One of the great travel experiences of all time is the good old-fashioned road trip. There really is nothing like hitting the road with friends with no particular schedule or agenda. The video below captures that feeling oh so well, using more than 5000 photos to sum up a cross-country journey in a little more than three minutes.
The video, which is entitled “Roadtrip USA,” was shot by Mike Matas who recently spent two weeks driving 3000 miles from San Francisco to New York City with his girlfriend. Their entire journey plays out here and while the images are at times oddly disjointed, anyone who has ever taken a long road trip will be able to relate to the feeling it conveys. Also, you’ll probably be tempted to pause the video on more than one occasion just so you can get a better look around, as you’re sure to recognize more than one or two of the locations on display.
So, sit back, enjoy the ride and prepare to drive across the U.S. in just three minutes of time.
Iraq is an ancient land. It’s seen a lot of civilizations come and go and each one has left behind spectacular monuments and rare treasures. On a recent visit, I had the privilege to experience many of these sites. Last time, I talked about the monuments of the Assyrian Empire. Today, I want to talk about three more of Iraq’s ancient wonders.
Perhaps the most famous is Babylon. It was the political and spiritual capital of southern Mesopotamia starting with the ruler Hammurabi (ruled 1792-1550 B.C.), the same king who created the famous law code. The city had its ups and downs but reached a peak under Nebuchadnezzar II (ruled 604-562 B.C.).
Babylon was home to the fabled Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens. Equally impressive were its city walls, which stretched for 8 kilometers. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus said they were wide enough on top to allow a four-horse chariot to turn around.
The story of the Tower of Babel may have been inspired by a giant stepped pyramid called a ziggurat. It was a temple to the god Marduk and stood 300 feet high. It was later quarried for its baked bricks and there’s little left. The Hanging Gardens have also vanished. What does remain are the city walls and the fabulous Ishtar Gate with its glazed brick reliefs of bulls and dragons. It was through this gate that the images of the gods would be taken in procession. The name Babylon means “the gate of the gods.”
The gate was excavated by a German team in the early 20th century and carted back to Staatliche Museen in Berlin. The gate at Babylon today is a modern reconstruction, and it’s not even full size. Far more impressive are the city walls, also reconstructed, and the original processional way, which, like the Ishtar Gate, is decorated with strange beasts.
Part of the original street level of the processional way remains – a flat surface of bitumen, an early form of asphalt. Strange to say, I found this simple stretch of pavement one of the most evocative sights in a country filled with ancient treasures. People walked along here more than 2,500 years ago, and there it was, stretched out before me. I desperately wanted to vault over the fence and stroll down the road, but even Iraq’s archaeological sites have guards and regulations. What a pity.
Babylon’s reconstruction was done under the rule of Saddam Hussein, who fancied himself one of the great kings of Mesopotamia. He got the cruelty part down pat, but missed out on the greatness. He couldn’t even do a decent reconstruction. Against the advice of the archaeological community, he built the new walls atop the originals and obliterated much of the ancient remains. In true ancient style he had bricks bearing his name used in the building. And now in true ancient style, his people have been busy erasing his name ever since his inglorious end. One of Saddam’s palaces stands on a hill overlooking the site – an empty shell.
%Gallery-172219%
When Babylon was enjoying its heyday, the Sumerian city of Ur was already ancient. Its foundation is lost in time, stretching back at least seven thousand years. The city grew steadily and became the center of the most sophisticated civilization the world had yet seen. Writing thrived here, with scribes producing countless clay tablets written in cuneiform, a complex script of wedge-shaped impressions.
The first dynasty of Ur, starting in the 26th century B.C., was hugely wealthy and powerful. Some of Sumer’s best-known treasures come from the royal tombs dating to this period, such as elaborately decorated harps, the Royal Standard decorated with scenes of war and peace, and delicate gold jewelry from the queens, princesses and their female servants. The British Museum now owns many of them. Click the link for an amazing slideshow.
The Third Dynasty was even greater than the First and saw a flourishing of the arts and science. It also created the first known law code, the Code of Ur-Nammu, 300 years before the Code of Hammurabi. This dynasty completely rebuilt Ur and also put up the Great Ziggurat, pictured above, which got a modern facelift courtesy of Saddam Hussein.
One archaeologist I met back in the U.S. told me that during the war, Saddam parked some of his fighter planes next to the ziggurat, hoping they’d be safer there than in the nearby air force base. They got strafed by an A-10 and some of the bullets hit the ziggurat. I intended on checking for bullet holes but got so entranced with where I was that I forgot to. Maybe next time.
Zipping forward several centuries we come to Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthian Empire in the first century B.C. and later the Sassanid Persian Empire. All that’s visible today is the Taq-i Kisra, shown below. This was an iwan, or great hall, built by the Sassanids in the sixth century A.D. The building was a royal winter residence and it was here in the iwan that this king would sit on his throne and rule his kingdom. The giant brick vault soars 110 feet into the air and used no reinforcement. It’s the largest of its kind ever built and despite all the years and wars and invasions, it’s still standing.
All of these sites and many more have suffered from looting and neglect in the tough years since the invasion. Luckily, a dedicated band of Iraqi and foreign archaeologists have been busy preserving them. New excavations have started and hopefully, as more incredible finds are uncovered, Iraq’s ancient past will come to light.
Don’t miss the rest of my series, “Destination: Iraq,” chronicling my 17-day journey across this strife-ridden country in search of adventure, archaeology and AK-47s.
Coming up next: “The Christian Community Of Iraq!”
I was staring, mesmerized, my mouth watering at a giant mozzarella. The elastic curd was submerged in a giant bowl of cold water in my favorite small, family-run specialty food store in Rome. The bowl was shaped like a huge puckered blossom. It sat atop a glinting counter at E. Volpetti & C. on Via Marmorata near the Pyramid of Cestius in the Testaccio neighborhood in southern-central Rome.
The archetypal Aladdin’s Cavern of gastronomy, Volpetti is a place of secular pilgrimage for savvy foodies but also for normal, food-loving, unpretentious Romans.
Dozens of hams were displayed in cubby-holes, the archives of porcine paradise waiting to be sliced to order by bona fide prosciutto experts. Jowl bacon and smoked pancetta dangled like headhunters’ trophies. Jars of artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, and slices of eggplant towered over the human scrum at the counter. Baskets brimmed with gnarled white truffles worth their weight in silver, truffles so nose-tickling that I nearly swooned of airborne gluttony.
Hundreds of fabulous, expensive cheeses beckoned: yellowish bitto or pecorino di fossa aged in limestone pits, pungent-smelling pear-shaped provolone with whole lemons buried inside, immense wheels of black-rimmed pecorino romano and flame-branded Parmigiano.
But it was the humble fresh mozzarella trucked in several times weekly afloat in that funny-looking bowl that held my gaze.
Ebullient Emilio and charismatic Claudio Volpetti saw me staring and smiling and they must have wondered what had gotten into me. Both are beyond retirement age. They still work 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, and are passionate. They have trained deeply knowledgeable staffers and groomed an heir, Alessandro. And they are still top of the heap in the world of old-fashioned gastronomy in this, arguably the greatest food city in Italy, a city with the freshest produce, the best meats fresh or cured, the greatest variety of wines from around the country and the world.
To be the best among the best is difficult in the best of times. It is almost impossible in hard times when big box stores take over, especially when Martians with a spaceship the size of the Coliseum land down the way and spend countless millions offering bread and circuses and razzle-dazzle morality lessons to the famished citizenry.
The reason I was obsessing about the mozzarella was simple yet multi-layered, like everything in Rome, where simplicity hides infinite complexity. I have been coming to the Volpetti brothers for decades and always assumed they would continue to thrive forever. But earlier that day I had faced a crisis and had wondered how much longer the place could remain in business.
Why? I had gone shopping. Then I’d performed a private, comparative tasting of Volpetti’s trucked-in mozzarella from the Naples area and the freshly-made mozzarella I’d bought at Rome’s new Martian food emporium.
The Martians are the creators of a chain of high-end foodie shopping malls and foodie food courts called Eataly. There are Eataly malls across Italy and Japan and in New York City. They are coming to a city near you if your city has money to spend and a holier-than-thou attitude among its consumers.
Rome’s Eataly, the chain’s latest conquest, is the biggest and the best, a true “americanata” as the Italians say, meaning in this case a glitzy Las Vegas Coliseum of gastronomy, a four-story showcase with canned music and moving sidewalks where the right-thinking, well-off, trendy consumer feels good about consuming both sanctimoniously and with orgiastic abandon in clean, modern, sanitized surroundings.
Eataly Rome occupies a disused air terminal at Ostiense train station. It’s a quarter-mile down grim, semi-industrial streets from E. Volpetti & C. and the caper-shagged Pyramid of Cestius.
The terminal building looks vaguely like a postmodern Gare d’Orsay, the famed museum in Paris. Instead of Impressionist masterpieces, it is stuffed with hundreds of millions of packages, bottles, barrels, bags and containers containing everything edible or potable produced in Italy by the anointed friends of Eataly who are, needless to say, the very best in the business.
The Eataly operation is unlike other commercial malls. It’s a for-profit business, but you get didactic displays, videos, cooking lessons, wine-tasting courses, seminars, and lots of cheerleader foodie propaganda in the bargain, including a paradoxical, not to say contradictory, spiel.
That spiel boils down to the claim that Italy’s small, family-run shops like Volpetti are finished. They’re gone. Kaput. So Eataly is it. It’s no mere supermarket. It’s responsible and good, and you are good because you shop there.
For instant enjoyment and to make sure customers have fun while being converted to the Eataly creed, a choice of fancy or cafeteria-style restaurants offer open kitchens behind picture windows and views over parking lots, housing projects, and railway tracks. This is the quintessence of trendy, meaning the cult of the ugly and the edgy. There are two cafés, one of them also a coffee-roasting establishment. There’s parking out front for hundreds of cars. It’s a fine way to encourage Romans to use vehicles in a city not designed for cars and ruined by cars.
Everything at Eataly is certainly the best. Some of the eager, handsome or comely young employees at Eataly are probably also knowledgeable. The poultry they spit and roast before your eyes is not mere poultry. Those are coddled, range-raised birds of noble lineage and include guinea fowl among their caste. The fish are caught responsibly by fish-loving environmentally aware fishermen and are so fresh they’re flipping and sometimes die dramatically before your eyes.
The chocolates are sourced with the good of the cacao growers in mind. The wines on tap or in the bottle are made responsibly, some of them according to the phases of the moon, and sold with incantations like the True Drink dispensed by the Vatican across town.
Precious shade-grown coffee beans are roasted on site. Beer is brewed from pure, unadulterated grains raised with love instead of fertilizers. Bread is shaped by loving hands and baked before the eyes of beholders. All is transparent, performed by performance artists of food behind large plate-glass windows.
In fact everything at Eataly comes with a giant explanatory panel, a video, a song and a dance, a label, an appellation, an approbation of excellence and wholesomeness and deliciousness. The acolytes and high priests of the Eataly cult and perhaps even Pope Benedict XVI himself when he visits wear badges of the Slow Food movement, born in a manger in Piedmont.
After decades of quiet preparation by the politically left-leaning Christian zealots that many of its founders once were, the Slow Food movement has found its Emperor Constantine, the ruler who recognized the cult of Jesus as a religion worthy of the Roman state. The foodie cult from Piedmont has united with the cleverest of clever Italian merchants, a group who in a few paragraphs can proclaim all small family-run retail food businesses dead, and yet claim in the next breath that it is promoting and protecting small, family-run businesses that produce the products Eataly sells. The world of Italian gastronomy is now safe. Eataly has arrived in the Eternal City in the nick of time. Beware those who dare to question its infallibility!
On the morning I visited, the moving sidewalks linking Eataly to Ostiense station were broken. So with my roast chicken, mozzarella and coffee all made or roasted on site, and much else stuffed in eco-friendly bags, I lumbered underground for the quarter-mile of fluorescent-lit tunnels separating Eataly from the great marble-clad, caper-shagged Pyramid of Cestius and Via Marmorata. I headed home and, with a group of food-loving friends, set to work comparing products. We did blind tastings of many exquisite things from Eataly and Volpetti. The results were unsurprising.
Back at Volpetti & C. that evening I stared happily at the last ball of mozzarella floating in the funny-looking container. It hadn’t been made minutes ago on site by eager zealots behind plate-glass windows. Why was it more flavorful, firmer, more luscious and perfect than the lump I’d bought at Eataly? Ditto the other cheeses we’d taste-tested, the hams, even the fresh bread.
It’s not that the Eataly products weren’t excellent. They were. But the ones bought at Volpetti’s dinosaur emporium were even better. How now, things purchased at a small, quiet, family-run place, which, as everyone knows, should no longer exist? Perhaps the reason was as elusively simple as everything else in Rome. Here reigned spontaneity, joy, passion and straightforward business instead of canned music, moving sidewalks, picture windows, handsome young acolytes, preachy zealots, and vats of sour-smelling sanctimoniousness.
Author and private walking-tour guide David Downie’s latest book is the critically acclaimed “Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light,” soon to be an audiobook. His next adventure-memoir, to be published in April 2013, is “Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James.” His websites are www.davidddownie.com, www.parisparistours.com, http://wanderingfrance.com/blog/paris and http://wanderingliguria.com, dedicated to the Italian Riviera.
Time is running out to save one of the world’s great archeological sites. On Christmas Day, archeologists who have been working to preserve Mes Aynak, a stunning archeological site in Afghanistan with more than 5,000 years of history, will be forced off the site to make way for a Chinese mining company that plans to extract copper from beneath the site.
The Chinese government owned company, China Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC), plans to destroy Mes Aynak’s temples, monasteries, thousands of Buddhist statues, and a mountain range in order to extract what they believe is $100 billion worth of copper. But Brent Huffman, a Chicago-based documentary filmmaker and others are still hoping for a last-minute solution that could preserve the site.
%Gallery-172097%
Huffman, 33, is making a documentary about Mes Aynak and we caught up with him before he departed for what may be his final trip to Mes Aynak before it’s completely destroyed to learn more about this site and to find out if there’s anything that can be done to save it.
What is the historical significance of this site?
The top layer of Mes Aynak is a Buddhist city that is about 2,400 years old. There are monastery complexes, temple structures, and over 400 life-sized Buddhist statues. Underneath that, there’s a 5,000-year-old Bronze-Age site. Archeologists are just starting to make discoveries in the Bronze Age site.
You’ve been there more than 10 times. How do you get there?
I can’t spend the night there because it’s in Logar province, which is Taliban country, so when the sun goes down, it’s too dangerous. The Afghan archeologists don’t stay the night either. It’s about 25 kilometers southeast of Kabul, but because the road is so crude, it can take an hour or an hour and a half to get there. And it’s dangerous, you have to travel through a few villages that are supportive of the Taliban and have a history of firing rockets at cars passing through or placing landmines on the road. So it’s nerve-racking just getting to the site.
Is it easy for Americans to visit Afghanistan?
People are surprised how easy it is. I go on a tourist visa. You need a letter of recommendation from your employer, but that’s about it. Emirates flies there, Turkish Air flies there. I’m going back to Afghanistan in December and I’ll take Turkish Air through Istanbul, then a direct flight from there to Kabul.
In your piece on CNN, you compare this site to Machu Picchu. Is it as awe inspiring as that?
Yes. The first time I saw it, I was blown away. Awe-inspiring is the right phrase. It’s a very Indiana Jones feeling. It’s an enormous site in a very isolated location.
I can’t really say for sure. This is just a rumor, but I’ve heard that UNESCO is going to leave Afghanistan altogether in 2014, which would leave the Buddhas of Bamiyan completely unguarded. A lot of NGOs in Afghanistan think it’ll be too hard to operate in the country after the troops pull out, so that may be part of their thinking.
Does the fact that this is a Buddhist site explain why the Afghan government hasn’t protected it?
Not exactly. The copper that is under the city is worth more than $100 billion. For a country where some citizens are starving, any economic activity like this sounds pretty good.
So this Chinese company, MCC, plans to destroy the site to extract what could be $100 billion worth of copper?
The contract was signed in 2007 for a 30-year lease of Mes Aynak and MCC paid a little under $3 billion for the exclusive rights to mine the site. MCC paid a first installment of $800 million and they were accused of bribery. The former Minister of Mines was allegedly paid a $30 million bribe in Dubai but he’s no longer in the government. The Chinese were never told that the Buddhist site exists before they signed the contract.
How could they not notice it?
I don’t think they actually visited the site.
And MCC eventually agreed to allow archaeologists to have three years to excavate the site?
Yes. There was a highly critical story about their plans in the Wall Street Journal, and MCC saw it as a PR nightmare, so they gave a three-year reprieve starting in 2009. And for the archaeologists, it’s been a sporadic three years because the area the site is in is so dangerous.
Who are these archaeologists?
There are three groups. The main group is a French organization, DAFA. And then there’s a team of Afghan archaeologists who are doing all the work, they are kind of the heroes in this story. They are the ones risking their lives every day to excavate the site. And then there’s an international team working underneath the Ministry of Mines, who are staying inside the Chinese MCC compound and you can see the conflict of interest there. The three groups are all doing different things and not working very cohesively together.
And now they need more time to excavate the site?
Right. Philippe Marquis, who is heading the DAFA team, said it should be a 30-year project to properly excavate and preserve the site and to discover these layers of civilizations.
I assume that there is no way to mine copper while preserving the site?
It might be possible to save the structures by using a different mining method but MCC proposes to use the open pit mining style, which is the cheapest and fastest, but most environmentally destructive method. Mining experts are telling me the Buddhist sites and the mountain range will be destroyed and they’ve already destroyed six villages in the area to prepare the site.
Were the people in the villages bought off?
Right now, the locals are extremely angry and they’re part of the violent attacks that have occurred at the site – rockets have been fired, land mines have been placed in the road – MCC and the Ministry of Mines negotiated with the villages, but the people were promised money and I don’t think they were ever paid, so now you have a lot of angry, homeless people in the area that used to live there and are now fighting back.
Have the archeologists themselves been attacked?
Yes. When MCC came in, they brought in members of the Kabul police force, so they have some officers protecting the mine. Eleven of those officers were killed recently and a landmine killed four Chinese workers. And one of the Afghan archeologists accidentally dug up a landmine at Mes Aynak. It blew up in his face and he lost his eyesight.
What about you, aren’t you concerned about your own safety?
I am. I love the site and I’m passionate about Afghanistan but it’s very difficult. I have a daughter who will turn 1 on December 12, right before I leave for Afghanistan. It’s very dangerous – every trip to Mes Aynak, I feel it.
So why are you willing to take the risk?
It’s a good question. My wife doesn’t understand it. My mother hates that I do this too. It’s really a love of Afghanistan. I started traveling there in 2004 and I fell in love with the country. To me, this destruction of this cultural heritage in Afghanistan, it represents something far greater than just this site. I fear that this will set a precedent where lots of cultural heritage sites could be destroyed.
If the international community could rally, we could stop this from happening and prevent a horrible precedent from being set.
How did this site survive when the Buddhas of Bamiyan were attacked? Why was this site spared?
It has been heavily looted already. It wasn’t flat out blown up like the Bamiyan Buddhas. The huge irony is that with MCC arriving on the scene with the Kabul police, they have served to protect the site. If MCC left, the Kabul police would go with them and because of all the press Mes Aynak received, it would be completely destroyed by looters. If UNESCO or someone like them doesn’t get involved to protect the site, it doesn’t look good.
And time is running out, MCC is set to start mining on Christmas day. Is there time left to save this site?
The December 25 date is when archeologists will be forced off the site. I won’t be there on Christmas but I don’t think they’d allow me to film the destruction of this site anyways.
What is the U.S. government’s stance on this issue?
Recently, because of my Facebook page and others who are working to spread awareness, Thailand has gotten involved to save the site in a huge way. Thais protested outside UNESCO’s office in Thailand to save the site.
I’ve also been working with the Smithsonian, who has been talking to the State Department. So we’re trying to stop this altogether or at least buy more time.
But has the U.S. government been supportive?
They have not been supportive of my efforts and my project. I’ve had contact with the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, and I think they are very intent on having the mining project begin, because they want to see private industry in Afghanistan succeed. That sounds good, but because of the level of corruption and environmental destruction and China’s record of mistreating workers, I don’t think it’s good for the country.
You don’t buy the argument that this project will create jobs and benefit the local economy?
No. There’s a great example of a Chinese mining company in Peru that promised many of the same things and delivered on none of them.
If this site is demolished will this be one of the world’s most important archeological sites to be destroyed?
Absolutely. This site has a 5,000-year history; it was a major hub on the Silk Road. Mes Aynak is the missing link that shows how important Afghanistan was in the history of the continent.
I suppose that the idea of attracting tourists to Afghanistan is so unrealistic at this point that no one in the Afghan government sees an opportunity in preserving the site?
Yes, unfortunately that’s right. Bamiyan is getting very dangerous as well. It was dynamited in 2001.
But it wasn’t completely destroyed?
No. And it is a tourist destination still. There are direct flights into Bamiyan but it’s pretty dangerous to get there.
For those who want to do something to help save this site, what should they do?
Check out my Facebook page. And we have two petitions, one is to have President Karzai intervene and stop this from happening, and the other is to appeal to UNESCO to have them get involved. And I have a Kickstarter campaign, which is 92% funded at this point, which does three things: 1) it will help me finish the film, 2) continue to raise awareness about Mes Aynak, and 3) 10% of the proceeds will go to Afghan archeologists to buy them computers and cameras and other equipment they don’t have.
When can we see your film?
It should be out in February or March. We have a trailer but we’re not done filming (see trailer above).
So what would happen in a best-case scenario here? Who would reimburse MCC if they aren’t allowed to mine the site?
MCC could mine in a less destructive way around the site – but I know they won’t do that because it isn’t cost effective. In a perfect world, the site becomes like Machu Picchu, and becomes a huge tourist site. I would love it if mining wouldn’t happen there at all.
[Photo credits: Photos of Mes Aynak courtesy of Brent Huffman and Jerome Starkey on Flickr; Bamiyan photo courtesy of Hadi Zaher on Flickr]
“Reno, Nevada. The Biggest Little City in the World. Famous for our casinos, quick divorces, and legalized prostitution.”
So goes the opening narration to “The Cheese Truck,” a funny little documentary made by Jason Spencer of Storm Front Productions. The 26-minute film follows what amounts to a day in the life of GourMelt owners/drivers/cheese geeks Jessie and Haley, as they feed Reno’s hungry masses.
This gem of a film caught my attention for three reasons: I just flew in from Reno last night, after spending a week in Lake Tahoe visiting my brother and his family; I work in the cheese industry and did a book signing at Wedge, Reno’s new (only?) cheese shop, six days ago, and I couldn’t believe someone had made a movie about Reno’s on-trend food scene. Ouch.
“The Cheese Truck” may also gently poke fun, but its objective is to show viewers how much work goes into operating a food truck, as well as highlight Reno’s Renaissance. As my experience at Wedge also showed, there are a lot of fun things popping up in the Biggest Little City, especially the South Virginia Street Corridor neighborhood.
Look for more details on the second coming of Reno next week. I’ll tell you where to find a great bottle of wine, used combat boots, and handcrafted soppressata, amongst the tattoo parlors and crack houses.