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Tag: adventure travel

When Big Game Hunting was Glamorous: The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

When Big Game Hunting was Glamorous: The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

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1592281877The recent scandal over the killing of Cecil the Lion has once again brought big game hunting into the spotlight, with various websites outing rich hunters who go to Africa to blow away lions, giraffes, and other animals.

Here in Spain, we had an even bigger scandal back in 2012 when, at the height of this country’s financial crisis, King Juan Carlos went to Botswana and killed an elephant. He later apologized but this, plus rumors of extramarital affairs and numerous incidents of being apparently drunk in public, forced him to abdicate two years later.

There was a time when scandals like this would have never happened, when kings and commoners could empty their guns into beautiful animals free from the fear of criticism. Many wrote memoirs of going on safari, creating a genre that has all but died out today.

One of the classics of the genre is The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, by Lt. Col. J.H. Patterson and originally published in 1907. Patterson worked as the chief engineer building the Mombasa to Uganda railway in 1898. Managing a huge crew of Africans, Pathans, and Sikhs in adverse conditions to build a railroad through poorly mapped territory would have been hard enough, but soon lions started coming into the workmen’s camp at night and carrying off his workers.

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Ancient Damascus: What We Might Lose Next

Ancient Damascus: What We Might Lose Next

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Damascus: the Jupiter temple (III A.C.) in front of Omayyad mosque
Ruins of the Jupiter Temple at the entrance of Al-Hamidiyah Souq. The postcard souq was just to the left.

This week’s destruction of the temple of Bel in Palmyra, Syria, has brought the Islamic State’s brutality into the international spotlight once again, just like they wanted it to. I’m grateful that at least I got to see the place before it was destroyed. I’ve written about it in my post Memories of Palmyra before ISIS.

Palmyra isn’t just a unique archaeological site, it’s strategically important too. Located at a crossroads in eastern Syria, from there it’s possible for ISIS to supply all their operations in that sector, including their push for the Syrian capital of Damascus.

ISIS is already on the outskirts of Damascus and is renewing military operations there. If they take the city, many more antiquities would be in danger.

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A Tour of the National Museum of Iraq

A Tour of the National Museum of Iraq

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A bas-relief showing an Assyrian king with various symbols of deities around his head. The renovated museum has improved lighting for key pieces such as this one, and has added more detailed signs in Arabic and English.

Iraq gets a lot of bad press. As usual with far-off countries, we only hear about them on the news when something goes wrong, and a lot has been going wrong in Iraq for the past few decades.

As usual, though, the news doesn’t tell the whole story. Iraq may be home to the 21st century’s most psychotic religious group and countless warring factions, but you can also find decent people and bastions of culture. The Iraqi intelligentsia fights a peaceful daily struggle to keep the nation’s culture and history alive.

Nowhere is this more clear than at the National Museum of Iraq. Like the Iraqi people, it’s a survivor, having withstood sanctions, invasion, and looting. That it’s survived at all shows just how dedicated its staff is to preserving humanity’s past.

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Faces of Iraq

Faces of Iraq

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Proud dad in Nasiriyah
Proud dad in Nasiriyah

The Iraqis we see in the news almost always fall into three types–The Evil Fundamentalist, The Useless Official, and The Wailing Victim. The media have a hard time dealing with a broad range of characters, so they tend to fall back on these types again and again.

Of course the reality is more complex. While there’s no shortage of bloodshed and corruption, most of Iraq’s 33 million people go about their day-to-day affairs trying to live a normal life.

Back in 2012 I traveled to Iraq to write about it for the now-moribund travel blog Gadling. Click the link to read the series. Sadly, the photo galleries have been taken offline, but you can still read the articles for the moment.

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Memories of Palmyra Before ISIS

Memories of Palmyra Before ISIS

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Landscape view of colonnaded path and temples at Palmyra, Syria. Courtesy Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.

The Islamic State is erasing my memories again.

I’ve written here before about how they wrecked the Assyrian sites around Mosul and destroyed the unique desert city of Hatra, both in Iraq. Many of the photos I took there can never be taken again. Now they’re turning their sights on Syria’s heritage.

Losing territory to the Kurds in the northeast, and realizing they can’t easily push into the Shia areas of Iraq after vowing to kill them all for apostasy, Islamic State is making a renewed offensive to the west into Syria, a divided and mostly Sunni region where they have a better chance to gaining ground. It was in Syria, in 1993 and 1994, where I first got a deep appreciation for many aspects of Arab culture and gained fond memories of visiting the country’s matchless archaeological sites.

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Remembering Nepal’s Ancient Cultural Heritage

Remembering Nepal’s Ancient Cultural Heritage

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Darbar Square, Kathmandu. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Durbar Square (“Palace Square”), Kathmandu. Surrounding these two large temples are a host of palaces and smaller temples and shrines. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

There’s a downside to being well-traveled — any time there’s a disaster overseas it feels close to home. This week’s earthquake in Nepal was another one of those disasters.

I visited Nepal in 1994 at the end of a year-long trip across Asia. I’d been working as an archaeologist in Bulgaria and went overland through Turkey, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and India to make it finally to Nepal. That trip gave me some of my favorite spots on Earth — Cappadocia, Damascus, Isfahan, Varanasi, and the Himalayas. Like most people who visit Nepal, I went for the trekking. While the view from Annapurna base camp is something I’ll never forget, the people and ancient art and architecture of the Kathmandu valley have also stuck with me after all those years.

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Ancient Hatra: Another Victim of ISIS

Ancient Hatra: Another Victim of ISIS

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This photo gives an idea of the vast scale of Hatra.
This photo gives an idea of the vast scale of Hatra.

Last week I shared some of my memories of visiting Mosul before it was taken over by ISIS. In that post I wondered if the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud would be destroyed just like Nineveh was. A day after the article went live, ISIS militants moved in and started smashing all the statues.

A week later they did the same with Hatra, an ancient site that’s less well known. This time they weren’t just smashing Iraq’s ancient history, they were smashing their own ancient history.

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Memories of Mosul before ISIS

Memories of Mosul before ISIS

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The author in front of the mosque of the Prophet Younis, or Jonah, in Mosul. ISIS militants blew it up in July 2014. Revered by Muslims as the burial place of Jonah, it was destroyed because ISIS believes shrines to be un-Islamic.
The author in front of the mosque of the Prophet Younis, or Jonah, in Mosul. ISIS militants blew it up in July 2014. Revered by Muslims and Christians alike as the burial place of Jonah, it was destroyed because ISIS believes shrines to be un-Islamic. The explosion was so powerful it also damaged several nearby homes.

Nobody smiled in Mosul.

What struck me the most when I visited Iraq as a journalist in 2012 was how many people smiled at me. On the street, in mosques, in museums, people came up to welcome me to their country. There was a lull in the fighting and the Iraqis were beginning to allow themselves hope. Nothing brought that home to me like the first time I heard gunshots in Baghdad. Early in the trip I was in my hotel room when that distinctive popping noise came from outside. Peeking from my window, I saw a wedding in progress in front of the hotel. Some of the men were firing into the air to celebrate, oblivious to the sensitivities of hotel guests or the consequences of gravity.

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Recycling the Trash of War

Recycling the Trash of War

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Playing on a tank in Ethiopia.
Playing on a tank in Ethiopia.

Last week, we looked at some of the arms and armor of the Abyssinian Empire. With the holidays coming up, I decided to do something a bit more peaceful. On my trips through Africa, I noticed a huge amount of detritus from its various wars. I was impressed at how the people adapted this stuff into something more useful. A lot of the spare metal is picked up and sold for scrap. Old battlefields once littered with burnt-out tanks get cleared out, only a few rusting hulks being left behind.

As you can see in the picture above, one of the tanks that was left behind has been turned into the local jungle gym. This photo was taken in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, near the Eritrean border. The tank was probably a casualty of the bitter war between the two countries. These kids are Eritrean refugees from a nearby refugee camp, whose only playground is a symbol of what made them refugees in the first place.

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Axum: Ancient Superpower of Ethiopia

Axum: Ancient Superpower of Ethiopia

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One of the stelae of Axum. Photo copyright Almudena Alonso-Herrero.
One of the stelae of Axum. Photo copyright Almudena Alonso-Herrero.

In a recent post on the ancient and medieval civilizations of Somalia, we looked at the importance of the Horn of Africa in international trade. The Somalis acted as middlemen, supplying the Eastern Mediterranean, India, and China with goods from the African interior. One of the major ancient civilizations in east Africa that was producing exports was the Empire of Axum.

Axum is a little-known civilization. It didn’t leave much in the way of writing and its sites have not been extensively excavated. Even its capital city has been little explored. We do know that it was founded in the fourth century BC and became a major power by about 100 AD. It came to control most of what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea, and then hopped over the Red Sea in the third century to take over parts of what is now Yemen and Saudi Arabia. For a time, it controlled trade through the Red Sea and acted as a link between the Roman Empire and India. Axumite coins have been found as far away as China. Greek writers noted Axum as one of the world’s great civilizations.

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