Exploring the diverse scenery of East Java, Indonesia

by Jessica Festa on

The area of East Java in Indonesia is home to beautiful and diverse landscapes that include beaches, volcanoes, mountains, plantations, lakes, natural reserves, and a lot more. There are also many natural, cultural, and adventure activities to partake in, like scuba diving, hiking volcanoes, surfing, witnessing traditional ceremonies, hearing folklore stories, learning the cultivation process of tea, and photographing wild animals like zebras and cheetahs.

To get to East Java you can fly into its capital, Surabaya, via their international airport, Juanda Airport (SUB).

If you’d like to explore East Java from the comfort of your computer chair, check out the gallery below.

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African game reserves flooded, travelers stranded

by Chris Owen on

Kruger National Park is one of the largest game reserves in Africa and a UNESCO Biosphere location. This week, the park was closed as massive flooding of the once-in-one-hundred-years magnitude stranding American and Canadian tourists who had to be airlifted out yesterday.

After a swollen river burst its banks and washed-out a bridge. “There wasn’t any other way to get out of the park,” Canadian Linda Freeman, airlifted out of the area told Reuters.

Flooding in southeast Africa this week has killed at least five people, forced thousands to evacuate homes and led to an airlift of about 20 foreign tourists in the southern provinces of Maputo, Gaza and Inhambane, weather officials said.

All organized game drives have been suspended as more than 1,500 people have been forced to flee their homes with local weather stations reporting a 267mm rainfall (10.5 inches) in one 24 hour period earlier this week, over five times the classification for heavy rain.




Gadling’s Kraig Becker was on safari in Kruger National Park not long ago and tells us:

“In all, I spent six days in Kruger, and was given the chance to explore it both on foot and by vehicle. In those days, I found that it lived up to its billing as one of the top safari destinations in all of Africa. Not only is the wildlife all that you would expect, and more, but the landscapes are breathtaking as well. In my travels within the park boundaries, I saw beautiful rivers, emerald forests, and stunning canyons. The gorgeous scenery was an element I wasn’t expecting, and it helped to further separate Kruger from the Serengeti.” Read more here.

Flickr photo by Sito Wijngaarden

Are there lost pyramids in Bosnia? Probably not.

by Sean McLachlan on


For several years now, European archaeologists have been in a furor over a supposed lost civilization in Bosnia that built the biggest pyramids in the world. Scholars have dismissed the claims, made by Bosnian-American businessman Semir Osmanagic, as pseudoscience, yet he’s getting funding from the Bosnian government and was just granted permission to excavate over the objections of the country’s archaeological establishment.

Osmanagic is convinced a large hill overlooking the town of Visoko near the Bosnian capital Sarajevo is a pyramid from an lost civilization dating to about 12,000 years ago, when the region was experiencing the Ice Age. The hill is indeed roughly pyramid-shaped, at least the half that faces the town. The other half is a bit lumpy. In fact, if you look at it with Google Earth, it doesn’t look like a pyramid at all. Geologists say it’s a natural formation and that there are several like it in the region; Osmanagic says many of those hills are pyramids too.

To prove his point Osmanagic set up the “Archaeological Park: Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun” and since 2005 has been fighting for permission to excavate. The permit was granted, but then it was revoked for fear the excavations could damage an existing archaeological site on the top of the hill. This is a medieval fort with Roman foundations built atop a Neolithic settlement. Now permission has been granted again and the work will continue.

A victory for independent science against the narrow vision of academia? Not necessarily.

Looking at the photos on Osmanagic’s website on the pyramids in Bosnia, I don’t see anything indicating there’s a pyramid there. Most of the supposedly worked stone looks like other natural formations I’ve seen, the so-called “secret tunnels” could be from any era, and the few examples of obviously worked stone could just as easily be medieval. In fact, Byzantine records say there was a town here in the Middle Ages and it has not been found. The Bosnian pyramid team may be destroying a real archaeological site in order to create a fake one.Some of Osmanagic’s actions seem a bit fishy too. He claimed to have assembled a team of experts to work on the site and give him advice, including famous Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass, but many of them said they had never agreed to work on the site. Some of them said Osmanagic never even contacted them.

In an angry letter to Archaeology Magazine, Dr. Hawass wrote, “The discoverer of the “pyramid” in Bosnia, Semir Osmanagic, who claims that a hill near the Bosnia River is a man-made structure built before the end of the last Ice Age, is not a specialist on pyramids. His previous claim that the Maya are from the Pleiades and Atlantis should be enough for any educated reader.”

The claim has certainly created a tourist industry in the previously sleepy town, and it’s sparking interest in Bosnia’s past. So where’s the harm?

In an article in Science, Bosnian archaeologists lamented that funding and attention were going to the fanciful pyramid theory while the nation’s real heritage remains underfunded and underprotected. Some have even reported being threatened for speaking out against the project. The Bosnian Pyramids have become a matter of national pride for a nation still feeling the wounds of the bitter war of the 1990s. Osmanagic has made Bosnia the cradle of civilization, or as he terms it, “supercivilization”.

This is the sort of nationalistic chest-thumping that got the Balkans into trouble in the first place. Osmanagic is playing with fire.

Lampedusa: Italy’s loneliest off-season island

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Lampedusa is Italy’s southernmost island. Geologically part of Africa, it sits about 70 miles from the Tunisian mainland and a good 125 miles from Sicily. If the island sounds familiar to you, that’s probably because it’s been in the news quite a bit recently.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, tens of thousands of migrants from Africa (first from Tunisia and Libya; later in the year from points south) set out for Lampedusa, many on rickety boats not designed to cross rough open waters. Many would-be migrants died en route, and Lampedusa has come to be associated with these tragedies in the ensuing months.

The migrant flow has had an undeniable effect on tourism on the island. Earlier this month in La Stampa, Federico Geremicca cited a 60 percent drop in tourism in 2011. Tourism on Lampedusa is confined to one very concentrated high season, the end of July through the end of August. During this period, scores of northern Italians descend upon Lampedusa to spend their school holidays in the serious heat.

Despite the concentration of high season into a single month, tourism is the major economic driver on Lampedusa. Aside from tourism, only fishing and a small crafts industry motor the economy.

Outside of its brief high season, the island is quiet. In January it’s almost silent. The concierge at my hotel, the very comfortable and inexpensive Hotel Martello (with rooms starting at €45 in low season) told me that I was the only tourist on Lampedusa.Since 1996, a significant portion of the island has been protected as a nature reserve. The preserved part of the island, which takes up most of the southern coast of the island’s eastern half, is visually very striking–rocky, with some wooded areas and recessed sandy coves. Though the summer heat dries the island out, during the winter the island is quite lush and good for hiking.

Visitors interested in spending time in the nature reserve should make a beeline to the Riserva Naturale Orientata office at Via Emanuele 25. The hiking maps on offer are detailed and staff members are helpful.

There’s bus transportation (€.60 or 78 cents) to the more or less completely unpopulated eastern end of the island, as well. Two walks in particular are pretty great. One of these starts and finishes at Casa Teresa, a traditional farmhouse, circling along a bluff overlooking the Mediterranean. The other of these starts nearby and descends through a wooded ravine to Pulcino Cove (Cala Pulcino). The trail to Cala Pulcino passes through lush woods, over rocky scrub, and finally along a rocky beach. After the exciting hike down to the cove, the beach itself is a little underwhelming; nonetheless, the walk is absolutely worthwhile.

The island’s trump card, however, is held by the well and truly breathtaking Rabbit’s Beach (Spiaggia dei conigli, above), a recessed cove of clear, bright blues. The beach is probably the best-known spot on Lampedusa. High season images show a beach swarmed with bathers, but even on a chilly January afternoon beset by thin light, the water looks downright appealing. Next to the beach is Rabbit’s Island, a loggerhead sea turtle nesting area.

Winter is a strange time to come to Lampedusa. There are just three restaurants open around the tourist side of the port, and another two pizzerias in town. Two of the year-round restaurants are quite good. L’Angolo del Mare (Via Alessandro Volta) does very good pasta and fish, while La Rotonda sul Mare (Via della Grotte) is great for pizza. Aside from that, there’s a fantastic delicatessen (Salumeria Enoteca Portu ‘Ntoni, Via Roma) and a smattering of cafes for pastries and espresso. There are a few larger supermarkets as well for other picnic staples, and individual vendors sell fruits and vegetables.

Not an obvious choice for a January break, Lampedusa’s physical beauty and pleasing solitude make it an appealing destination, perhaps especially so when the tourist tally is in the single digits.

Training shuttle to be displayed in Seattle’s Museum of Flight

by Sean McLachlan on


It looks like the Space Shuttle, but it isn’t. It’s made of plywood, for one thing, and it can’t fly.

Yet it’s a piece of aeronautics history and will soon grace Seattle’s Museum of Flight. This training shuttle, more properly called the Full Fuselage Trainer, is a full-scale mockup that astronauts have used for practice since the 1970s. The museum originally hoped to get one of the four actual Space Shuttles, but those went to other museums. The advantage of the training shuttle, however, is that visitors will be able to climb aboard and get a feel of what it must have been like to go on a mission.

The shuttle will be flown to Seattle in five segments starting in May and should be open to the public sometime in June, the Seattle Times reports.

The Space Shuttles are going to four different museums. The Atlantis will go to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center in Florida. The Endeavour will go to the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The Discovery is earmarked for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in northern Virginia. The Smithsonian will transfer the shuttle prototype Enterprise to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.