Chinese artist creates sculptures from suitcases

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Ever packed so much in your suitcase that it felt like you were carrying around a whole city? Apparently you’re not the only one. Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen had a similar feeling during her recent travels and decided to turn it into art. Xiuzhen has recently been using suitcases and discarded travel clothing to recreate miniature model cities in a project she calls “Portable Cities.”

The idea for Portable Cities got its start when the artist was waiting at the airport baggage carousel for her luggage. Xiuzhen began thinking about how we carry our homes around with us when we travel; the natural extension of that thought was to think about suitcases as the symbolic “home” of the global traveler. Ever since her revelation, Xiuzhen has been recreating intricate sculptures of her favorite cities like Seattle, Berlin, Vancouver and Beijing using pieces of random travel clothing as her medium.

For a generation of travelers groomed on round the world trips, AirBnB and Technomadic lifestyles, Xiuzhen’s art makes perfect sense. What is a home when you’re constantly packing your life into a suitcase? Is it a physical place? Or simply a state of mind?

[Photo via DesignBoom]

[Thanks Liz!]

The photographer who changed the way we see the world

by Sean McLachlan on


We’ve all seen them, those grainy series of black and white images showing animals walking or nude people climbing stairs or jumping. They’ve been used in art pieces, music videos, and are part of our visual heritage, but what are they all about?

A new exhibition at London’s Tate Britain tells the story of the photographer who took these enduring images. Eadweard Muybridge was a British immigrant to the U.S. in the 1850s. A skilled photographer, he traveled the world taking giant panoramic shots that he would then put on display, sort of an IMAX theater for Victorians. His seventeen-foot long panorama of San Francisco is one of the exhibition’s highlights.

His fame comes from his experiments with high-speed film in the 1870s. Muybridge wanted to answer the question of whether a galloping horse took all four hooves off the ground at the same time. People had been arguing about this for ages but the movement was too quick to catch with the unaided eye. Muybridge hired the Sacremento racetrack and put up a series of high-speed cameras that would be set off when the horse hit their tripwires. This technological innovation proved horses actually do leave the ground while galloping.

Muybridge became fascinated by human and animal movement and produced thousands of images. The people in his photographs are generally nude. While stuffy Victorian morality frowned on this sort of thing, since it was in the name of science Muybridge got away with it. One wonders how many of his books sold not for their scientific value, but because they contained plenty of cheesecake. He even made movies by stringing the images together on a spinning wheel called a zoopraxiscope. Muybridge was making movies twenty years before the movie camera was invented.

Muybridge at Tate Britain runs until 16 January 2011.

[Photo courtesy Library of Congress]

A pilgrim in Peru: Part Two, visiting Moray, Pisaq and Ollantaytambo

by Don George on

On my second day in the Sacred Valley, I awoke to clear mountain air, the faint sweet scent of distant smoke and the green and bright-blossoming grounds of the Hotel Sol & Luna. Manuel met me over cafés con leche in the hotel’s breakfast room, unfurled a map and traced our itinerary for the day: The Sacred Valley is a swath of level land bordered by the Urubamba and Vilcabamba mountain ranges and threaded by the Urubamba River; the distance from the endpoints of Ollantaytambo in the northwest to Pisaq in the southeast is about 70 miles. Strung throughout this valley are some two dozen towns and villages, as well as the grand capital, Cusco. On our first full day here we would travel the length of the valley and visit three ancient sites: Moray, Pisaq and Ollantaytambo.

A couple of what would become recurring themes emerged on our morning visit to Moray. The first was that archaeological tourism and archaeological stewardship are still very new in Peru. As we gazed over the site’s mesmerizing sunken circular terraces, Manuel said, “No one is sure when it was built, but many people believe it goes back to 1420s, 1430s. And it was no more than five years ago that the government really started paying attention to what had been done here. Farmers had been using this as a corral before that. And if the government doesn’t pay attention, people will just take these stones and use them for themselves.”

The second was just how technologically sophisticated the ancient settlers here were. Moray’s multi-tiered amphitheater was a laboratory where agricultural experiments were performed to see what kinds of crops would grow best at what altitudes and under what climatic and meteorological conditions. Each terrace represented a different temperature and ecological level. “The Incas were trying to domesticate crops that didn’t grow naturally here,” Manuel said. “For example, cotton seeds have been found on the site. This shows that the Incas were not only expert building engineers and hydraulic engineers; they were also great genetic engineers. Some people think this is where potatoes were domesticated. Think of it. The potato is probably the number one crop all over the world, and it may have been introduced here.” He shaded his eyes from the sun and stared at the grassy circles. “Five grains that are now used all around the world also came from here – who knows, maybe they did that work right in these terraces before us.”
Pisac, 60 miles to the southeast of Moray, had even more impressive terracing – ribboning up a towering slope crowned by a complex of reddish rock ruins. As we huffed and puffed up in the afternoon sun, the view of golden valley expanses and distant brown mountains became more and more impressive. The panorama from the top was breathtaking: Terraces descended like waves below, with the modern town of Pisac to the right, behind us a lush green gorge and across it a cliff wall pocked with ancient tombs. The site’s significance as a strategic watchpoint and easily defensible fortress was clear, but as we poked around its walls, windows, entranceways and alleys, its everyday significance came to life as well: A family had cooked and slept here, stored their grain and housed their livestock there; we could identify courtyards where religious ceremonies had been performed and guardhouses where lookouts were posted.

As the day cooled in the waning afternoon light, the thin sound of an Andean flute floated up from below; a little shiver – the breath of an Inca messenger? – fluted along my spine.

Moray and Pisac were illuminating and impressive, but the highlight of the day was Ollantaytambo, 60 miles northwest of Cusco and the last big town before Machu Picchu. As we bumped along its cobbled streets, Manuel said, “Ollantaytambo was very important because of its location – the way the valley narrows, anyone traveling to Machu Picchu or beyond had to go through here. So Ollantaytambo was important economically and strategically. We call it a living museum – many people here are descendants of the original Quechua settlers and are living in houses with Inca foundations that were built at least 500 years ago.”

An impressive fortress-like pile of rockwork that ranged from rough-hewn to astonishingly smooth, the ancient temple-fortress of Ollantaytambo rises like a juggernaut out of the valley floor. “Look at this!” Manuel exclaimed after we’d ascended a stony stairway to the main temple area. The rockwork here was so smooth and perfectly pieced together it almost defied comprehension. “How did they cut these rocks so smooth?” Manuel said, echoing my own thoughts. “Maybe they had a wire made of gold or silver and they used stone chisels – but it’s amazing that they could make such quality. And look at the sizes of the stones!” The biggest stones were easily 12 feet high by 8 feet long. “Some of them weigh 80-100 tons. The quarries were over there,” Manuel pointed to a hillside across the Urubamba River, perhaps two miles away. “They had to move the stones downhill, get them across the river, then bring them uphill. Yes, they had stone tools, but you know, the best tool they had was men. They must have had thousands of men working here.”

Manuel turned to me. “I believe the Incas must have had a writing system to do this work. We know they had a counting system, and I’m sure they had a system of measurement and a writing system too. How else can you explain this perfection?” The Incas must have written down their methods of transporting heavy stones and piecing together the intricate picture-puzzles of their massive, masterful monuments; surely such a sophisticated civilization had developed an efficient way to transport information as well as materials all along the Inca trail. As we walked around the site, Manuel gazed over the valley. “You know, people today feel more safe to build houses on Inca terraces than on plains built by modern engineers.”

Later we walked through the cobbled streets of the endearing town, past 21st-century dwellings built on 15th-century foundations, 15th-century canals irrigating 21st-century crops, past and present interwoven on a Quechua loom.

A final highlight of the day was something much more mundane – a stop at a roadside chicha establishment. Chicha is a fermented beverage made from corn. Manuel took me to a place he favored – signified, as with all such establishments, by a red flag hanging jauntily on a pole outside the shop. After admiring a basket of multi-colored ears of corn which the proprietress brought out to illustrate the source of the brew, we sampled two kinds of chicha: the traditional straw-colored drink, which was a little bitter for my taste, and a pinkish one that had been flavored with strawberry, known as frutillada, which tasted like a mildly alcoholic smoothie.

Manuel said that after a hard day of work in the fields, locals would repair to the neighborhood chicha place, down a few brews, talk and unwind. I cannot imagine a better way to end a hot Peruvian day. As we drank our second round of frutilladas, Manuel introduced me to the traditional game of sapo which often accompanies chicha-quaffing. Sapo involves a somewhat desk-like piece of furniture with about half a dozen holes in its top plane and a golden frog perched with its mouth open. You set the desk about eight feet away, then take a round brass piece about the size of a silver dollar and toss it at the desk. You get points if your piece lands in one of the holes and even more points if you manage to toss it into the frog’s mouth. How did I do? Well, I probably won’t be invited to join the Peruvian national sapo team for a while. But I did hit the desk a couple of times – and as further frutilladas slid smoothily down, even that seemed pretty special. And I managed to avoid hitting Manuel and John. So all in all I considered it a pretty successful chicha stop. And I’m happy to say no frogs – golden or green — were harmed that day.

Manuel and John dropped me at the Sol & Luna, where that night I feasted on mushroom consommé with chicken-filled ravioli and grilled local king fish, all enhanced by the hotel’s handsome, mural-graced circular dining room. Then I retired to my tiled cassita, admired the handicrafts artfully arranged throughout – like lodging in an exquisite handicrafts boutique – and took one last walk through the crisp Andean air, under the star-skeined Inca sky.

Previously: A pilgrim in Peru: Part One, Arriving in Peru
Tomorrow: A pilgrim in Peru: Part Three, arriving in Machu Picchu

This trip was hosted by both LAN and Geographic Expeditions, but the opinions, joy, and amazement concerning the people and archaeology in Peru are purely my own.

Behind the scenes in the Round The World travel machine

by Grant Martin on

So what will you do when you get back?

I’m going to collapse in exhaustion – and turn 40. – Rolf Potts

Gadling Labs was in Cairo for much of last week, helping out on the Herculean effort of developing, shooting, narrating, editing, blogging and publishing the internet travel phenom known as the No Baggage Challenge. The journey, set to prove that luggage can be as much physical as it can be psychological is about 1/3 complete, with the team crossing the northern shoulders of Africa and heading south to Johannesburg.

I met up with Rolf and Justin at the Cairo Marriott late one evening, a sprawling, beautiful property at the edge of the Nile on Zamalek, the leafy island at the center of the city. With few hours of sleep and a bad case of jetlag, my condition was actually pretty similar to the travelers, and as we ate dinner at the edge of the property they caught me up on their day-to-day and future activities. We would be spending the next two whole days filming and editing here in Cairo and there was a lot to do.

Like on most days of production, my time with the team was action packed and exhausting. Each morning the team met for breakfast at Omar’s Cafe at the hotel, discussed strategy, gathered our bearings and polished plans made earlier for the day. On the day that we shot Giza Plateau footage, we were out the door by 8AM, deep in camel negotiation by 9 and wrestling with a crowd of touts and salesmen before lunch – all before heading back to Zamalek, barreling through the city streets and shooting b-roll and side-story footage for later episodes.

Only after returning to the Marriott could we consider lunch (or at that point: dinner) but it was time for post production, so offset in two opposite chairs, Justin and I worked on blog and video content from his room while Rolf compiled dispatches from his tiny keyboard and iPod across the hall. For the two travelers, dinner in greater Cairo wasn’t an option, so I took some time to walk down to a local haunt, pick up some shish and some stuffed pigeon and bring it back to the starving lads. Wrapping up late in the evening, we made plans to meet for breakfast at Omar’s the next day and retired to our rooms in exhaustion.

Twenty-four hours after departing the lush Midwest, the process of planning, shooting, editing and posting a round-the-world travel series was nothing short of exhausting for me. The two days of involvement in the No Baggage Challenge left me completely drained, dirty and sick on my return to Chicago a few days later – I’ve no idea how these two guys can continue to do it around the clock. As I write this from the leafy suburb of Evanston the boys are currently roughing it through Johannesburg — check out their progress at rtwblog.com and wish them luck.

A pilgrim in Peru: Part One, Arriving in Peru

by Don George on

I got up at dawn and made my way in the crisp Andean air through the warren of just-opening stalls selling booklets, blankets and bug repellent, to the Aguas Calientes bus stop. With about two dozen Peruvian guides and Western and Japanese tourists, I piled into the bus for the weaving 1500-foot ascent to a place I’d been dreaming of visiting for decades: Machu Picchu.

I had to get there for the sunrise. I wasn’t sure why, but for years I had felt that something was waiting for me at Machu Picchu, that something would be revealed to me there. I’d tried to play down this feeling, not wanting to freight my experience any more than decades of posters and travelers’ tales already had, but as the bus jounced and switchbacked through the lightening dawn, it weighed undeniably in my stomach and my head: a yearning, an expectation.

For decades, Machu Picchu had been at the top of my Places to Go list, but somehow, in 30 years as a travel writer and editor visiting more than 70 countries, I still hadn’t gotten there. In the spring of 2010 I was beginning to despair that I ever would.

Then an invitation arrived from LAN Airlines, via the San Francisco-based adventure travel company Geographic Expeditions. LAN was inaugurating non-stop service from San Francisco to Lima and was looking for a few journalists to host on the inaugural flight. Friends at GeoEx offered to make my longtime dream come true: I could fly to Lima and then Cusco with LAN, take a special six-day GeoEx tour of the Sacred Valley, culminating in a visit to Machu Picchu, and fly back on LAN eight days later. I leapt.

My pilgrimage began in unexpected splendor. Minutes before boarding the LAN inaugural I was upgraded to business class, where I happily sipped champagne, dined on grilled salmon with lemon risotto and sautéed snow peas with mushrooms, and played with the amazing Transformer Seat, which offered dozens of body configurations, including my all-time favorite – the fully flat, 180-degree, lie-down-and-sleep-like-a-baby recline. That and “Would you like some more champagne, sir?” and I’d found heaven at 33,000 feet.

We landed shortly after midnight. I was blearily greeted by a GeoEx representative and guided literally across the street to the Ramada airport hotel, where I fell into a deep sleep, then walked back across the street the next morning for the 9:35 LAN flight to Cusco. Soaring over seemingly endless Andean crenellations and jagged snow-swept peaks was the first revelation of my trip.

When the lush gold and green expanses of the Sacred Valley suddenly appeared, it was a visually stunning lesson in just how remote and isolated – and idyllic – that valley is. We landed over the terra-cotta roofs of Cusco a little over an hour after we left Lima, and I was met at the airport by Manuel, my guide for the next six days, and John, our driver. And then the adventures began.

We drove first to Cusco’s Central Market, where I had a glorious baptismal immersion in the Sacred Valley. Our first stop was an extremely eye-opening stand where a jolly, stolid middle-aged woman was lifting slick, loopy intestinal parts from an industrial-size bubbling pot. “We have liver, frog from Lake Titicaca, crab, octopus, fish, and the most important ingredient, bull penis,” Manuel translated with a big smile. “Many people start the day off here,” he said. “This soup is good for headaches, vision, asthma, epilepsy, prostate – many things.” Nodding at me, the woman ladled out a long puckery octopus appendage and another thick looping body part I didn’t even want to think about.

She passed me a bowl and encouraged me to dive in. I took a deep sniff. It did not smell like chicken soup.

We walked along the slippery aisles past scurrying dogs and slurping patrons and a dizzying succession of stands. In one area fresh cows’ heads were lined up invitingly. “These are used in offerings to the earth mother to help sick children,” Manuel said. “Sometimes we use just the nose, sometimes the teeth, sometimes the horns – it depends on the illness.”

We passed huge hanging pigs and glistening fish and rainbow-colored tumbles of grains and fruits and vegetables. “In Peru we have more than 100 varieties of corn,” Manuel said, and then, waving at a stand overflowing with white, black, brown and yellow potatoes, “and more than a thousand varieties of potato.” We walked past sweet-scented flowers in a riot of colors, bright shawls and beans and beads, festival masks, great wheels of bread and cheese, and neat plastic-bagged packs of coca leaves. “Welcome to Peru,” Manuel smiled.

The market was equally fine for people-watching, including the distinctive hats that many Peruvian village women still wear. A friendly bean and coca vendor posed in her handsome white mestizo hat; a few stands later, a bread-seller proudly showed off a high-topped cream-colored headpiece dashingly encircled with a wide pink sash.

We motored on to Cusco’s central Plaza de Armas and the inviting Inka Grill, where I had the first of many delicious meals: ají de gallina, shredded chicken with nuts, cheese, and chile peppers. After lunch I began to feel a little woozy and lightheaded – Cusco is perched at 11,000 feet, after all – but Manuel passed me a packet of coca leaves and told me to chew a mouthful. The coca had a not unpleasant earthy taste, like a mix of green tea and maple leaves, and after a few minutes of concentrated chewing the lightheadedness passed. John set off, expertly threading though Cusco’s traffic-clogged streets, and in perhaps 15 minutes we were surrounded by rolling green-brown hills and terra cotta-roofed homes, many made of neatly stacked brick blocks. Beyond the grasslands and hills, snowy mountains shimmered, and in the distance a glinting river sinewed through – a landscape of breathtaking beauty I was entirely unprepared for.

As we drove, Manuel delivered a crash course in Peruvian political, cultural, and religious history: “Manco Capac is generally considered the first Inca king; he ruled the area around Cusco at the end of the 11th century. We can say that the Inca empire really began in the 15th century, under the great ruler Pachacutec, who conquered rival tribes in the Sacred Valley and established Tawantinsuyu, or ‘the united four provinces.’ ” The expansion of the empire reached its height two rulers later under Huayna Capac, who aggressively extended its reach all the way from present-day southern Colombia to north-central Chile, encompassing much of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northwest Argentina. This was the greatest empire in pre-Columbian America, and it lasted until Francisco Pizarro arrived with a ragged band of armored and equined soldiers in 1532. Within a year Pizarro had murdered the then-ruler Atahualpa and installed Atahualpa’s half-brother, Manco Inca, as a puppet ruler. In 1536 Manco rebelled against the Spaniards and retreated to a jungle stronghold called Vilcabamba, where he resisted and raided the Spaniards for 36 years. In 1572 that last Inca redoubt was conquered, and the last ruler, Túpac Amaru, Manco’s son, was captured and executed.

“All the colonial churches we’ve been seeing,” Manuel continued, gesturing at a distant cathedral spire, “were built by the Spaniards after they took control of the country; they were meant as a sign of power and control – the Spaniards were trying to disappear all evidences from Inca times. When the Spaniards arrived, Incas didn’t want to join them to be Christian. Thousands were killed. Finally they had to accept it when they were under Spanish control. Today 75-80 percent of Peruvians are Catholic. But of course we have the freedom to choose whatever religion we want to be.”

“What did the Incas worship?” I asked.

“When the Incas were in power,” Manuel said, “they worshipped nature: sun, moon, earth, mountains, also the puma and the condor. The Spaniards called them idolators and maybe they were — but I think they did very well; they took care of the environment, they had a big respect for nature.”

Soon we turned off the main road in a village called Chinchero, where Manuel took me to an adobe home-cum-workshop where members of an extended local family – ages 6 to silver-haired – were waiting to demonstrate the traditional way of making textiles. Strikingly dressed in red and green capes and black skirts with upturned red-brimmed hats, they showed how wool from sheep or alpacas is washed and formed into thread, how the thread is dyed using flowers, minerals and fruits (and how adding salt or lemon can dramatically change a dye’s color), and how these multi-colored threads are painstakingly handwoven into artful creations on venerable looms.

Manuel spoke with the family patriarch, who explained that his workshop is affiliated with an organization called the Centre for Traditional Textiles in Cusco. His family has been engaged in this practice for 13 years, the patriarch said, and their workshop gets an average of 30 visitors a day. “Our goal is to keep the area’s traditional textile-making alive,” Manuel translated. “In Inca times, textile-making was second in economic importance only after farming in this region. Each town has its own textile techniques, colors and designs, and many of these have historical or legendary meaning. They are very important to each place’s character and continuing.”

After the demonstration, I admired the bright hats, sweaters, blankets and shawls for sale with a new appreciation of the effort, time and skill they embodied. Though I’m usually an adamant anti-shopper on the road, I happily bought two long, intricately patterned, red, green, white and purple scarves. Sometimes shopping is just the right thing to do.

As we left the family’s compound, I reflected on the day: bull penis soup, shredded chicken, coca leaves and textile treasures. The Andean expanses of the morning’s flight seemed more than half a day away.

I glanced at my watch. It was only 4:30, but the sun was already beginning to disappear behind the mountains. Night came early and quickly here. We waved to the weavers and left in a dusty trail for the town of Urubamba and a gracious, gardened enclave called Sol & Luna, where I passed a blissful night in cosseted casita splendor.

Tomorrow: A pilgrim in Peru: Part Two, visiting Moray, Pisaq and Ollantaytambo

This trip was hosted by both LAN and Geographic Expeditions, but the opinions, joy, and amazement concerning the people and food in Peru are purely my own.