Results tagged “Preservation” from Intelligent Travel Blog

If you haven't yet snagged it, be sure to pick up a copy of the October issue of National Geographic Magazine for their incredible cover story about National Geographic explorer-in-residence Michael Fay's 11-month journey walking through the Redwoods, from Big Sur to just beyond the Oregon border. I read it last night, and this paragraph alone captivated me:

Fording a vein of emerald water known as the South Fork of the Eel, they climbed the far bank and entered the translucent shade of the most magnificent grove they'd seen yet. Redwoods the size of Saturn rockets sprouted from the ground like giant beanstalks, their butts blackened by fire. Some bore thick, ropy bark that spiraled sky­ward in candy-cane swirls. Others had huge cav­ities known as goose pens--after the use early pio­neers put them to--big enough to hold 20 people. Treetops the size of VW buses lay half-buried among the sorrel and sword ferns, where they'd plummeted from 30 stories up--the casualties of titanic wars with the wind, which even now coursed through the tops with panpipe-like creaks and groans. It's no wonder Steven Spielberg and George Lucas filmed scenes for the Jurassic Park sequel and Return of the Jedi among the redwood giants: It felt as if a T. rex or a furry Ewok could poke its head out at any minute.

The Redwoods also happen to be featured in the latest issue of Traveler, as one our "50 Places of a Lifetime." In his essay, author Richard Preston notes that "when I'm in the Redwoods, I always get the sense that time is slowing down, slowing almost to the point where it hardly seems to exist as an influence in one's life. If human time is a fast-running brook, redwood time is a deep, dreaming river." You can find the entire essay in our October issue, on newsstands now.

Have you experienced the Redwoods yourself? If you have, share your experiences. And if you haven't (and even if you have) click through for a glimpse at the spectacular photo collage of 84 images that Michael Nichols created of one of the tallest trees. It's an insert in the latest issue of National Geographic, and you can see more spectacular images here.

Above Photo: ©2009 Michael Nichols/National Geographic Staff

Much to the consternation of tiger enthusiasts, reverence for these once-mythical beasts seems to be at an all-time low. The BBC reports that one of India's fabled tiger parks, Panna National Park in Madhya Pradesh, has admitted that its Royal Bengal tiger population is now believed to be zero. The main culprit, according to an investigative probe? Poaching.

This saddens me, particularly, as barely three years ago I came within several feet of one of these most majestic of Panna's endagered residents (image, above). Though it was a short encounter (we, the tourists atop elephants in the bush, were limited to a few minutes of viewing and photographing, so as not to upset the shy animal), it remains my favorite recollection from India. Going on tiger safaris is certainly iconic and popular, but there is a specific disclaimer given to most tours: Tiger sightings are increasingly rare and are by no means guaranteed. With the knowledge that finding one of Panna's then-healthy population of 24 tigers in the park's 210-square-mile area was a textbook needle-in-haystack situation, I accepted this experience as one to hold in awe. And I was lucky to be able to do so. It now grieves me to think that experiences such as mine are on the extinction path.

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee added 13 new sites to its World Heritage List last week, bringing the total of protected sites to 890 properties. The list, which encourages countries to preserve important cultural locations, now includes two additional Natural Heritage sites and 11 Cultural Heritage sites, including the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in Wales (above). 

Are you a fan of polar bears? (Who isn't?!) Well there's some good news from our friends over at the NatGeo News Watch blog:

Russia will create a new 3.7 million-acre (1.5 million-hectare) park in the Arctic, a central area for the Barents and Kara Sea polar bear populations, WWF said today.

Announcing the park, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he hoped it would be a major attraction for tourism, and announced that he personally plans to vacation there, WWF said.

The new Russian Arctic park is located on the northern part of Novaya Zemlya, a long island that arcs out into the Arctic Ocean between the Barents and Kara Seas, WWF said. It also includes some adjacent marine areas.

Check out the entire post for more info on the park.

Photo: NGS photo of polar bear in the Russian Arctic by Gordon Wiltsie

Michael Meyer, author of The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed and a panelist on Traveler's annual Destinations Rated issue, shares an intimate glimpse of life in his hutong neighborhood.

Last year, billboards across the city promised: "New Beijing, New Olympics." To an American, the result looks uncomfortably familiar. Ancient courtyard homes and narrow lanes have been replaced by shopping malls, parking lots, nearly 200 McDonald's, and over one hundred Starbucks. I live in one of the capital's last remaining traditional neighborhoods, located just south of Tiananmen Square. Visitors to Beijing should see it now; the hutong - narrow lanes - are slated for destruction at summer's end.

Hutong are to Beijing what canals are to Venice. In 1949, a survey recorded more than seven thousand hutong. Shaded by rows of leaning locust trees, many were too narrow for vehicles to enter. The network of backstreets connected neighborhoods of walled courtyards and also formed an elongated public marketplace, where itinerant peddlers and performers worked door-to-door. In a period of the late 1990s, an average of six hundred lanes were destroyed each year. Now, less than thirteen hundred hutong remain, and the government admits to evicting over five hundred thousand residents from the city center, a figure that continues to rise.

Settled over eight centuries ago, my hutong neighborhood, Dazhalan (Big Fence), is Beijing's most venerable community. The name dates to the fifteenth century, when wicker gates on either end of the area's hutong were clasped shut at night to deter thieves from preying upon the shops that formed the capital's most prosperous commercial district. After a succession of seventeenth-century imperial edicts banned hotels, restaurants, teahouses, and theaters from inside the imperial confines, businesses migrated through Qianmen (Front Gate) to the other side of the city wall. Dazhalan became the capital's entertainment, artisan, and antiques district. Beijing specialties such as roast duck, acrobatics, and opera flourished here. Some lanes filled with silversmiths, silk embroiderers, and calligraphers; others with stages, brothels, and opium dens.

Friend of IT Molly Feltner is traveling through Africa, and just came face-to-face with mountain gorillas in Rwanda.

I've witnessed cheetahs hunting gazelle in the Serengeti, spent hours watching monkeys play in the Amazon, and swam with wild dolphins off the coast of Brazil, but no wildlife experience I've had can compare to coming face-to-face with a 500-pound silverback mountain gorilla, an animal that shares about 98% of my DNA. I met Kurira, the leader of Susa group, a 38-member gorilla family, while trekking in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, and found him to be a rather hospitable fellow. He didn't mind me or the seven other members of my gorilla trekking party wandering among his charges--he's been visited every day by tourists for years. After giving my group a good look over from a sunny patch of vegetation about 20 feet away, he stretched out on his back, arms folded behind his head, and let a baby crawl up on his big belly. The two played together for nearly 20 minutes.

Other gorillas gathered around us as we stood still. A big black-back male made a nest of leaves and settled in for a nap to my right. On my left a mother plucked and peeled wild celery, her twins playing nearby. After an hour, our guide signaled it was time to go--tourists only get one hour with the gorillas to limit the apes' exposure to human germs. It was a short time but the chance to see such rare creatures (there are only about 700 in the world) in so intimate a setting was well worth the $500 price tag and the effort of trekking up the volcano to find them.

As we've said before, the National Mall here in D.C. has been in disrepair for some time. Despite hosting some 25 million visitors a year, the national park has only 100 toilets and three places to buy water. The Reflecting Pool is old and grimy, and the Mall's grass just hasn't been the same since millions of people visited D.C. for the Inauguration in January.
 
But finally, after much deliberation, the Department of the Interior announced yesterday that Washington, D.C. will get more than $70 million to restore these "eyesores." The Washington Post reports $30 million will go to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool and $7.3 will go to the District of Columbia War Memorial, which has seen very little upkeep in decades.

But the aid doesn't stop at District lines. Twelve million will go to the C&O Canal, which has more than 180 miles of hiking and bike trails, $3 million will go to Arlington Cemetery's historic Custis-Lee mansion, and nearly $10 million will go to Skyline Drive, one of the country's most popular fall foliage drives.

The funding is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which awarded $750 million to the country's national parks. The money will fund some 750 projects around the U.S.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that work on the National Mall will begin immediately, and hopes to have the projects complete by September 2010. He told the Post:

"With respect to the National Mall . . . this is but the beginning," he said. "This is a down payment on the challenges that we face on the Mall. . . . This is not Washington, D.C.'s Mall, this is the Mall that belongs to the people of the United States of America. . . . This is part of the best of what is America."

Photo: StacyN - MichiganMoments via the Intelligent Travel Flickr pool

Those of you who were fans of Hunter's story yesterday about Costa Rican turtle preserves, or recall our great Q&A with Wallace J. Nichols, a conservationist whose turtle-tracking project thrilled children around the world, we offer you some more turtle topics, only this time these turtles are traveling themselves.

National Geographic is partnering with Conservation International and the Canadian Sea Turtle Network to sponsor the Great Turtle Race, and yesterday, the contestants (all of whom are leatherback sea turtles) started on their two-week journey from the frigid Newfoundland costline down to the Carribbean. The turtles are tagged with state-of-the-art satellite tracking devices that enable the rest of us to follow their incredible 3,700-mile (6,000-kilometer) journey, which you can track yourself here on NG's interactive race map. So far, it seems as though Nueva Esperanza is winning, though Cali is on her tail. You can sign up with Conservation International to get updates on the the racers, and get their play-by-play of race on their blog.

For more on turtles, check out the story by Tim Appenzeller about Leatherback Sea Turtles in this month's National Geographic. And watch the video of photographer Brian Skerry as he talks about using natural moonlight and a long exposure to create this ghostly image of the vanishing species.

The earthquake that hit L'Aquila, Italy has inflicted devastating damage to multiple sites of the city's artistic history. L'Aquila, the medieval capital of the Abruzzo region just northeast of Rome, was at the epicenter of the 6.3 magnitude earthquake early Monday morning. The death toll has reached over 90, and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has estimated 1,500 have been injured.

The full extent of the earthquake's damage has yet to be assessed, but Giuseppe Proietti, Secretary General of the Italian Culture Ministry commented to the news agency ANSA that the quake's toll has been "huge." Much of the city's treasured Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance architecture is now gone.

The city's largest Romanesque church, the Santa Maria di Collemaggio, cracked at the transept and part of the nave has collapsed. The 13th-century basilica was the coronation site of Pope Celestine V in 1294. Other collapsed structures are the cupola of the 17th-century Anime Sante church and the bell tower of San Bernardino da Siena. In addition, it has been reported that the Porta Napoli, built in 1548 to honor Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, is gone.

Concern has turned to the National Museum of Abruzzo. A reported collapse on the third floor of this 16th-century castle has prevented anyone from entering the building to evaluate damage to the museum's civic and religious works, which date back to the 17th and 18th centuries.

In addition to the deaths, tens of thousands have been left homeless. The National Italian American Foundation has set up a special Abruzzo relief fund to aid the victims of the earthquake. Although the Italian Red Cross has not yet asked for international assistance, the US International Response Fund will be taking donations.

--Giovanna Palatucci

Looking for a once-in-a-lifetime adventure in the mountainous Golden Triangle region of northern Thailand, where Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos converge? Love elephants? Want to help rescued Asian elephants and protect Thailand's wild herds?

If your head's bobbing and you're intrigued, check out the work of the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation. The foundation rescues abused, abandoned, and overworked elephants, many of whom once toiled in the logging industry, and has created camps for them in two impressive resorts in the Chiang Rai region of northern Thailand.

The elephants earn their keep at the Anantara Resort's Elephant Conservation Camp and at the Four Seasons Tented Camp by interacting with guests and carrying them on treks in Thai hill country, through dense patches of bamboo and across riverine flood plains. Each resort also employs the elephants' mahouts (drivers). They teach guests some of the 70 verbal commands the mahouts use to communicate with these gregarious beasts.

To learn more about this exciting program we caught up with John Roberts, Director of Elephants at the Anantara Golden Triangle Resort's Elephant Conservation Camp.

How long has the foundation been in existence?  

The foundation was created in 2006, after we rescued our first street baby; the intention to help came first and then we built the charitable apparatus to help us do more. The camp has been in existence since 2003, when we started with four government-owned elephants from the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre around whom we built the, then unique, guest mahout training program. This program has been copied and is now an accepted sustainable, elephant-friendly way for elephants to make a living from tourists.

Since its inception, how many elephants have been helped by the foundation?

We currently have 18 elephants under the care of the foundation, two born here and 14 at the hotel camps. These are all still ex-street elephants but they don't come under the foundation as they, with our help, earn a sustainable living for themselves.We've also sent money, vets, and vet equipment to other worthwhile projects--particularly the Thai Conservation Centre--to enable them to give free help to elephants throughout Thailand. We're most proud about our elephant ambulance, mobile centrifuge, and Dr. Pap, who's now a vet for the Royal White Elephants who received his training under our patronage.