Category Archives: Landscapes

Croatian Sailing and Slovenian Cycling

April 20, 2019 by Jeff C | Comments Off

This wasn’t a ‘serious’ photo expedition like some of my trips.  This one was about sailing, biking and general sightseeing with a handful of friends, old and new.  Just a few thoughts and a few pretty pictures to share . . . .

Lake Bled, Slovenia was a highlight of the trip.

Sunset over the Adriatic Sea, from a hotel balcony in Rovinj, Croatia.

I always tended to think of Croatia and Slovenia as a lot more exotic and far away than European destinations like Italy or Austria or Greece.  But it turns out that the foreign-sounding capital city of Ljubljana, Slovenia is just a couple of hours’ drive from either Venice, Italy or southern Austria.  And the Croatian coast is just a hundred miles across the Adriatic from the east side of the “boot” of Italy.  That geographic proximity gives a pretty good hint of what you’ll see when you’re sightseeing: pretty coastlines, tree-covered mountains, hillside vineyards, Mediterranean islands, and towns that are a couple of thousand years old.

Somehow the people of both countries (very similar to each other but with different languages) seemed familiar.  Few would stand out in any American town, and I could imagine myself blending in almost entirely (lots of people with blue-green light eyes and Mediterranean skin).   Though tourism is definitely getting more popular here, it’s new and small enough that the people are happy to see and welcome visitors.

I spent one week on a sailboat off the Croatian Coast near Split, and the next on a bicycle going in and out of Slovenia, Italy, and Croatia.  Both were great trips with the good company of mostly new friends and my long-time colleague and law firm partner Grant Harvey.  Grant and I worked together then retired from the same Houston law firm, and he rides bikes, flies airplanes, and enjoys travel photography, so we’ve always got lots to talk about.  And we occasionally agree on something political!  Occasionally.

Split, Croatia, is a major cruise and boating port

 

 

 

This was a little gravel landing strip on the island of Hvar, Croatia. (No, I did not fly there! and yes, I resisted the strong temptation to steal that sign.)

Grant Harvey, my very good friend for the last 25 years or so. Grant organized this trip, so I’m in his debt. This is him on our chartered sailboat, somewhere between Split and Hvar Croatia.

 

Rovinj, from the sea, on a ferry back from Pula.

A quaint old lounge area at a hotel in Bled, Slovenia.

The biking went in and out of Slovenia, Italy, and Croatia. Croatia is a member of the EU, but somehow I still needed my passport even for a bike ride.

 

 

Sailboats off the Croatian Coast, near Split. Croatia is an extremely popular sailing destination. Even in the ‘off’ season when I was there, I could sometimes see 100s of other sailboats at sea.

The gallery here includes a shot of an old Russian submarine “garage” and hideout – a reminder of my Cold War youth and of times when we had a different view of this part of the world.  That horse in the bad selfie with me is one of the Lipizzaner stallions at their home in Lipica, Slovenia.  Almost all of them are white; the handful of black ones are genetic celebrities.  The ancient Roman looking stuff is ancient Roman stuff: at the fourth-century “palace” of Roman emperor Diocletian, and (with me) the colosseum at Pula.  That odd statue in the last image is a truffle, in the Istrian truffle region of Slovenia.

Iran: Deserts, Shepherds, and the Power of a Swift Smack to the Shin

November 21, 2017 by Jeff C | Comments Off

 

If you want to see the sights of Iran, you’ll spend a lot of time traveling through the desert.  But sometimes, the desert itself is the attraction — both for striking scenery and interesting folks.   I spent one night in a small town in the scrubby deserts, one in a mountain village, another at the edge of a vast sand-dune-and-rock-mesa desert, and another in a hillside tent with with a few dozen sheep and goats penned up 15 feet away.

 

Sunrise in the Lut Desert. Its precise location is “a long damn ways from the major cities of Iran.” It goes on like this for a hundred miles or more. The things you see in the background are natural (not man-made), and most of them are less than 100 high and easy to climb.  In this area near the highway, it was tough to keep the dune buggy tracks out of the picture.

“Modern” nomadic shepherd/goatherd Ali Mardon-loo, left, with his son, Bahram.

Kids bathe while dad stomps the laundry. A spring-fed canal through an old caravansarai in Shafiabad, near the Lut Desert.

Mother and daughter, in the small town of Chupanan.

Vehicle tracks went everywhere in this part of the Lut Desert

Ali Mardan-loo, my nomadic sparring partner turned friend-for-life. I get a B-minus for this portrait: his herd of sheep and goats are on the hillside behind him, but I didn’t have my lens set correctly (this is f4.5 at 120mm) so the distant flock is too blurry to be recognized. I fixed it in other versions of this picture, but Ali’s facial expression wasn’t as good.

A dry lakebed near Chupanan.

 

A high point of my trip through the desert was a stay with a family of traditional nomadic shepherds.  I guess they’re “modern traditional” shepherds, because they actually owned a small car, but their primary lifestyle was one of sheep and goats and tents and meals cooked on campfires as they moved their herds cross country for seasonal grazing.  At night, nine of us slept side-by-side-by-side in an open-sided tent about 30 feet by 10 feet. 

The patriarch of the group was Ali Mardon-loo.  Ali was about my age; his two sons were helping out with the herds and with his American guests while his wife cooked a mountain of 18-inch round flatbreads over an outdoor campfire.  Ali spoke Turkic — not Farsi as most Iranians speak, and certainly no English.  One of his sons could translate from Turkic to Farsi, and our guide could translate Farsi to English.  His other son — who’d been sent off to boarding school at age twelve — spoke all three languages and could translate directly.

I saw Ali and another herder briefly playing a game using their shepherd staffs  — a lot like our sport of fencing, except that it’s all below the waist and the goal is just to whack your opponent in the shins.  He said something to his youngest, who looked at me and said “He’s looking for a challenger if you will play.”  Uh-oh.  I figured I was about to get whacked, but I had one shred of hope:  I took a semester of fencing when I was in college and it seemed like maybe some of the basic principles would translate to help me survive a round of Turkic Nomad stick fighting.

 
 For better or worse, within a minute or so, I delivered a smack to Ali’s shin.  I guess I’d “won,” but given my inexperience, I hadn’t gauged well how hard or fast to go.  It made an awkwardly loud noise.  I was mortified that I’d just whacked and maybe injured our gracious host, but after Ali hopped around and recovered for a minute, he smiled ear to ear and shook my hand.  For the rest of the evening, we were buddies (notwithstanding the zero overlap in our language capabilities).  At dinner, he sat across from me and declared to everyone that we were best friends.  He kept putting more and more food on my plate.  He gave me a bracelet his wife had hand made, and ceremoniously announced that he was giving me a lamb (apparently this is a high honor, but Happily a only symbolic one; I never had to take custody of any ovine.)  He dubbed me an honorary member of the Mardon-loo clan, much to the amusement — and exclusion — of his other five American visitors.  Never again will I underestimate the bonding potential of a good whack in the shins.  

Me and Ali. He’s posing with his rifle — a prized possession usually prohibited in Iran. As a shepherd, he’s allowed one gun to fend off wolves. I’m wearing the bracelet his wife made. Everyone kept suggesting that he and I looked alike??

 

Ali, moving the flock

Sunset in the Lut Desert

Sunrise in the Lut Desert

 

 

A friendly face in Pereshkaft village near Shiraz, Iran. This old guy was sitting with a buddy on the roof of a hillside house, watching the sunset.  They seemed like they were eager to share all kinds of stories with us, had we spoken a common language.  Women in this village were very reluctant to be photographed; one of them told us she’d like to but her husband wouldn’t approve.

View from the hill overlooking Chupanan. Those things on the tops of most of the houses are “wind towers,” which channel some of the breeze into the house and vent out hot air.

Crown of Palaces: The Taj Mahal in Agra, India

September 8, 2016 by Jeff C | Comments Off

 

If you get up early in Agra, skip the most popular viewpoints near the reflecting pools, and hurry around to the west side by the Yamuna River, you can find yourself mostly alone, watching the sun rise over the Taj Mahal, with the world’s most famously beautiful building seemingly all to yourself.

 

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Muslim Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built the white marble “Taj” in the 1600s as a mausoleum and memorial for his favorite wife (and mother of 14 of his kids).  A probably-apocryphal legend says Shah Jahan planned to build a similar black marble Taj directly across the river as his own eternal resting place. But it’s tough being a Mughal emperor, and one of his sons took over and sent Jahan to a far less glorious prison cell for his final days.  The Shah’s final tomb is wedged into the Taj beside his wife, the only thing asymmetrical in the whole place.

“Taj Mahal” means “crown of palaces,” reflecting Jahan’s intent to make it the fanciest place in the world. The signs say he spent around a billion inflation-adjusted U.S. dollars on it, and from the perspective of a visitor 400 years hence, that was a billion bucks well spent.

 

 

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The red out-building to the west — from which some of these pictures were taken — is still treated as a mosque (no shoes allowed), though the identical red building to the east is not.   If you put booties over your shoes, you can go up on the balconies of the Taj itself, which is a fine spot, but the best views are “of” the Taj, not “from” it. Unfortunately, there was some maintenance work going on when I was there – thus the scaffolding on the east side and on two of the minarets.

 

 

 

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I also visited the Agra Fort across town. It’s an interesting complex, but the only real photo opportunities there were its hazy views of the Taj Mahal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A final Agra amusement: I knew the days ahead in northern India would include more than a few nights in cold tents and without showers, so I’d decided to spring for an unusually nice room for the two nights in Agra, with a balcony that overlooked the Taj Mahal complex. The place must’ve been nearly full (or nearly empty?) because they instead upgraded me to a ridiculously lavish top-floor suite with two big balconies, seating for 18, and Taj views even from its glass shower and bath tub. A further amusement was that most of the hotel staff had no idea that I was in Suite 512 only through a flukish free upgrade, so they treated me like a Maharaja! They also let me know that Prince William and Kate Middleton had been in the same suite in April when they were in town.  Pictures of the hotel, and of or from my snazzy suite at the Oberois Amarvilas Agra:

 

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Cross-Country Colombia: Coffee Farmers, Mountains & Medellin

November 22, 2015 by Jeff C | Comments Off

As usual for me, the further I got from the main cities and main highways, the more interesting my visit to Colombia became.

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Colombian coffee-country landscapes were planted in meticulously organized patterns.

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One of several older gentleman farmers hanging around the town square of the hilltop town of La Merced, Colombia.

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My Hertz reservation for a small pickup truck got fouled up, leaving my friend Grant and me driving a late-model VW Jetta through the mountains in the heart of Colombia.  It’s impossible not to look conspicuously out of place in rural Colombia in a late-model Jetta.  Hertz’s punishment was that their Jetta endured long stretches of dirt-and-gravel mountain roads of the Colombian Andes.  Much of our trip was in the heart of Colombia’s “coffee country.” Most of the patterned agricultural landscape you see in the pictures is coffee.   Despite the mostly hazy and cloudy weather (and my dislike of coffee), the landscapes were striking.

In the hilltop town of El Merced, the town square was full of old guys – mostly just hanging out. It took a fair amount of bi-lingual cajoling to get some of them to let me make a few pictures. The guy with the scarred face was also toting a machete strapped to his hip – which gave me some insight on how his smile may have become so crooked. (They carry machetes as agricultural tools; not as sidearms). I wished for a photograph with that big knife in the picture, but I was barely able to get him to let me photograph him at all.  One of the guys recommended “Asadero La Fonda” as the best restaurant in town for us to have lunch (see picture in the grid); we had lots of meals at places that looked like that.

When you get away from the cities and tourist areas, prices in Colombia can be disconcertingly low. Two meat-and-cheese breakfast pastries, two doughnuts, a cup of (Colombian!) coffee, two Diet Cokes, and a couple of big cookies for the road? COL $8,000 – less than $3 U.S.  At Hotel Colonial in Aguadas, I paid extra for a bigger room with three balcony-windows overlooking the town square (and with a couch, table and chairs, big bathroom, wifi, refrigerator, breakfast included). It was US $20; my buddy’s room (without the ‘view’) was US $8.  (The last image in the grid below is the view from my room).  One regular quandary: What kind of tip do you leave when you get great service and a fine lunch for less than two bucks?

The biggish city of Medellin was the end of our car trip (we flew from there to Cartagena). The plump-looking (and probably familiar-seeming?) statues are by a famous Colombian artist, Botero.

Next stop:  Cartegena.

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Near Manizales, Colombia

 

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Late Friday night in the town square in in the isolated mountain town of Aguadas, Colombia. Their director was perhaps the best (and surely the most entertaining) clarinet player I’ve ever heard.

 

Images from Salento, Aguadas, and Medellin:

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One of several Botero statues in Medellin, Colombia’s downtown Botero Square. Medellin is Botero’s home town.

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Morning near Aguadas, Colombia.

Overlooking Bogota

November 20, 2015 by Jeff C | Comments Off
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Bogota, Colombia,  just after (above) and just before (below) sunset – from Monserrate, a 10,000 ft mountain just east of downtown.

I spent just 36 hours or so in Bogota before heading west through the Andes. It’s Colombia’s biggest and capital city — with a metro population bigger than Chicago and an elevation higher than Aspen. Bogota has plenty to offer. If you go, plan to stay longer than I did.

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A “protester” (sort of) on Plaza Bolivar (between the Capital and the Supreme Court) in Bogota. Her sign says (I think) “There’s nothing left to say.” Every minute or so she’d just scream “Aaaaaaahhh!” as loud as she could. The capitol police kept a close eye on her and other protesters, but generally let them do their thing.  A statue in the image is Simon Bolivar.

 

In the grid above are views from Monserrate, around Plaza Bolivar and the Catedral Nacional, inside Museo de Oro (Gold); and outside the presidential Palacio Narino.

 

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The central courtyard of Bogota’s Capitolio. The guards were nice enough to let me past the first layer of security to get a few pictures.

The central government square in Bogota is “Plaza Bolivar” — named for 19th Century Latin American hero, Simon Bolivar. He’s credited with liberating from Spain the region of “New Granada” — now Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.  Maybe obvious: “Bolivia” was named after him. Depending on who you believe and how you look at it, it may be a little unclear whether he was benevolently liberating, or if he was attempting his own Napoleon-style conquest. In any case, history has been kind to Bolivar: seemingly every town or city we visited had its own Plaza Bolivar and its own big statue of “El Libertador” himself. (Americans may overlook him, but there are actually prominent Bolivar statues in downtown Paris, in Washington DC, and in New York’s Central Park.) If you see a statue in Colombia and wonder who it is, you can probably win a bet by guessing Bolivar.

A few of the other Plazas (and “estatuas”) Bolivar we encountered, in Salento, Medellin, and Cartegena: