along with another young captive Shoshone girl, to Toussaint Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper. Thirty-four year old Charbonneau was […]

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Enlightenment doesn’t happen overnight. Neither, apparently, does building a temple. I don’t know how long they have been working on the new wihan (พระวิหาร), or shrine hall, at Wat Ratchathammaram (วัดราชธรรมาราม) in Maret on the southeast side of Koh Samui, but we’ve been driving past on the way to or from somewhere for several of our visits […]

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Can you get more Irish than Dún Chaoin (Dunquin) and An Daingean (Dingle), on the Corca Dhuibhne (“Seed or tribe of Duibhne”; the Dingle Peninsula) on the southwestern-most reaches of Ireland’s County Kerry? I very much doubt it! After staggering into Dingle from Annascaul, wet and windblown, we were pleased to have two nights in one […]

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