Darling Ducky
Feb 2, 2013
For the big Sydney Festival last month in Darling Harbour, Sydney, Australia, they floated a big rubber ducky out there in Cockle Bay.
Hole in the Clouds
Tag: (Image credit: Trey Ratcliff via Stuck in Customs)
Old and New #1
Apr 1, 2013
The noonday sun works its way into Beijing's new Capital Museum to illuminate China's ancient treasure.
In the Neighborhood
Jul 10, 2013
Corner store in Beijing, China.
Snow Monkeys
Sep 14, 2013
Japanese macaques, native to much of the country, are the world's northernmost species of non-human primates. They can tolerate below-zero temperatures (F) and spend months at a time living in the snow.
Some but not all of the snow monkeys congregate in and around hot springs during the wintertime.
Big City
Nov 7, 2013
Photographer Trey Ratcliff called this picture "The Infity of Tokyo."
The Sun Sets On Yet Another Place We've Never Been
Feb 18, 2014
As today's contribution to the occasional series "Places We've Not Been and Have No Business Trying to Write Anything About," please consider this roofscape scene taken in Lijiang village, a UNESCO World Heritage site high in the hills of southwest China, near the border with Myanmar.
Human habitation in Lijiang has been continuous since before there was such a thing as a roofscape, or even a roof; paleolithic cave-dwellers were here. The ancient Silk Road passed through here. Townspeople grew wealthy through trade and tribute, and they began to rebuild their town in more elaborate, decorative styles.
Civilization was flourishing here in the thirteenth century. And fortunately for some, within about eight hundred years, give or take, the tourists showed up.
Sun Sets on the Souk
Apr 23, 2014
Up the road a ways past Casablanca in Morocco is the ancient Berber city of Marrakech, famed for its gardens and palaces and especially for its sprawling, labyrinthine markets.
Click on the picture to, um, biggenize it, to glimpse what's on display in this souk and also, perhaps, to check the accuracy of our unofficial count: mounted on rooftops visible here are at least 104 satellite dishes.
My Pretty Pony
Jun 4, 2014
Girls grooming a very small horse in Gibbston, New Zealand.
Fossiliferous!
Mar 9, 2016
Also taxidermiferous! Displaying life that is no longer with us, at the Muséum national d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.
Métro de Paris
Jan 19, 2017
Some of the subway tunnels in Paris are for pedestrians rather than trains.
Venice in the Wee Hours
Jan 26, 2017
Caribbean Mindfulness
Feb 25, 2017
Paddleboard yoga, all adrift in Aruba. We're told it ain't easy.
Shackleton's Shack
Jan 13, 2018
In 1907, Ernest Shackleton led his first expedition aimed at reaching the South Pole. He'd already spent years in Antarctica, serving under Robert Scott, failing to reach the Pole but learning much about survival and leadership. Shackleton's 1907 trip would make it closer to the Pole by far than earlier explorers, though he and his men still fell short by 87 miles.
They first landed in Antarctica at a place called Cape Royd on McMurdo Sound, where Shackleton oversaw the building of his hut for wintering over in Antarctica. He and his men huddled there through the winter of 1908, and when they left that spring to attempt their sprint to the Pole, the hut was equipped with food and fuel to last 15 men for one year.
They left a note with details about provisions and the coal store and then locked the door and nailed the key to the door.
They never returned to the hut, though they did make it back safely to England in 1909, where Shackleton immediately began planning his next trip to the South Pole.
Almost a century later, in 2006, the hut was dug out of the ice and snow and reopened. Much of the food was described as "perfectly preserved," though some meat was said to be quite rancid. Several cases of McKinlay & Co. scotch whisky were retrieved from the cellar and found to be delicious; based on a chemical analysis of this whisky, the distillery is again producing the old single-malt scotch.
The hut has now been restored through the World Monuments Fund, and the land surrounding it has been designated an Antarctic Specially Protected Area.
Shackleton did succeed in raising money for another expedition, which set sail on the Endurance in 1914 but never reached the Antarctic mainland; he Endurance was crushed by ice near the coast, initiating years of fear and suffering, out on the sea ice. Shackleton's renown as a leader dates from this disastrous voyage, when he was able to sustain morale and eventually get the men to safety 700 miles away at a whaling station in the South Georgia Islands. They made it back to England in 1917.
His fully provisioned little hut, meanwhile, complete with a coal-burning stove and crates of scotch, sat on the opposite edge of the Antarctic continent, closer to New Zealand than to South America. It might as well have been on the moon.
Two Stairways
Apr 6, 2018
Next to Tokyo''s famed neon nightclub district is Golden Gai, which we're told is the old nightlife neighborhood, packed with tiny dive bars, many of them up steep stairs from the street.
Somehow, Golden Gai escaped the urban renewal boom that destroyed almost all of old-timey Tokyo. These two staircases lead to two different bars. A patron with a furled umbrella descends from one of them.
Housebound
Apr 19, 2018
Drone's eye view of a yacht, said to be abandoned, in a Hong Kong neighborhood of government apartment towers.