A Little Closer to Home

This is Zac.

No, don’t worry, I haven’t run out of travel images to post.  Nor am I becoming one of those people who posts soppy pictures of their pets all over the web.  (Zac’s not even mine…  you think I can keep a dog with my lifestyle?  But he belongs to my folks, so he’s part of the family).

We’ve kept Tibetan Terriers for a good twenty years now.  First Toffee, when we lived in France, and now Zac and his little sidekick Zena.  I’ve been camping at my folks place looking for somewhere to live, and every now and then I take the dogs down to a nearby park where they can run, and play with other dogs too.  It’s a real joy to watch them tumbling around as a pack together, a big bundle of paws and tails and ears flailing in a big ball of dust.

(Incidentally, you can see how the drought’s really taking hold down here; where Zac’s perched is supposed to be grass, but now the whole place looks more like the back-lot to a beach).

From a photographic side, it’s been fun taking my 5D for a walk while I exercise the dogs.  I’ve been fitting my 85mm f/1.8 on the front and it’s an ideal focal-length to catch some of the canine chaos.  The shoots bring with them their own challenges.  The dogs are rarely still, and when they are, they’re rarely looking at the camera.  I open up the aperture as wide as it will go so I can ramp up the shutter-speed and freeze the action, but unless I absolutely nail the point of focus, their faces end up a little blurry.

I caught the top one of Zac as he took a breather between romps.  It’s shot at f/1.8, hence the deeply blurred background.  It’s not a perfect shot (you’ll notice the bench growing out of the side of his head), but I like that his face is in focus, and he’s wearing a typically Zac expression, happy and content and just a little bit puffed.  You can see the gleam in his eyes.  Intelligent, and stubborn because of it, he’s affectionate and gentle, and frankly, we all love him to bits.

Yeah, the little heart tag isn’t very masculine.  That’s my Mum’s doing…

And just to make sure I haven’t alienated the rest of you who don’t like dogs, I promise to post something less pet-related very soon.

Photos:

1. Little King. Zac sitting in the park

2. Playtime. Zac (l) and Zena chasing down a willing Staffie

3. The Chase. A Labradoodle (Labrador/Poodle cross) gives Zena a run for her money

4. Romp. A Retriever and a chocolate Labradoodle having a good time

5. Dogfight. Zac checks out the fun and games between a pair of young Retrievers

6. Show me the Love. A Cavelier King Charles Spaniel finds some affection

7. Thoughtful. Zac can be a sombre little bugger sometimes

The Naga’s Welcome

A Naga guards the entrance to a small temple in an equally small village some way outside the little town of Pai, in rural Mae Hong Son Province.  The Naga, as I understand it in my limited grasp of Buddhist tradition, is a water spirit in the form of a serpent (not a dragon, although it certainly strongly resembles the Chinese dragon, sans claws).  They can be found in pairs guarding the entrance to most wats (temples), facing outwards and in their humping snakiform (is that a word), one on each side of the stairs to the door.  I believe they serve a similar purpose as gargoyles do in traditional European churches- namely, to scare the living snot out of small children.

I had a nice little time exploring and photographing the environs of this wat.  It was a gorgeous afternoon and the contrast of yellow on blue made for some strong images.  One of the delights of casual travel is exploring and coming upon little treasures just by happenstance.  In this instance, I was just tootling along the byways of Pai on my scooter and happened to swing through this little village, catching sight of the temple as I passed.  No plans, no real goals, just exploring.  It’s the sort of travel I love.

I half like this picture, and half don’t like it.  On the one hand, I like the structure in the background, and the strong colours (again), with that depth of blue and the bright red and yellow- fun colours.  The framing though has fallen a little flat- I used the wide-angle and tried to capture the little oranges in the foreground to bring out the similar tones in the temple itself- the reds and yellows.  Unfortunately the oranges really were very small (about the size of a silver dollar) and so to make them significant in the frame, I had to get down low and close.  This threw them out of focus, and also upset the overall balance of the shot.  I’ve also managed to snag the front end of my scooter- a little careless of me, as it’s too little to add a sense of travel to the photo, and also too little to emphasize the colour- my scooter was also orange.  In hindsight I probably should have taken a photo deliberately with the scooter and the wat- it might have told a nice story…  The detailing on the temple’s architecture however speaks for itself.  Really pretty to look at.

Very little oranges…

And the top of the roof in a little more detail.  I like the textures in the roofing tiles, and those little gold squiggles at the corners.  This sort of architecture really is delightful.

I have a few more photos from this temple, but that’s probably enough for now.  Some other time I’ll post the rest.  It’s pleasant to remember the gentle warmth of Mae Hong Son as we prepare for another smokey 38-degree scorcher here in Victoria, and the fire warnings shoot back through the roof.

Celebrating the Mundane

Sometimes the fun is in finding the beauty in plain, every day objects.  Like a wooden birdtable.  This one is in my parents’ garden, taken before Christmas (when things weren’t quite so dry and yellow…).  I really like the streaks of cloud in that rich blue sky, the strong greens, the sharp linear frame of the wooden structure versus the soft vegetation, and the play of afternoon light on the angles.

This was one of the first shots I took with my Canon EOS 5D, that most beautiful of technological creations.  I was getting used to having a DSLR in my hands after nine months of messing around with my trusty but limited Canon Powershot G9.  Shooting full-frame on a wide-angle lens is something special- I’ve got some posts lined up from my new Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8, which is one spectacular piece of glass.

Sorry I haven’t posted much in the last week or so.  I’ve been working most nights up to 11.30 and later, and things have been a bit hectic.  Hoping that’ll settled down for the next couple of weeks and I’ll try and have some more images up.  I’m still clocking them up faster than I can post, there’s hundreds yet to come…  ;o)

Legacy of a Genocide

Of the 17,000 men and women (and several thousand more children) who passed through the Tuol Sleng detention centre (or S-21), just twelve lived to tell the tale. The notorious prison, converted from a Phnom Penh school, became the hub of the Khmer Rouge’s deadly political purification, where people accused of sedition and crimes against the state were interred, interrogated, tortured, and eventually either killed, or transported to one of the nearby Killing Fields and executed alongside hundreds of thousands more. This number would eventually include many high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials and their families, themselves, caught in Pol Pot’s paranoid purges.

Phnom Penh was liberated by the Vietnamese army in January 1979. Thirty years on, and yesterday the very first trial of a Khmer Rouge leader opened in a special UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia. Kaing Guak Eav, known to most as ‘Duch’, headed Tuol Sleng prison, also called S-21. A third of the Cambodian population are said to have perished during the brief but genocidal reign of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, in the four years from 1975 to 1979. It’s hard to believe that the country has held itself together for so long, while these crimes go unpunished and families are left without reconciliation or answers. Pol Pot himself died in 1998, under uncertain circumstances while under house arrest by a Khmer Rouge faction.

Tuol Sleng is now a museum honoring the victims of the prison camp, a memorial in much the same vein that the death camps of Nazi Germany remember those who perished in the holocaust. The place itself is a quiet and reflective location, with the stark pre-communist school-blocks surrrounding an open courtyard filled with benches and frangipani trees, and the bustle of Phnom Penh feels strangely distant. The cells have been left largely as they were found. When the Vietnamese liberators were drawn to the prison by the stench of rotting flesh, they found a dozen corpses still shackled to their beds, executed as their captors fled. The photographs they took as evidence are graphic displays of the coarse brutality, still mounted in the cells they were taken in.

Like many places where evil has blossomed, there remains a lingering disquiet over the compound. The mementos and photographs hail back a chilling time in history. Subdued voices of visitors passing through echo in hallways where screams and cries must once have thrived. Barred windows and barbed wire lend only the briefest taste of what the inmates must have seen, day after day, as they awaited their turn with the interrogators.

Like the death camps of Germany and eastern France, Tuol Sleng is an important place. Not only does it honor those who died innocently and needlessly before a vicious gang of thugs, but it allows us the space to remember, and on a very shallow level, to connect to the events that took place, in the Orwellian hope that we won’t come back to this place again. Although it’s not my first time visiting a place of atrocities, I found it left a mark on my soul, and stands out as one of the most significant memories of my month travelling in south-east Asia. I would strongly recommend that anybody who passes through Phnom Penh makes a visit to Tuol Sleng a priority. Too much of what we do when we travel is frivolous and petty, but the gravity of remembering the experiences and circumstances our fellow humans have been through is both important, and our responsibility.

 

Photographs:

1. Cell.  Detention cell in Tuol Sleng.

2. A Quiet Place.  View of one of the detention blocks, formerly a school building, and the courtyard at Tuol Sleng.

3. Resting Place.  An interrogation chamber upstairs in Tuol Sleng.

4. Razor.  Coiled wire and, beyond, flowers outside the prison.

Annapurna Base Camp South

I’ve been to a lot of places.  At last count, at least fifty different countries.  And quite a few places within those countries.  So when I say that a place is pretty spectacular, I’ve got quite a lot to compare it to.

I reckon the Annapurna Sanctuary has to rate up in the top three most beautiful places I’ve been to.  I wouldn’t want to try and come up with a definitive list, and certainly wouldn’t want to try and rank them (maybe someday in the future I might give that project a try…), but that gives you an idea for how, well, how awesome it really is.  Sadly, no photography is ever going to capture the true grandeur of standing in that breathtaking arena.

In simple terms, the Sanctuary is a natural basin surrounded by a ring of 7- and 8,000-metre peaks, the tallest of which being Annapurna 1 (8,092m).  Situated at 4,200m and with the South Base Camp as its focal point, these mountains jut upwards with phenomenal ferocity, and in the crisp high-altitude air, they are startlingly close.

This shot is taken looking backwards, towards the one entrance to the Sanctuary and away from Annapurna.  It shows the striking prominence of Macchapuchare, 6,993m, but a face less often seen than the classic view (below) which gives it the nickname ‘Matterhorn of the Himalaya’.

Taking the photo, I’m standing on the wall of a glacial ravine.  Along the left of the frame is the Annapurna Glacier, at the bottom of a 200m drop and looking distinctly like a long river of gravel.  In front of me, in the near foreground, is the South Annapurna Base Camp (the less well-known and less-visited North Camp is actually the camp from which Maurice Herzog launched his historic assault on Annapurna 1, on the far side of this mountain chain behind me.  The southern approach is far more difficult and dangerous- not to take away from Herzog’s finger-chilling heroics of 1951 when he completed the first 8,000m summit, and survived the world’s then-highest bivouac after become trapped just below the peak in the Death Zone, much to the chagrin of his digits…)

Today the South camp is the last in a chain of tourist-oriented tea-houses catering to the thousands of trekkers who climb up to see this natural amphitheatre.  Like most of the stops along the route, it is basic but comfortable, with hot tea and warm food and after the physical exertion of the day, crawling onto those foam mattresses is a delight.  When we were there the toilets were frozen solid, so there was no talk of taking a wash, but we were turned around and gone again within twenty-four hours.

The next time I come here, I’m gonna stay for three days.

The Tree on the Hill

I had the privilege of attending the wedding of two dear friends of mine not long ago, Mike and Lisa, a few photos of which may appear at some point in the future.  Both Mike and Lisa are global nomads like myself.  Mike, a friend of several years, and I shared a house last year in Papua New Guinea.  I met Lisa face-to-face for the first time two days before the wedding, but we had been corresponding for eight months and already struck up a good friendship.  I share many things in common with both of them, not least among which being a love for travel and for writing.

They got married in the garden of Lisa’s parents house on a hillside behind the sleepy seaside town of Ballina, in northern New South Wales.  The view was spectacular, and the weather just perfect for an outdoors wedding.  From a photographic perspective, one of my favourite features was this view across the ridgeline to a lone tree standing in an empty adjacent field.  With the garden flowers in the foreground (I love Frangipani) and the afternoon light, I took several snaps of this vista.  In this particular shot I’ve used a shallow depth of field and focussed nice and close to the lens so that the tree behind is thrown into a faint blur- still clear enough to show what it is, but indistinct enough that the emphasis is on its form and the lighting, rather than any particular details.

Just playing, really.

Among Thorns

Colour me unromantic, but I’ve never been one to get into a tizzy for Valentine’s Day, relationship or none. In fact I’m not quite sure where the whole myth popped up from. Doing a bit of research, it seems that nobody really knows much about what a St. Valentine might have done, or might not of done, but it certainly didn’t seem to have too much to do with romancing. There were several martyrs who bore the name, and nobody in the early church seemed to know much about them, including, it seems, the Pope who finally canonized them.  He claimed that while their names were known to man, their deeds would remain known only to God. Opaque, at best.

Valentine’s story was fleshed out more in the 14th Century (trust those renaissance folks to come up with a good yarn), where it turns out he was imprisoned by Emperor Claudius.   Claudius was quite fond of the saint until the preacher tried to convert the good ruler, at which point Claudius ordered Valentine removed from the realm of the living. When pummelings with clubs and stones didn’t seem to do the trick, the shortly-to-be-martyr was dragged out to a city gate and beheaded.  Romantic to the last.

Early sources linking St. Valentine’s Day with lovers is probably more to do with the date than anything about the saint passé. Typically, French courtiers seemed to play a part in the romanticization of the date, with the stakes driven further home by good Bill Shakespeare as the seventeenth century clocked over, during a lament by Hamlet’s hapless love-interest Ophelia. Sources suggest the event has its roots in an ancient pagan tradition held in mid-February dating back to the Romans (who in turn poached it from the Greeks) revolving around sexuality and fertility (those ancients really did like their fertility festivals).  In fact the modern habit of card-giving seems to have really taken off in the mid-eighteen-hundreds when a US cardmaker began mass-producing embossed Valentines cards. So really, it’s the original sales-driven holiday. Score one for consumerism. Again.

(That’d make it Consumerism, 8,716,342: Good Taste and Careful Thought: 4).

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t actually dislike Valentine’s Day. At least, not nearly as much as I dislike Christmas. I’m all up for people celebrating their relationships. And no, this isn’t some bitter single’s rant. In fact, quite the contrary- being single on Valentine’s Day is something of a relief, taking away all that pressure to create, to perform, or simply to spend. I guess I just enjoy bringing in a healthy dose of hard cold reality into all the fuss and frills of our unquestioned modern world as it ploughs over the top of us with all the dignity of a mail-truck full of Hallmark cards.

So for all you lovers out there, happy luvin’, and for all the rest, have a great weekend. I’m going to a chilli fair, a farewell barbecue and a wine festival. What about you?

Photo: A dew-spotted rose unfurling in the early morning mist in northern Thailand.  Selective desaturation in Lightroom used to break out the colour.

Barbs of History

After Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia in 1975, a Phnom Penh high school called Tuol Svay Prey was taken and turned into an interrogation, detention and torture centre, among the very cruelest of places the 20th Century- a century of atrocities- saw.  An estimated 17,000 men and women, and several thousand children, passed into the centre and were tortured until they confessed to crimes against the regime- often for many weeks.  Once convicted, they were executed at a killing field outside the city.  Only twelve people who were interred at the prison during its four-year reign of terror are known to have survived.

Tuol Sleng, as the prison came to be known, was liberated by the Vietnamese who marched on Phnom Penh and drove out the Khmer Rouge in January 1979.  They found a dozen or so corpses, still on the beds they had been chained to and executed by their fleeing captors.  Today the place has been preserved as a museum, a place of memorial to those who died, and a place of remembering and learning lest those who come after are ever tempted to repeat such a dark history.

Photo: Barbed wire still strung across a window at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

The Promise of a New Dawn

The sun tickles the sky behind Angkor Wat’s historic temples, as it has done each morning for nearly nine hundred years.  Siam Reap, Cambodia.

Passage of Time

Light plays on a derelict corridor in the temple complex of Ta Phrom, part of the ancient Angkor kingdom outside Siam Reap.

For the first time on this trip I found myself studying the light and taking photos specifically with the intent of converting them to black and white.  I was pleasantly surprised by the whole process.

Lots more to come.