Captain Robert Scott’s South Pole Expedition, Exposed Again

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People with an interest in exploration, expeditions, adventure have a higher likelihood of knowing who Captain Scott was.  Only an expedition photography geek, a historian, or otherwise quirky know-it-all is likely be familiar with the name Ponting. Thankfully, such people exist and they have brought Ponting back from the archival grave. Outside magazine’s website has this collection on display. The captions follow in order of the slideshow above:

1. A program for Herbert Ponting’s lectures on Captain Scott. Ponting’s lectures, which accompanied his silent films at the Philharmonic Hall in London, were a huge success, with over 100,000 people going in to hear him, including leading politicians and celebrities of the day. His films were a significant milestone in the history of the cinema. Continue reading

Solitary togetherness : a walk into Periyar Tiger Reserve

Traveling in a pack, or you might say a group, is not something I do on holidays. I’m a lone wolf kind of traveler. See what I mean? Then I took the opportunity to escort a group coming to Cardamom County for a bird photography workshop into Periyar Tiger Reserve, and all my preconceptions disappeared. Although my companions came from all parts of India to take wildlife pictures and I arrived on day 1 with just an iphone, I quickly felt like I belonged. Continue reading

Lost City Of The Monkey God

Another great article (click the image to the left to go to the source), complementing this recent one from the New Yorker, about one special location within the region several members of Raxa Collective have called home for most of the last two decades:

The rain forests of Mosquitia, which span more than thirty-two thousand square miles of Honduras and Nicaragua, are among the densest and most inhospitable in the world. “It’s mountainous,” Chris Begley, an archeologist and expert on Honduras, told me recently. “There’s white water. There are jumping vipers, coral snakes, fer-de-lance, stinging plants, and biting insects. And then there are the illnesses—malaria, dengue fever, leishmaniasis, Chagas’.” Nevertheless, for nearly a century, archeologists and adventurers have plunged into the region, in search of the ruins of an ancient city, built of white stone, called la Ciudad Blanca, the White City. Continue reading

Writer Will Walk, We Will Watch

We will link to the updates as they arrive.  For now, the plan:

It will be a journalistic assignment like no other. Call it “the longest walk”.

In what is probably the longest, most arduous piece of reportage ever undertaken, Paul Salopek, an experienced writer for the Chicago Tribune and National Geographic, is embarking on the astonishing task of retracing the journey taken by early man tens of thousands of years ago.

Beginning in the exotic surroundings of the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia, Salopek will take an estimated 30 million steps, reaching his destination seven years later, three continents away at the most southerly point of South America. Continue reading