Tag Archives: maldives

When you get to travel all over the world armed with a camera, you get to take snaps of all sorts of natural and man-made objects of varying degrees of unusualness, attractiveness, monumentalness, and a thousand other nesses. But, occasionally, you find yourself taking pics of certain less attractive objects – albeit ones still possessing a certain mysterious appeal: I’m referring to abandoned, deserted settlements: dilapidated buildings left to rot, streets all overgrown; decay, ruin. All rather depressing, but still, clickety-clack go the cameras!

I’ve seen a few such places over the years. In January of this year a group of petrol-heads and I dropped in on the dead town of Kadykchan on the Kolyma Highway in Russia’s far-east. A year earlier we paid a visit to the half-buried-in-sand ghost town of Kolmanskop in Namibia, Africa. The year before that we were in the Kurils where we inspected a deserted former military base. Down in Antarctica there was an abandoned Chilean camp (you guessed it, half-buried in snow and ice). And over on the Kamchatka peninsula there was another abandoned military (naval) base, Bechevinka.

And who would have thought it (not me, at first, for one) – you also get this kind of thing in… Maldives! Here it’s not abandoned military bases or mono-towns or former mining settlements, but derelict, crumbling former tourist resorts. You can find a zillion photos online of fancy bungalows lining paradisiacal atolls around these parts; you’ll find a lot less than a zillion like the ones I’m about to show you…

So, there we were, flying up above the Maldives archipelago, and down below all looks as per the script: paradise!…

But if you look a bit closer…

Read on…

One of the most pressing problems facing the world today is global warming. Its effects can be witnessed all over the globe – from the Americas to… Zambia. Whether man-made pollution has much of an overall effect on specifically global warming is open to question, and question that postulate I did some months back (but before you scream ‘climate change denier!’, no one’s denying climate change. Click the link first:). But global warming is for real, whatever its causes, and it’s serious and should concern us all. Ok, but what’s any of this to do with Maldives or Magadan in the title? Well…

It turns out both locations may become more perceptibly vulnerable to global warming – and quicker – than most. Maldives: the sea level goes up due to melting ice caps… and it could be curtains. Magadan: if the permafrost there thaws – it might not be full curtains, but the changes to the flora and fauna could be significant. Ok, but what’s the connection between the two – Maldives and Magadan? Well…

There is nothing really that connects Maldives and Magadan. Two places on the planet couldn’t be more different. It was us who made the connection: flying from Maldives to Magadan! Not directly (no flights: shame; would have shaved off hours up in the air).

Now – why Maldives? Why not?!

And why Magadan? Well, we reckoned it might just be the last opportunity to ever really experience the true OMG-crazy-cold of northeastern Siberia!

All righty: back to the Maldives where we began…

Read on…

And the first place in yesterday’s post – the tropical one with the novel Christmas trees – is (as title of this blogpost has somewhat given away)…

…Maldives!

Did you guess right? Or did you spot the clue in the very last of the tropical snaps – Devarana – a nice spa on one of the islands, which is as Google-able as just about anything.

This paradisical place is made up of 26 atolls, which in turn are made up of more than a thousand islands! Some are inhabited – many are resort islands – but most of them have never been settled upon. There are a zillion pics of the picture-perfect archipelago on the internet, be they having been taken on land, underwater or from the air, but here are some of my own aerial pics too:

Read on…

Welcome back folks!

Ok, 2020-review: done.

Next up, my first 2021 blogpost proper – on how we met the New Year.

And we happened to have met it in an exotic location somewhere far away – hurray! (Who’d have thought it? Actually – me! It’s 2021 already!) The suitcases (more than usual) were all packed, and it was time to get going…

Not that seeing in the New Year in some distant place is new to me: I’ve done it… on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, near the peak of a volcano in Indonesia, next to high-altitude hot springs in Ecuador, and even at the South Pole. But on those and other New Year’s Eves > New Year’s Days, there was always a Christmas tree. If not a real one, at least a plastic – green! – one. This year, the Christmas tree situation was… strange. There were… surrogates: tropical installations doing their best fir-tree impression, but which were decidedly not even green. Strange – yes; but also clearly creatively constructed with care, and suitably festively decorated. Like! ->

Read on…