Pompeii now on Google Street View

by Sean McLachlan on

The ancient Roman city of Pompeii is the latest addition to Google Street View.

Available from Google’s UNESCO World Heritage list of street views, it’s the latest addition to a selection of famous sites that includes Stonehenge, Prague’s historic center, and the Roman/Medieval Spanish town of Segovia.

Pompeii was a Roman provincial town near the Gulf of Naples in Italy. It was buried by a massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Thick layers of volcanic ash kept the town in a remarkable state of preservation. Visitors (and now web surfers) can admire buildings, statues, wall paintings, graffiti, even furniture. The most eerie bits are the plaster casts of the eruption’s many victims. Their bodies rotted away and left holes in the hardened ash. Modern archaeologists filled these with plaster to create ghostly images of men, women, and children perishing from suffocation.

Pompeii and its neighboring town of Herculaneum give an unparalleled look into the daily life of the Roman Empire. The Italian government hopes that having Pompeii on the web it will encourage more visitors. While a walk through its virtual streets is a fun way to kill time at work, it’s nothing compared with doing it for real.

Coming Attractions: Iran

by Sean McLachlan on

My first night in Tehran, reeling from a 55 hour bus ride from Istanbul, I staggered into the closest restaurant I could find for some dinner. The waiter was very curious to see me and we chatted a bit. I quickly found my mediocre Arabic was useless in this Farsi-speaking nation and we got by in what limited English he could muster. After dinner I went up to the register to pay and the cashier said, “Never mind, your waiter paid for you.”

“Wow, that was nice! Where is he so I can thank him?” I asked.

“He’s gone home already.”

That was my first sample of Persian hospitality.

It’s a casual, instinctive form of hospitality. They don’t make a big show of it like in some countries. Instead the Iranians have an intellectual curiosity about the outside world and feel a genuine warmth to outsiders.

Wait. . .Iran? That country with the leader who denies the Holocaust and wants to build nukes? Yeah, that Iran. I’ve been to more than 25 countries and I’ve never seen such a difference between a people and their government. The regime is crap, no doubt about it (there goes any offers of a press trip) but the people are something else. In a month I never got an ounce of attitude, not even in the mosques and madrasas (religious schools). One director of a madrasa even confided, “I wish the government didn’t force Islam on people. It turns people away from the faith.”

To anyone brought up on Western television, Iran is a constant series of surprises. It’s quite safe and is home to ten UNESCO World Heritage Sites, easily accessible via an efficient system of clean, modern buses. Top sites include the old Persian capital of Persepolis (where the guard gave me a tour in Italian because it kinda sounded like the French I tried on him), medieval Armenian churches, and the mosques of Isfahan, simply the most beautiful Islamic city I’ve seen.

There’s a saying in Persian, Isfahan nesfe jahan, “Isfahan is half the world”, and it certainly gave me half of my best memories of Iran. The mosques, with their cool blue tiles and sleek minarets, are as soothing to the eye as the city’s lush gardens. Perhaps it’s because so many Iranian buildings are made of bare concrete that Isfahan creates such an awesome contrast, but I spent days admiring the architecture. Isfahan is also home to many traditional crafts, their stores divided into separate streets in the customary fashion of the Middle East. The carpet bazaar was as much of a visual treat as the mosques, but the coppersmith’s street, while having traditional appeal, is not a place to go while nursing a headache. A hundred guys hammering away at metal lacks any cultural interest at that point.

Oh, and the food’s good too, especially if you have a sweet tooth. The Persians are big on desserts. I wish I could remember the name of this one concoction made with ice cream topped with honey and walnuts, topped with whipped cream, and then another layer of ice cream topped with honey and walnuts and whipped cream. . . and on and on to the top of a dauntingly tall glass.

Get there

While there are no direct flights from the U.S. or Canada to Iran, there are numerous flights from all major European hubs. Or you can try that horrible bus route I took from Istanbul. It’s grueling, but you get to see many long miles of rugged Anatolian and Persian scenery on the way, and meet lots of dodgy money traders too. One guy offered me $7,000 cash for my Canadian passport. I have to admit I was tempted, but the idea of being without a passport and having to lie to Iranian cop kept me honest. It’s even possible for U.S. citizens to get visas to Iran from the Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Pakistani embassy in Washington, DC. Read the website carefully, though, as there are lots of restrictions.

Ancient Buddhist caves under threat

by Sean McLachlan on

The Archaeological Survey of India has been struggling to control water damage to ancient Buddhist paintings in the Ajanta Caves in the state of Maharashtra.

The 29 caves in this UNESCO World Heritage Site are decorated with sculptures and paintings dating back as far as the second century B.C. They depict Buddhist tales and images of the Buddha and various Bodhisattvas.

The addition of new drainage systems has stopped some of the leakage of water through tiny cracks in the stone, but recent heavy rains have made the caves develop new leaks.

Archaeological Survey officials are monitoring the situation and trying to decide what to do next. Memories of a another Buddhist cave complex, the Bagh Caves, is making them tread lightly. Bad conservation methods at that site led to their almost complete destruction by seepage in the 1950s and 60s.

India is putting new emphasis on conservation as it tries to add more sites to the World Heritage List. Hopefully the folks at the Archaeological Survey of India will win the battle to preserve India’s heritage. I met some of their archaeologists the last couple of times I went to India and they’re a dedicated bunch, despite having to struggle with bureaucracy, insufficient funds, and the sheer vastness of their task.

Will Varanasi and Sarnath join the World Heritage list?

by Sean McLachlan on

It’s World Heritage Week from November 19-25 and countries around the globe are celebrating the priceless treasures that UNESCO, which runs the list, is helping to preserve.

But one country, India, is wondering why two of its most famous places aren’t on the list. India has no shortage of World Heritage Sites, like the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort, but the 3500 year-old holy city of Varanasi (Benares) isn’t on the list and the Buddhist shrines at Sarnath are only on the tentative list.

This seems like an odd oversight. Varanasi is a beautiful, chaotic, ancient city on the banks of the Ganges. Nobody knows just how many temples there are here, from massive golden structures with elegant statues to little flagstones carved with a lotus flower and daubed with a bit of paint or an offering of a flower. It seems that when you are close to the river you cannot look anywhere without seeing a temple or shrine. In fact, it’s hard not to see several of them! The riverbank is famous for its burning ghats, platforms where Hindus are cremated before their remains are tossed into the holy Ganges River. But like in Hinduism itself, death and life are two parts of the same process. While people are mourning along one section of the riverside, not far off the dhobis are washing clothes, spreading out colorful saris like terrestrial rainbows, while old men play chess and kids frolic in the water. The ghats are strange mixture of morbid reminders of mortality and the throbbing life that makes India so exciting.

Nearby Sarnath is where Buddha is said to have preached his first sermon, and there are numerous temples in the representing all the Buddhist countries in the world. It’s interesting to see Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, and other temples all together, attended by monks of all different nationalities.The peaceful, semi-rural surroundings make a stark contrast to noisy Varanasi.

So why aren’t these two places, so popular with visitors and so important to world heritage, not on the list? Nobody seems to have a good answer, but the Indian press does have some complaints about how they are treated, not by UNESCO, but by the Indians themselves. An article in the Times of India complains that the temples of Varanasi aren’t properly preserved. The stone temple of Kashi Vishwanath, shown here and built in 1777, was recently painted using enamel paint, which can seriously damage the stone. Now curators are facing a hefty preservation bill if they want to save one of the most important temples to Shiva. A recent study found about 2,000 temples in Varanasi that need help, but nobody is sure of the true extent of the problem.

Sarnath was submitted for consideration in 1998. Now it appears poised to get on the list. While the older temples and monuments have crumbled with time, the newer temples are in good condition and give the visitor or pilgrim a world tour of Buddhist practice. Here’s hoping Sarnath makes it onto the list soon, and that India will increase its efforts to preserve Varanasi and get it on the World Heritage List too.

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Sacred mountain added to World Heritage List

by Sean McLachlan on

UNESCO has just made the latest addition to its World Heritage List–Suleiman Mountain in the Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan.

This is Kyrgyzstan’s first World Heritage Site. The mountain has been a holy spot for thousands of years. Prehistoric rock art shows it was sacred long before Islam came to the region. When the new faith took over it became a focus for Muslim pilgrims. Sick people sit in the caves on the mountainside hoping to be cured, and there’s a natural rock slide that women use to promote fertility. Kids slide down it too, supposedly to make them grow up healthy, but judging from this video it looks like they’re having too much fun to think about that. There’s an interesting slide show of the mountain here.

There are seventeen places of worship on the mountain, including a reconstruction of a medieval mosque. The original was destroyed by the Soviets in an effort to stamp out religion in the region. Judging from the thousands of pilgrims who go to Suleiman Mountain every year, they didn’t achieve much.

The mountain is right next to the 3,000 year-old city of Osh, a stop on the old Silk Road, so adventure travelers following this increasingly popular route will want to stop off and see this.