I saw the first (sorry, second) of National Geographic’s feature films the other day, The Story of
Weeping Camel, and I thought it was really excellent. The actors are all Mongolian and the
film is kind of a mixture of documentary and fiction. The story follows the lives of a family of herders in the Gobi
desert who have to deal with a crisis when a mother camel rejects her baby (OK, not exactly Star Wars, but interesting,
none the less). Turns out the film has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and I will bet
you that it wins. To complement the film Nat Geo also has got a
fine mini-site dedicated to
Mongolia and the people wh live there.
The Dugong
Looking around at various dive sites, I came across this site
dedicated to a very odd animal, the Dugong. The Dugong is a
massive, awkward, corpulent beast. It looks like a tube of cookie dough. It lives mostly in and around Australia,
but is scattered throughout the Red Sea and much of Asia. Apparently divers love to come across dugong’s because they
are very docile if not downright friendly. The site here actually has an MP3 of a Dugong male. Anyway, kind of
interesting. A little bit of light-hearted Friday fare.
48 Hours in Bangkok
The Independent has got a
sweet new series called “48 Hours
In”, where they go and spend, yes, 48 hours, in a particular city. This one takes them to Bangkok, one of the most
exotic cities in the world. I lived in Bangkok briefly back in the 90s and can say that Bangkok is, as the writer puts
it: ”a chaotic, sprawling city…confusing for the first-time visitor…[but] superb…and breathtaking.” The writer
recommends many of the famous old tourist haunts, like Jim Thompson’s
house, a teak masterpeice; seeing the Chao Praya by boat, and of
course the magnificent temples.
The Explorer’s Daughter
And you thought traveling with kids was an added hassle. Not so, says Kari Herbert, daughter of British explorer
Wally Herbert, who completed the first crossing of the Arctic Ocean by foot and dog sled, by way of the North Pole, in
1969. Daughter Kari says her presence on some of dad’s expeditions helped break the, um, ice with various indigenous
groups.
In this short, nice
little
interview in the LA Times Herbert talks about travels with dad and mum to an Inuit hunting village on a remote
island in Greenland. She ruminates on chiildhood with an explorer dad, eating blubber and her recent book.
Hoofing It Across the Gobi
Why take four wheels when you can take four legs? Or so seems to be the
question in this interesting Guardian
piece about riding horses across the Gobi. Mongolia is making the news a lot these days. There was a piece in
the Times today about how English
is taking hold there as part of a modernization effort led by the government to get people to speak the language,
the “Singapore Model” was it they put it. Seems Russian wasn’t working out too well for them. Then there was the
“Golfing Across Mongolia“ the epic story of Andre Tolme to shoot
the par 11,880 country.