TRAVEL TUESDAY 516 - THE ARAL SEA, ASIA

“Sustainable development is the pathway to the future we want for all. It offers a framework to generate economic growth, achieve social justice, exercise environmental stewardship and strengthen governance.” - Ban Ki-moon

Welcome to the Travel Tuesday meme! Join me every Tuesday and showcase your creativity in photography, painting and drawing, music, poetry, creative writing or a plain old natter about Travel.

There is only one simple rule: Link your own creative work about some aspect of travel and share it with the rest of us.Please use this meme for your creative endeavours only.
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The Aral Sea is a salt lake in Central Asia, located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which was once the world's fourth-largest lake but has since shrunk dramatically. This environmental catastrophe began in the 1960s due to the Soviet Union's diversion of its inflowing rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, for unsustainable cotton cultivation. The shrinking sea left behind toxic desert plains, but some recovery efforts have led to a revival of the smaller Northern Aral Sea.

By 2007, the Aral Sea had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into four lakes: the North Aral Sea, the eastern and western basins of the once far larger South Aral Sea, and the smaller intermediate Barsakelmes Lake. By 2009, the southeastern lake had disappeared and the southwestern lake had retreated to a thin strip at the western edge of the former southern sea. In subsequent years occasional water flows have led to the southeastern lake sometimes being replenished to a small degree. Satellite images by NASA in August 2014 revealed that for the first time in modern history the eastern basin of the Aral Sea had completely dried up. The eastern basin is now called the Aralkum Desert.

After the visit to Muynak in 2011, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the shrinking of the Aral Sea “one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters.” The region's once-prosperous fishing industry has been devastated, bringing unemployment and economic hardship. The water from the diverted Syr Darya river is used to irrigate about two million hectares of farmland in the Ferghana Valley. The Aral Sea region is heavily polluted, with consequent serious public health problems.

In a Kazakhstani effort to save and replenish the North Aral Sea, the Dike Kokaral dam was completed in 2005. By 2008, the water level had risen 12 m above that of 2003, to 42 m. As of 2013, salinity dropped, and fish were again present in sufficient numbers for some fishing to be viable.

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TRAVEL TUESDAY #179 - NÔTRE DAME DE PARIS

“I beg you take courage; the brave soul can mend even disaster.” - Catherine the Great 

Welcome to the Travel Tuesday meme! Join me every Tuesday and showcase your creativity in photography, painting and drawing, music, poetry, creative writing or a plain old natter about Travel.

There is only one simple rule: Link your own creative work about some aspect of travel and share it with the rest of us. Please use this meme for your creative endeavours only.

Do not use this meme to advertise your products or services as any links or comments by advertisers will be removed immediately.

Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. It has an area of 105 square kilometres and a population of 2,229,621 in 2013 within its administrative limits The city is both a commune and department and forms the centre and headquarters of the Île-de-France, or Paris Region, which has an area of 12,012 square kilometres and a population in 2016 of 12,142,802, comprising roughly 18 percent of the population of France. By the 17th century, Paris was one of Europe's major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, and it retains that position still today. The Paris Region had a GDP of €624 billion (US $687 billion) in 2012, accounting for 30.0 percent of the GDP of France and ranking it as one of the wealthiest regions in Europe. 

Notre-Dame de Paris ("Our Lady of Paris"), also known as Notre-Dame Cathedral or simply Notre-Dame, is a medieval Catholic cathedral on the Île de la Cité in the fourth arrondissement of Paris, France. The cathedral is widely considered to be one of the finest examples of French Gothic architecture, and it is among the largest and most well-known church buildings in the world. The naturalism of its sculptures and stained glass are in contrast with earlier Romanesque architecture. As the cathedral of the Archdiocese of Paris, Notre-Dame contains the cathedra of the Archbishop of Paris, currently Cardinal Michel Christian Alain Aupetit.

The cathedral treasury contains a reliquary, which houses some of Catholicism's most important relics, including the purported Crown of Thorns, a fragment of the True Cross, and one of the Holy Nails. In the 1790s, Notre-Dame suffered desecration in the radical phase of the French Revolution when much of its religious imagery was damaged or destroyed. An extensive restoration supervised by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc began in 1845. A project of further restoration and maintenance began in 1991.

While undergoing renovation and restoration, the cathedral caught fire on 15 April 2019 and sustained significant damage, including the destruction of two-thirds of the roof and the spire. The world watched in disbelief as this cultural monument of humankind was devastated by flames. All cultured human beings mourned with the French for the loss of this basion of Western civilisation. French President Emmanuel Macron announced that Notre-Dame will be rebuilt, stating “It’s part of the fate, the destiny of France, and our common project over the coming years. And I am committed to it.” 

We stand united with Parisians and all civilised people around the world, sharing their loss of one of the great cultural monuments of the world, the Nôtre Dame of Paris. The cathedral will arise anew from its ashes and continue to symbolise culture and civilisation, faith and enlightenment, sensitivity and broad-mindedness. 

This post is part of the Our World Tuesday meme,
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MOVIE MONDAY - KRAKATOA

“We cannot stop natural disasters but we can arm ourselves with knowledge: so many lives wouldn't have to be lost if there was enough disaster preparedness.” - Petra Němcová

Sometimes you remember a film you saw when you were a child and the memory of it is so powerful and haunting that you can’t wait to find the film again in your adult years and re-watch it in order to savour those feelings you experienced the first time around. Of course, nothing is the same as it was the first time around, film watching included… We live, we experience more and more, we grow, we change, we become jaded, we see the world differently. No surprise when we re-watch that movie that we may be a little disappointed!

This was the case with the film we watched last weekend, which I had first seen as a child of 11 years. I remember then being completely overwhelmed and watching in awe, breathless with excitement and wide-eyed with amazement. The movie was the 1968 Bernard L. Kowalski disaster/adventure flick “Krakatoa: East of Java”, starring  Maximilian Schell, Diane Baker, Brian Keith, Barbara Werle, Sal Mineo, and Rossano Brazzi.

Krakatoa (Indonesian: Krakatau), is a volcanic island situated in the Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra in the Indonesian province of Lampung. The name is also used for the surrounding island group comprising the remnants of a much larger island of three volcanic peaks which was obliterated in a cataclysmic 1883 eruption, unleashing huge tsunamis (killing more than 36,000 people) and destroying over two-thirds of the island.

The explosion is considered to be the loudest sound ever heard in modern history, with reports of it being heard up to 3,000 miles (4,800 km) from its point of origin. The shock waves from the explosion were recorded on barographs worldwide. In 1927 a new island, Anak Krakatau, or “Child of Krakatoa”, emerged from the caldera formed in 1883 and is the current location of eruptive activity. Just to set the record straight, Krakatoa is actually located west, not east, of Java, a boo-boo that has haunted the film ever since it was released, being widely mocked in the critics reviews which were mostly quite scathing for the whole of the film...

The plot of the movie centres on the recovery of a valuable cargo of rare pearls from a shipwreck close the island of Krakatoa. When the expedition sets off the location of the wreck seems not be a worry as everyone believes that the volcano on the island has been dormant for around two hundred years. The eruption of the volcano in August 1883 will of course prove them wrong. The characters are the ship’s Dutch captain (Schell), his beautiful mistress (Baker) who is fleeing from an abusive husband and looking for her young son, from whom she has been separated, a drug-addicted diver (Keith) with health problems and his girlfriend (Werle), the British inventor of a diving bell (Leyton), an Italian father-and-son (Brazzi & Mineo) team of balloonists and four female Japanese pearl fishers, hired for their diving expertise. One of these girls becomes romantically involved with the younger Italian. By this stage you’d have thought the plot was already bogged down with too many subplots, but there is another one! The captain is forced by the authorities to take on a load of prisoners to be transported to Madura, which of course will cause problems later…

Needless to say, the eruption of Krakatoa and the subsequent catastrophe is what dominates the film. In an unusual approach to making the film, the producers of the movie had the special effects scenes shot before the script had been completed. The script then was written so as to incorporate the special effects sequences! Although now quite dated in appearance, the film’s special effects were considered impressive enough by 1969 standards for it to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects (it lost to the sci-fi disaster movie,  “Marooned”!).

Well, watching the film as an adult all these years later certainly made me aware of my age. The film was not how I remembered it and scenes that in that distant time made me feel awed and amazed now raised a smile or even a laugh. The film was utterly and completely demystified and its many shortcomings were blatantly obvious. There were plot holes, bad script writing, abominable dialogue ordinary acting and too much reliance on the special effects (used excessively and repetitively) to carry the movie forward.

So what was the final verdict on this film with a pedestrian, badly paced, and poorly told story and where the special effects were so constant and overwhelming as to become numbing? Well, we actually enjoyed it. First, because it was associated with nostalgia, second because it was a movie you could watch and take the mickey out of, having a laugh here and there, and finally because it revived memories of the old Hollywood (perhaps memories of Hollywood 1950s B-grade potboilers). Maybe if you will watch this film now for the first time you will run out of patience and stop watching it half-way through. Or maybe if you reduce the size of your expectations you may enjoy it too…

NEPAL EARTHQUAKE 2015

“There are no greater treasures than the highest human qualities such as compassion, courage and hope. Not even tragic accident or disaster can destroy such treasures of the heart.” - Daisaku Ikeda

The news from Nepal is getting worse and worse after last Saturday’s massive quake. The 2015 Nepal earthquake (also referred to as the Himalayan earthquake) occurred at 11:56 NST on 25 April with a moment magnitude (Mw) of 7.8 or 8.1Ms and a maximum Mercalli Intensity of IX (Violent). Its epicenter was approximately 34 km east-southeast of Lamjung, Nepal, and its hypocenter was at a depth of approximately 15 km.

It was the most powerful disaster to strike Nepal since the 1934 Nepal–Bihar earthquake. As of 28 April 2015, more than 5,000 people were believed to have died as a result, with casualties reported in Nepal and adjoining areas of India, China, and Bangladesh. Within minutes of the earthquake, the Government of India, via the Indian Armed Forces, initiated Operation Maitri (English: Operation Amity), a massive humanitarian mission with the primary objective of conducting relief and rescue operations in Nepal. The Indian government also evacuated Indian and foreign citizens from Nepal.

The earthquake triggered an avalanche on Mount Everest, killing at least 18 people. The death toll surpassed that of the 2014 Mount Everest avalanche, making it the most lethal day on the mountain. It triggered another huge avalanche in Langtang valley where 250 are missing. The quake and avalanches have changed the geography of the region and it is believed that Mt Everest may be a metre higher after the disaster.

Centuries-old buildings were destroyed at UNESCO World Heritage sites in the Kathmandu Valley, including some at the Kathmandu Durbar Square. Nepal’s government has declared three days of mourning after the quake. Continued aftershocks occurred throughout Nepal, with one shock reaching a magnitude of 6.7 on 26 April at 12:54:08 NST.

Prime Minister Sushil Koirala has announced that the death toll in Nepal’s earthquake could reach 10,000. Survivors’ despair is turning to anger at the government’s slow response to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the country, with food, water and other essentials in desperately short supply. At the moment, more than 10,000 people have been injured, however, there are warnings the full extent of the tragedy will not be known until rescue teams have reached “flattened” villages in remote regions.

You can help by visiting these websites where donations are accepted:

UNRefugees

AmeriCares

World Vision