DW Travel (June 10, 2023) – TV-host KMJ guides you through his city, Accra — from the old fishing district of Jamestown to the hip Osu Oxford Street. Of course, KMJ also shares tips on where to eat delicious food and shows you the best place in Accra for chilling by the sea.
Video timeline: 00:00 Intro 00:25 Labadi Beach Hotel 01:25 Legon Botanical Gardens 02:23 Azmera restaurant 03:50 Jamestown with the arts center 04:22 Osu Oxford Street
Accra is the capital of Ghana, on the Atlantic coast of West Africa. Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park honors Ghana’s first president, who helped lead the country to independence. The park contains Nkrumah’s mausoleum and a museum charting his life. Makola Market is the city’s vast, colorful bazaar. Popular seafront spots Labadi Beach and Kokrobite Beach offer golden sand and high-energy nightlife.
Country Life Magazine (June 10 , 2023) – Annie Tempest, the brains and hands behind Country Life’s beloved Tottering-by-Gently cartoon, shares her pictorial diary of a recent Empires of the Mediterranean cruise, aboard Viking’s ‘Sky’ ship, with us.
Piraeus 1.0 – We boarded Viking Sky at Piraeus port in Athens, so were in harbour over night. I began to notice the blueness and the ‘dome-i-ness’ of my surroundings. Acclimatising my eyes to the change in architecture from North Norfolk.
Still painting late into the night watching the the buildings turn into silhouettes and the blue mountains in the distance fade to smudges.
Koper, Slovenia – Tito Square in Koper has a strong Italian influence and even the language spoken here is part Italian and part Slovene. It was a capital city under the Venetian Republic. I couldn’t paint this journey without including a tourist photographing the magnificent architecture.
This was the sight that greeted us as we approached the Greek island of Santorini. Beautiful coloured buildings above what looked like cave entrances. The town sits on the top of what appears to be a giant rock and is reached by cable car, or donkey for the more intrepid.
Clairmont Films (June 10, 2023) – Armenia, landlocked country of Transcaucasia, lying just south of the great mountain range of the Caucasus and fronting the northwestern extremity of Asia. To the north and east Armenia is bounded by Georgia and Azerbaijan, while its neighbours to the southeast and west are, respectively, Iran and Turkey. Naxçıvan, an exclave of Azerbaijan, borders Armenia to the southwest. The capital is Yerevan (Erevan).
Modern Armenia comprises only a small portion of ancient Armenia, one of the world’s oldest centres of civilization. At its height, Armenia extended from the south-central Black Sea coast to the Caspian Sea and from the Mediterranean Sea to Lake Urmia in present-day Iran. Ancient Armenia was subjected to constant foreign incursions, finally losing its autonomy in the 14th century CE. The centuries-long rule of Ottoman and Persian conquerors imperiled the very existence of the Armenian people. Eastern Armenia was annexed by Russia during the 19th century, while western Armenia remained under Ottoman rule, and in 1894–96 and 1915 the Ottoman government perpetrated systematic massacres and forced deportations of Armenians.
Tourist Channel (June 9, 2023) – Since 1981 Moustiers Sainte-Marie has been listed as one of the most beautiful village of France. The church, the old village walls, the chapels, the aqueduct, the fountains represent an alliance of water and stone.
It lies at the western entrance to the Verdon Gorge (Gorges du Verdon). The village has been a centre of the pottery trade, especially faïence, for centuries. A spring flows out of the cliff and creates a waterfall in town, providing water power.
The New York Times Travel (June 9, 2023) – The Italian island, long in the shadow of its fashionable neighbor, Capri, is newly chic, but remains deeply authentic, with rocky harbors more likely to dock fishing boats than megayachts.
The Hotel Mezzatorre is perched on a finger of land with a view onto the bay of Naples and the beach of San Montano below.
Ischia is one of a trio of islands (known as the Phlegraeans) off Naples that also includes Capri and Procida. Capri’s size and popularity with day trippers means it can easily feel overrun and overexposed. Procida is the smallest of the three and has never gotten the attention of its siblings (although it too is worth a visit for its pastel villages and artisan workshops).
La Mortella gardens in Forio were created by the renowned garden designer Russell Page.
Ischia’s magic is that it’s suspended between the newly chic — with the recent overhaul of the Mezzatorre Hotel by the hotelier Marie-Louise Sció, who brought a crowd that had never heard of the island but were fans of her über-photogenic hotels — and the authentic. There are simple bars, beach clubs and harbors more likely to dock fishing boats than megayachts. With a surface area of almost 18 square miles, the island is home to a number of charming villages to explore like Forio, Ischia Ponte, Sant’Angelo and Casamicciola, among others. Add in natural thermal spas, lush vineyards and deserted coves, and it’s easy to see why Ischia is quickly become one of Italy’s rising destinations.
For centuries Sintra was the favoured summer retreat and hunting ground of Portuguese nobles, and their legacy is a veritable jewel box of palaces, castles and candy-coloured mansions.
The traditional retreat of Portuguese nobility provides the perfect mix of palaces and pastries
The Unesco-listed cultural landscape of domes and turrets seems to be straight out of a fairytale — no wonder it has fired the imaginations of literary luminaries from Hans Christian Andersen to Byron. Deserving of far more than a day trip from Lisbon, 20 miles away, Sintra is even more magical at the day’s end. Once the coach parties have departed, the few who linger have the run of all those lofty viewpoints and quaint pestico bars.
Casa Piriquita There’s more to Portuguese pastry craft than pasteis de nata, as this traditional bakery that dates from 1862 proves. Treat yourself to a signature queijada, a type of cheesecake, or the sugar-dusted puff pastry “cushions” called travesseiros, which are filled with almond cream.
Incomum by Luis Santos Incomum is one of Sintra’s smartest dinner spots, with a Mediterranean menu that ranges from carpaccio and truffle-laced risotto to Iberian pork filet mignon and lobster bisque — and a signature olive oil pudding to finish. Handily, there’s a wine bar next door for an aperitif or post-dinner glass of port.
DW Travel (June 7, 2023) – Did you know that Copenhagen is one of the greenest cities in the world? Transport, urban planning, food – the Danish capital is committed to sustainability in all areas. DW’s Aisha Sharipzan shows how your next trip to Copenhagen can be sustainable AND tons of fun.
Video timeline:00:00 Intro 00:40 Rent a bike 01:42 Public Transport 02:13 Free kajak tour at the harbour, collecting trash 04:19 Vesterbro and Nørrebro 04:48 BaneGaarden 05:40 Kødbyen 06:19 Harbour in Nordhavn 07:07 Danish Architecture Center 10:25 CopenHill 10:37 Park’N’Play 11:36 Reffen Street Food Market
Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital, sits on the coastal islands of Zealand and Amager. It’s linked to Malmo in southern Sweden by the Öresund Bridge. Indre By, the city’s historic center, contains Frederiksstaden, an 18th-century rococo district, home to the royal family’s Amalienborg Palace. Nearby is Christiansborg Palace and the Renaissance-era Rosenborg Castle, surrounded by gardens and home to the crown jewels
The New York Times (June 6, 2023) – Down beneath the tourist lodges and shops selling keychains and incense, past windswept arroyos and brown valleys speckled with agave, juniper and sagebrush, the rocks of the Grand Canyon seem untethered from time. The oldest ones date back 1.8 billion years, not just eons before humans laid eyes on them, but eons before evolution endowed any organism on this planet with eyes.
Written and photographed by Raymond Zhong, who joined scientists on a 90-mile raft expedition through the canyon.
Since 1963, the Glen Canyon Dam has been backing up the Colorado for nearly 200 miles, in the form of America’s second-largest reservoir, Lake Powell. Engineers constantly evaluate water and electricity needs to decide how much of the river to let through the dam’s works and out the other end, first into the Grand Canyon, then into Lake Mead and, eventually, into fields and homes in Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico.
Spend long enough in the canyon, and you might start feeling a little unmoored from time yourself.
North Canyon, and a spring at Vasey’s Paradise.
The immense walls form a kind of cocoon, sealing you off from the modern world, with its cell signal and light pollution and disappointments. They draw your eyes relentlessly upward, as in a cathedral.
You might think you are seeing all the way to the top. But up and above are more walls, and above them even more, out of sight except for the occasional glimpse. For the canyon is not just deep. It is broad, too — 18 miles, rim to rim, at its widest. This is no mere cathedral of stone. It is a kingdom: sprawling, self-contained, an alternate reality existing magnificently outside of our own.
And yet, the Grand Canyon remains yoked to the present in one key respect. The Colorado River, whose wild energy incised the canyon over millions of years, is in crisis.
FRANCE 24 (June 5, 2023) – A long trek across the desert of northeastern Niger brings visitors to one of the most astonishing and rewarding sights in the Sahel: fortified villages of salt and clay built on rocks, besieged by the Sahara sands.
Generations of travelers have stood before the “ksars” of Djado, wandering their crenellated walls, watchtowers, secretive passages and wells, all of them testifying to a skilled but unknown hand.
The now ruined city Djado is located on the southern end of the Djado Pleateau in the Sahara in northern Niger. It is not clear who built the complex of fortified mud buildings (ksars). The city was a part Trans-Saharan trading network of the Kanuri people whose Kanem-Bornu Empire was founded before 1000 CE and at its greater extent covered what is now Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, southern Lybia and Eastern Niger.
It is not clear what caused the abandonment of the city after the 1860s: increased desertification, conflict or even a mosquito infestation have been proposed as possible causes. Since then it has been used by Toubou nomads for the cultivation of dates. The site also contains rock drawings and carvings from 12,000 to 6,000 BCE, depicting the fauna that roved the prehistoric Sahara. The Djado Plateau was added to the UNESCO Tenative List in 2006.
Niger or the Niger, officially the Republic of the Niger, is a landlocked country in West Africa. It is a unitary state bordered by Libya to the northeast, Chad to the east, Nigeria to the south, Benin and Burkina Faso to the southwest, Mali to the west, and Algeria to the northwest.
The New York Times (June 5, 2023) – Each spring, opalescent icebergs from the Greenland ice sheet pass through Iceberg Alley, off the eastern edge of Canada, on a slow-motion journey southward.
“I never trust the mind of an iceberg,” Cecil Stockley told me. He estimates its length, multiplies by five and keeps his boat at least that distance away.
Dave Boyd said his safety rules depend on which type of iceberg he’s dealing with. “A tabular is generally pretty mellow,” Mr. Boyd explained as we floated off the coast of Newfoundland, referring to icebergs with steep sides and large, flat tops. “But a pinnacle” — a tall iceberg with one or more spires — “can be a real beast.”
Dave Boyd, who captains tour boats, also runs Prime Berth, a museum and heritage center in Twillingate. Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Barry Rogers doesn’t just look at an iceberg; he listens to it, as well. When the normal Rice Krispies-like pop of escaping air bubbles gives way to a much louder frying-pan sizzle, the iceberg may be about to roll over or even split apart, he explained.
In 1912, one such iceberg struck the starboard side of the Titanic on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic. Over the years, plenty of others have done lesser damage to ships, oil rigs and even the occasional unlucky — or foolhardy — kayaker.
Clairmont
Tourist Channel
Boomers Daily 