Category: Travel

Kingfisher

On the last day of our holiday, we went on a short river safari up the Balapitiya River in South West Sri Lanka. Not the best choice of river for watching birdlife, as the banks of the river were covered in mangrove trees. Consequently, there were no ibises, storks, herons, egrets and other waders, that we had seen in abundance elsewhere in Sri Lanka, to be seen.

The boat trip marked by a very noisy outboard and with the continuous diesel fumes was disappointing, although there were a couple of highlights. The first highlight was this kingfisher, perched on a post sticking out of the water. The kingfisher was, surprisingly, unperturbed by the noisy outboard motor, so we managed to get very close, giving me the opportunity to take a couple shots.

I will leave you in suspense with what the other two highlights of this boat trip were, as each will deserve its own post.

Views of Sigiriya

The Lion’s Rock, or Sigirya in the local tongue, is a dominant volcanic rock rising some 1,000 feet above the central planes of Sri Lanka and is distinctively visible from all directions.

Sigiriya has had a very long and turbulent history, from being inhabited in pre-historic times to becoming a Buddhist monastery in the 5th Century B.C., before being captured by King Kashyapa’s to build his splendid palace in the 5th Century A.D., and finally returning to be a Buddhist monastery after the king’s death until the 14th Century A.D. But more about the archeology, history and legacy of the Lion’s Rock in various upcoming posts.

We were lucky to witness this fantastic sunset from the terrace of the superb Kandalama hotel shortly after our arrival while sipping on a fresh mango juice. The Kandalama hotel was a fabulous experience in itself, but I will leave that also for a future post.

The next morning our guide drove us to Sigirya via the senic route, giving us the opportunity to view the fabulous rock across Kandalama Wewa. Due to the dry period, the water level in the reservoir was so low that the dead trees provided an eerie foreground to the prominent rock.

This final panorama of Sirgiriya is taken from the extensive gardens surrounding the rock on our walk in to a long but very rewarding climb to the top.

Ancient Sri Lankan door

A wonderfully preserved ancient Sri Lankan door.

Gomeran geology

The geology of La Gomera is stunning and characterises the volcanic island.

Devastated by fire

A typical shot of the blacked laurel forest on La Gomera caused by the devastating fire on the island in August 2012. This is the worst fire in the history of the island, spreading uncontrollably fast due to the high winds and tinder-dry vegetation and forced the evacuation of nearly 1,000 people by boat.

Unfortunately, the fire consumed about 1,853 acres of ancient woodland in the Garajonay nature reserve, a Unesco World Heritage site, some of which is believed to have been in existence for millions of years.

Precarious Rock Stairs

Here are a few shots of the precarious stairs along the steep cliffs behind El Castillo on the edge of Playa Vallehermoso, La Gomera, battered by the rough seas hitting the North Coast of the island.

I believe this would make a great location for a block buster pirate movie, with the stairs leading out of a pirate’s treasure cave, with treasure hunters scrambling across it chased by pirates’ skeletons protecting the treasure.

Maybe that’s just bananas. These stairs are actually part of the remains leading to the large platforms leading out over the ocean to load bananas onto the ships. The North coast of the island shows the tell tale signs of this, once thriving, banana trade, but to anyone seeing the cliffs, rocks and surf, especially in rough seas, it seems to be impossible to load a ship on these shores.

Mayan Arches at Uxmal

One of the most distinctive features found in Mayan architecture is the Mayan arch, a corbelled arch that spans entrances and vaults. As the Maya never discovered the true arch, the Maya were limited to construct single storey buildings with narrow, if sometimes long, rooms.

The Mayan arch can only support a limited amount of weight and requires significantly thickened walls and an abutment of other stone or fill to counteract the effects of gravity and to avoid each side of the archway to collapse inwards.

The description in the dictionary of a Mayan arch is not easy to comprehend: a corbel arch is constructed by offsetting successive courses of stone at the springline of the walls so that they project towards the archway’s center from each supporting side, until the courses meet at the apex of the archway, often capped with flat stones.

A picture paints a thousand words, so rather than trying to explain or visualise the Mayan Arch from this string of words, I have selected a set of images of Mayan Arches taken at our last visit to Uxmal to illustrate the Mayan Arch and it’s construction.

It is worthwhile to view the above image of the Mayan Arch at the House of Pigeons in full screen mode, and to zoom in and navigate around.

Is it a squirrel? Is it a cuckoo?

First, the facts. The squirrel cuckoo or ‘kip cho’ in Mayan or ‘cuco ardilla’ in Spanish is a largish bird measuring up to 50cm in length, has reddish plumage on the upper parts and grey on the lower, and is characterised by it’s long tail with white markings.

While admiring the massive crocodiles (from a very safe distance of course!) found at Lake Cobá, I heard an unusual bird song coming from the nearby jungle. Not that an unusual bird song is out of the ordinary, as the song of nearly all the birds in the Yucatán are alien to me. So I decided to turn my back on the crocodile to sneak to a hole in the stone wall on the edge of the jungle with the aim to find the source of the sound.

I spotted the singing bird with a striking long tail on some rocks in the undergrowth very quickly. Unfortunately, it was shy and hiding just too far away from me within the jungle to get anything other than a heavily cropped ‘evidence’ or ‘identification’ shot (below, middle). While listening to the bird’s song and hoping that it would come closer, I noticed a slight movement in my peripheral vision.

With a quick refocus, I spotted it’s mate on a branch close by. Luckily I got a brief but very welcome opportunity to take a couple of shots (bottom left and top) of this cuckoo hopping from one branch to another, before it flew to a branch close to it’s mate (below right) before the pair disappeared out of sight, deeper into the jungle.

The Mayan people

What better to do at Christmas when the wind howls through the chimney and the rain lashes against the windows than to look at pictures from our travels to warmer climates. In other words, an opportunity, or should I say another attempt, to finally sort through the 2,500 images from our visit to the Yucatán and Ciudad de México last Christmas.

These three images of Mayan people will be the start in a series of posts covering our travels through México in December 2010. With our travels through the Yucatán we were partly retracing our steps from January 2001, so I will attempt to find some of the old photos to show you the fenominal change this region has gone through in a decade.

I took the image of the Mayan women with a young child at the market on Plaza Major in Mérida, a colonial city founded by the Spanish Conquistador Francisco de Montejo. Over the past decade, Mérida has changed from a characterful, quiet colonial town  to an extremely noise, dirty city with the bustle of a multi million population.

The old Mayan women was folding the hand embroidered handkerchiefs that she was selling to the tourists in the shade beside the great ball court at archaeological site at Chichén-Itzá. We brought a massive smile to her face by buying half a dozen of these traditional coloured souvenirs without haggling too much.

One of the most notable scenes in the Yucatán is to see the children play happily on the street wherever you go. I honestly cannot remember the last time I saw boys play football on the the streets in Glasgow, a sad enditement to our changed society dominated by computer games. These bare footed boys and girl with flip flops were playing football on the road leading from the Villas Arqueológicas to the historical site at Cobá.

House of the pigeons

The House of the Pigeons. The name was given because the fretwork of the cresting resembles a pigeon house. At the centre of the cluster, there is a patio which was surrounded by palace-like buildings, of which only a part of the North building remains. On it one can observe a cresting made up of nine stepped triangular units with fretwork resting upon a row of pillars which used to be covered with painted stucco bas-reliefs representing human figures reclining on pedestals. V. Segovia investigated the astronomical functions of this building which dates between 900 – 1000 A.D.

Catedral Metropolitana

Catedral Metropolitana, Ciudad de México

Or in English, the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City.

Mexican sanderlings

I simply sat down on the beech in Tulum with my camera and watched the sanderlings wander along the shoreline searching for crustaceans. Amazing how these lovely little birds were completely unperturbed, not just with passing very closely by me, but also with the noisy flocks of tourists on the beech.