Alaska 10

When packing for a trip to the great outdoors, your correspondents generally endeavor to travel light. This is both because we're generally on foot and therefore carrying everything we choose to bring for miles and miles. More philosophically, we generally take the "getting away from it all" aspect of wilderness to include a variety of our favorite intoxicants and stimulants. I.e., we don't pack coffee, and we don't pack booze.

Lucky for us, our fellow travelers on our kayaking trip (a guided group with eight paying clients) operated with a different philosophy. First of all, the trip was not cheap (that danger pay from Afghanistan continuing to burn holes in our pockets), and part of the service we paid for was having our guides cook gourmet meals for us. "Gourmet" in this sense entirely graded on a curve, but taking into account that we were literally several hours by boat from the nearest grocery or kitchen, they did pretty well. They also provided coffee every morning, which was a nice treat. If you've followed Google here in search for information on kayaking the Northwestern Lagoon or elsewhere near Seward, we heartily recommend Sunny Cove Kayak.

More importantly, some of the other clients were smart enough to realize that adding a couple pounds of weight to your kayak is much less burdensome than carrying the equivalent in a backpack. Taking the philosophy "any fool can suffer in the wilderness," some of our fellow kayakers brought some bourbon and some gin, with the goal of mixing drinks with glacial ice. I gather that there exist some theories that glacial ice is better for drinks because it(choose one) is more pure/is more dense/has ancient air particles in it/just sounds cool. Pictured above, paddling back to camp with chunks of glacial ice gathered from the lagoon.

Whatever motivation was necessary to inspire these kind people to bring and share martinis and bourbon as we sat on the beach, watching avalanches of ice fall from the glacier across the inlet from us, it was much appreciated.

Alaska 9

Another retroactive post; detail of driftwood on one of the little beaches where we camped.

Alaska 8

Once again the day job has interrupted our publishing schedule. Apologies. We know our loyal readers would be distraught if this deprived you of all the pictures of Alaska you deserve. So, we now retro-actively present this picture of some cute otters! We saw a lot of otters.

Yay otters!

Alaska 7

Loved this spot for the cracks in the rocks and the barnacle stippling patterns on patterns.

Alaska 6

On the third day of kayaking, we started paddling in more gloomy grayness. During lunch, the sun broke through the clouds, and by the time we launched again after eating, the sky was blue in all directions. After a couple days of steady drizzle, it seemed like a rare treat, especially with no guarantees it would last.

We paddled around the big island in the lagoon, through increasing traffic of ice floes ranging from a couple inches to a couple yards across. Rounding the island was perhaps the highlight of the trip - the entire lagoon past the island was clogged with icebergs, and dozens (maybe hundreds?) of harbor seals were hauled out sunning themselves on the ice. They're a bit small to see in the 360-degree panorama above - but they're right in the center. Click on the picture to see it much bigger, but probably not big enough to spot the seals. As a substitute, we present the picture below of one of the many seals who swam over for a closer look at the kayaks -- your correspondents would swear they were following us for quite a while, although it is a bit tough to tell one seal from another to be sure.

Alaska 5

For a good portion of the trip, we paddled in rain, drizzle, mist, and various other forms of wetness. The clouds were usually high enough to still enjoy scenery, but not always. The rain was sometimes light enough to allow for some modest attempts at photography, but not always. We set up tents in the rain (always fun) and stayed in them when we weren't paddling. Gray was the predominant color, most of the time. Not much you can do; it just rains a lot up there.

Alaska 4

Our first major undertaking of the trip to Alaska was the Northwestern Lagoon in Kenai Fjords National Park. We did five days of kayaking on what I would have called a bay, or maybe even a fjord (see name of national park, e.g.). Upon looking up the actual definition of lagoon, I see that it was perhaps properly named.

The Northwestern lagoon is home to several tidewater glaciers - i.e., glaciers that end in the sea, calving big icy chunks into the water. The crazier part is that according to reports from our guides (which we have been unable to corroborate from the interwebs), as recently as 100 years ago, the entire lagoon -- at least five miles long -- was covered by the glaciers that are now rapidly retreating. The landscape featured a lot of very steep rock faces, scoured by the retreating ice and relatively free of vegetation. 100 years seems like a pretty quick retreat for a glacier, but I can't prove they were wrong.

Taking satisfying pictures of glaciers turns out to be pretty tough, as is the case with many immense things. The picture above gives some sense of scale, but in fact the kayaks in this picture are probably still a quarter mile away from what the glacier. (The park service recommends staying a half mile away from the glaciers to avoid being capsized by the waves from falling sheets of ice - I would guess we pushed that boundary a fair bit.)

Stay tuned - there will be more pictures from the Northwestern Lagoon for the rest of the week.

Alaska 3

Two cool animal sightings from a boat tour we took on our day before heading out into the wildernesses of Alaska. Above, humpback whales. Best whale sighting was seeing one glide by our fjord-side campsite the next day, ridiculously close to the shore. But this one was the most photogenic, with the perfect fluke and the Bear Glacier in the background.

However, we had been even closer to whales while kayaking in Hawaii (some observers and state law would apparently argue we were too close). So the much smaller but more exciting sighting was below: Wild Puffins! They never got very close to the boat, and they're not that big to begin with, so we didn't capture any photographic masterpieces. But whatevs. Wild Puffins!

Alaska 2

We're holding off on the scenery and the wildlife for the moment. In a return to chronology, we present these pictures from the Alaska Sea Life Center, an excellent aquarium in Seward, on the South Central coast of the state. We had most of a day to kill in Seward before setting off into the wilderness, and the Sea Life Center was rightly recommended. Apologies to any scientific types who would like to know exactly what these animals are. There's a hermit crab, and the standard I-was-at-an-aquarium picture of jellyfish, and some other stuff. They also had puffins (not pictured).

Alaska 1

We went to Alaska!

The plastic cups and bar napkins of Alaska declare it the "#1 MGD State in USA." Your intrepid correspondents' investigations, which involved a small but we think sufficient amount of research time in Alaskan bars, led to the conclusion that the official MGD State Rankings must be subject to some sort of per-capita and/or cost-of-living adjustments, because there seemed to be a pretty normal amount of MGD there.

Anyway, we took a million pictures of amazing natural landscapes and animals and stuff in Alaska (which we will display here this month)... But only one picture of beer in a plastic cup, we promise!

India 30

One last picture from the highway - a personal favorite, in fact, more for compositional reasons than any truths revealed about the subcontinent. In any case, that's all from India, for now. We probably went too far already, given that we were only there for a week.

And, that's it for pictures of awesome R&R vacations from Kabul. Between Tanzania, China, Hawaii, Japan, France, Nepal, and India, it was not a bad year on the travel front. And yet... up next: the awesome vacation that your government required us to take in order to get back in touch with America after completing our tour abroad. The December of Pictures from Home Leave in Alaska starts tomorrow!

India 29

Two developing-world staples for you today, as we round up a last few images from the highway. First: Another example of the disparity of bus/truck aesthetics between the developed and developing worlds. A lot of less wealthy places gravitate toward a decorative style that the rich world might find a bit over-done. Painting buses and trucks is a prime example. As in Guatemala, most vehicles in India had a lot more detailing and decorative flair than we would typically find at home.


Second: The multi-passenger motorcycle. As perhaps illustrated previously, you really have to get past four passengers on a motorcycle to impress any more, but this was the best picture we came away with. As a bonus, below, note that if you don't have a helmet for every passenger, feel free to tie a handkerchief around additional passengers heads to provide a similar effect.

India 28

Fatepur Sikri is an impressive complex of old royal palaces, courts, and mosques from the late 16th century. There is some fine architecture, and the stone buildings are quite well preserved. Of course, it is all uniformly the reddish brown of the primary rock used in its construction. This photo is a detail is from the ceiling of the residence of one of the emperor's wives, where you can still see the decorative paintings and get a slightly better sense of what it may have looked like back in the day. It's not that thrilling of a picture - but it's a picture of an artwork that's been sitting around outside for four hundred years.

India 27

Our day wandering around Old Delhi was a definite highlight. There were the winding streets and narrow alleys and shops selling all variety of goods. The spice market was a highlight, with a bunch of fragrant stalls. Then, suddenly, a dark passageway leading to a distant courtyard. Within that passageway, and the courtyard, was the hot pepper sales district. The volume of hot peppers being moved in Delhi is pretty impressive, and just walking through the passage made one's nostrils burn. Since "spicy" is the only flavor that I have much appreciation for, I quite enjoyed it.

As we emerged from the retail area, we found all sorts of presumable wholesalers pushing large quantities of goods by hand or hauling with any machine or animal they could. E.g, this guy moving what we estimate to be twenty tons of rice.

India 26

I guess we're sort of running out of stuff to say about India. I don't know how. We must have forgotten something. But this is another picture of a crazy truck that seems too old to possibly be carting a buffalo around the streets of India. Surely, that's part of the plan when you make a truck that has something like 5 total moving parts. Easy to repair; lasts forever.

India 25

Available for birthdays and bar mitzvahs.

India 24

We love all the little sidewalk restaurants of India. Not that we ate in many, but we like the idea of them. And we're assuming these two were sitting down to have a big Thanksgiving meal, even though the picture was taken months ago, and they don't celebrate Thanksgiving Day in India, and for all we know, they weren't eating anything. But we didn't wind up with any pictures of turkeys in India, so this will have to do.

India 23

This photo doesn't exactly scream "India." But if you're a regular reader, you probably know that the staff photographer is a sucker for pictures of the texture of things that are falling apart. So there you have it.

India 22

I'm not sure what the trade of these young guys is. We saw a couple of them wandering around with these lamp contraptions. Are they selling the lamp? Is it just to aid them in shining shoes after dark? Customers put a quarter in and the lights flash and whirl? I'm sure there's something I'm missing here. It was very clear, in any case, that this was a young man's game. Like, probably not legal for them to be working young. I guess it's probably better than labor in a brick factory, but we'll reserve final judgment on that until we know for sure what the kids with the lamps were doing.

India 21

This youngster was one of many who would take care of one's shoes at the entrance of the mosque in Fatepur Sikri. In the style of any number of personal-service positions where someone does something for you that you didn't really need done, and would have preferred to do yourself, and then you're more or less obliged to tip them. The most famous example is the "restroom attendant." (I forget exactly where in our travels I walked into a restroom with an attendant, and immediately said aloud depsite myself "oh no you don't" and walked out. I guess I didn't have to go all that bad.) India is particularly good at this game, with various dudes always ready to "help" with whatever they can think of. It is, in many Indian tourist attractions, extremely difficult to avoid having a volunteer "guide," who even after being told in no uncertain terms "We don't want a guide and will not pay you," would proceed to follow us around and tell us fun facts about the site, and then for a tip. The shoe-minders at the mosque have a better racket in that one can theoretically imagine having one's shoes stolen were they left untended, and since you don't tip until you get your shoes back, you may never know what might have happened without them. Of course an even better racket would be to demand a payment up front, and then ensure the disappearance of the shoes of those who decline to pay.

Not sure what the horseshoes are for. Perhaps we should have paid a guide to tell us.