Category: travel

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 29, 2026 • 8:30 am

Reader EdwardM has sent us some travel photos from Sri Lanka.  His captions are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

These photos are of statuary and frescoes in the Dambulla Cave Temples outside Kandy, Sri Lanka. Kandy, by the way, has a venerated shrine which holds one of Buddha’s teeth! The Dambulla Cave Temples date to the first century AD. The caves, which sit high on a bare rock escarpment, were used as a refuge for a king, called Valagamba, and his people during one of the many invasions of Sri Lanka. To commemorate their survival, Valagamba and heirs founded a monastery in the caves. Over the centuries images, frescoes, and statues of the Lord Buddha, the bodhisattvas, and various gods and goddesses were installed. Typically they were funded by wealthy Sri Lankans for their private redemptive purposes, much like many Christian sites were funded by the wealthy in hopes of favor or forgiveness. The caves are full of these wonderfully vibrant icons.

The caves themselves were welcoming, with soft light and wonderfully cool air; a respite from the brutal Sri Lankan midday heat. One note I’d like to add. Sri Lanka is a fabulously beautiful land, and I know it has had a complex past with much turmoil and violence. But I became endeared to the people; they are delightful and they get genuine pleasure from other people’s happiness. They aren’t faking it. I loved the country, the people, and I encourage anyone who can go; visit.

Here are a few of the shots from the complex. There are five caves but two of them we closed for work when we were there. First, a reclining Buddha with statues of minor gods and goddesses at his head and one of the bodhisattvas (I have no idea which) seated at left. The Buddha was carved out of the rock in the cave. There are several of these at Dambulla.

This image gives an idea of the size of this reclining Buddha. This one is not the largest in the complex. Amazing that this is carved from the rock itself:

 

Some more statuary. These are depictions of the bodhisattvas, the enlightened followers of Buddha. Unlike the reclining Buddhas, most of the statuary was NOT carved from the rock of the cave, but was instead carved outside the caves and installed within:

The monks (it’s an active monastery) place offerings to various gods and goddesses. Here they put these fabrics on statues of a couple of the Enlightened, but I don’t recall the significance:

More shots of statuary:

The walls and ceilings were covered in beautiful frescoes, some ancient. Here are a few shots:

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 24, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today Friend of the Website Greg Mayer contributes some photos from Britain.

by Greg Mayer

Since we’re awaiting a recharge of the tank of Readers’ Wildlife Photos, I thought I’d add a few wildlife photos from a recent trip to England. I did not bring my good camera with a telephoto lens, since the visit was focused on museums in London, and the photos reflect this constraint.

The only mammal we saw in London was the introduced Gray Squirrel, but in Oxfordshire we saw molehills (made by the European Mole, Talpa europea) in and near the churchyard of St. Margaret of Antioch in Binsey. American moles most prominently make much less elevated runs or tracks, not distinct hillocks like these, so the phrase “making a mountain out of a molehill” makes more sense to me now.

Part of Oxford University, Wytham Woods (a famed area for ecological studies) had some Sheep (Ovis aries) in an enclosure. These are domesticated, and the species was brought to Britain thousands of years ago.

In London, we encountered two more corvids. The Carrion Crow (Corvus corone corone) is the most like what is, to an American, a “normal” crow. (During a brief stop in Copenhagen on the way to England, we also saw a Hooded Crow, Corvus corone cornix, which has a gray body, and has a long hybrid zone with the Carrion Crow, )

The other corvid was the Eurasian Magpie (Pica pica), which is much more “crow-y” looking than the jays in America (which are also corvids). We also saw Rooks (Corvus fragileus) on the trip, but got no photos.

Note the blue on the wings of this Magpie.

Like the Carrion Crow above, also on the Victoria Embankment was a Black-headed Gull (Chroicocephalus ribundus); this is an adult in winter plumage. We saw quite a few gulls all around London. Most were larger than this (Larus sp. or spp.), but we could not ID them.

On the way to Greenwich by boat on the Thames, we saw Mute Swans (Cygnus olor), which I include here to show the great tidal range of the Thames, ca. 7 m, evident from the algal growth on the bulkhead behind the pair of swans.

Also on the Thames we saw Great Cormorants (Phalacrocorax carbo), including a pale-bellied juvenile.

We were struck by how the apartments along the south bank of the Thames resembled scenes from movies, for example A Fish Called Wanda, and sure enough, the building at the left of the photo above is indeed where the Cleese-Curtis “canoodling” rendezvous took place!

The bird we saw more of than any other in England was the pigeon. Not the Common Wood Pigeon (Columba palumbus), like this one in Greenwich, which we saw a fair number of. . .

. . . but the Feral Pigeon or “rock dove” (Columba livia), which was everywhere, both city and country.  There were many of the highly variable domestic color forms, such as this one

. . . . and some of the “wild type”, which is the color pattern of the ancestral wild Rock Doves.

Wild Rock Doves persist in Scotland and western Ireland; all the pigeons we saw in London and Oxfordshire were feral.

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 12, 2026 • 8:15 am

Please send your photos, as I have only one set left!

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior is here with photos of a trip to a special place in Greece. Athayde’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Between Heaven and Earth

Meteora (Μετέωρα) is a majestic rock formation comprising countless peaks, caves, crevices and overhangs in the Thessaly region, northern Greece, a 3.5-hour or so drive from Thessaloniki:

These pillars were formed about 60 million years ago, when the seabed receded and exposed the rocks to winds and waves. Thanks to its remoteness and inaccessibility, Meteora for centuries has been a magnet for misanthropic characters seeking salvation in solitude or common folk escaping from marauders and assorted enemies:

Hermits and monks from all over the Byzantine Empire converged on the area to build proto-monastic communities, which with time grew into monasteries. Out of the 33 that were founded throughout the centuries, six are active today:

The word meteoron (pl. meteora) means ‘between earth and sky’, ‘lofty’ or ‘elevated’. Meteora was a bastion of Greek Christian orthodoxy during the 400-year Turkish occupation (for a gripping account of how the occupation ended, see The Greek revolution: 1821 and the making of modern Europe, by Mark Mazower):

The first monks climbed up Meteora’s peaks by using scaffolds propped up by joists that were wedged against holes in the rock. Later, rope ladders and nets were deployed until the first stairs were carved into rocks in the early 20th century:

Until the 1920s, many monasteries winched visitors tucked inside nets, a 370-m journey in one case. According to tradition, a wary visitor asked a monk whether the rope of his transporting basket was ever replaced. ‘Yes’, he answered; ‘when it breaks’. Bridges and stairs chiseled into the rocks have made ascent a lot easier, but supplies are still hauled up in some monasteries:

Here, a group of tourists (highlighted) cross a narrow bridge, the single access to a monastery:

Meteora comprises the most important group of Greek monasteries after Mount Athos. The six active ones (two are now nunneries), the massif and the village of Kastráki (in the distance) are a UNESCO World Heritage Site:

If you live on the narrow top of a mountain, you need to be resourceful and imaginative with your gardening…:

….and your booze supply. This 16th-century oak cask once stored up to 12,000 l of wine:

The monasteries’ churches, in typical Byzantine fashion, are packed with priceless frescoes, icons and mosaics depicting Christ, the Virgin Mary and assorted saints in a jumble of gold, colours and shapes. Alas, photos are not allowed inside the churches, so you will need to look up online to find out more. This photo was taken from the outside, so no sin was committed:

The monasteries are not for people with impaired mobility or couch potatoes. All but one require moderate to hard climbing – up to 300 steps. Too hard for many visitors, who stay put by the road and pass the time photographing the landscape:

Now the bad side of Meteora. If you are thinking about visiting the monasteries for peace and contemplation, forget it: they have been turned into mega-tourist attractions. The narrow access road through the mountains is lined with coach after coach disgorging hordes of tourists and rude pilgrims, there are long queues for the entrance fee (5 Euros, cash only) and the buildings are claustrophobically crowded. Having said that, Meteora retains its magnificence. If you go, pick a cold, rainy day outside the religious calendar, and get there early:

To the Arctic, part 7: A cliff packed with guillemots

October 4, 2025 • 10:15 am

On July 12, while heading south towards Jan Mayen Island, we got off the ship to take a long Zodiac trip along one of the most amazing animal habitats I’ve seen: Alkevfjellt (“Mount Guillemot”).  It is a geological feature that happens to have provided hundreds of narrow rock shelves for one species of bird to nest on. And nest they do, by the hundreds of thousands. From Wikipedia:

Alkefjellet is a cliff in Lomfjordhalvøya in Ny-Friesland at Spitsbergen, Svalbard. Alkefjellet is a bird cliff facing towards Hinlopen Strait.

Alkefjellet (‘mount guillemot’) is the nesting location for over 60,000 breeding pairs of Brünnich’s guillemots. The cliffs are made of basalt columns up to100 m high, interspersed with a dark layer – a dolerite intrusion. The molten rock, as it intruded caused the limestone in the contact zone to re-crystalize and form marble.

Here’s the ship’s map of our trip again (in this post we’re at number 6), and then a map of the Hinlopen Strait where the cliffs are

You can see that Svalbard is not an island but an archipelago, and we’re in a strait separating two islands.

Wikimedia Commons

First the bird:

The thick-billed murre or Brünnich’s guillemot (Uria lomvia) is a bird in the auk family (Alcidae). This bird is named after the Danish zoologist Morten Thrane Brünnich. The very deeply black North Pacific subspecies Uria lomvia arra is also called Pallas’ murre after its describer.

This species was first described by Linnaeus. There are four subspecies, and the one on Svalbard is U. l. lomvia,  Here’s a photo of some thick-billed murres in breeding plumage, which is the stage when we saw them:

By USGS – USGS, Public Domain

 

. . . . and its range:

Cephas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

 

We cruised along the base of the cliffs in the Zodiac; photography was a bit hard because the water was choppy and it’s hard to photograph birds on a cliff when the boat is rocking and focus changes.  Plus there were so many birds (I would guess over 100,000) that it smelled TERRIBLE from guano. But you ignore the smell when there’s a site like this.

Further, we had to be constantly aware of them pooping on our heads.  I mostly knelt in the bottom of the rubber boat, and once when I got up from the edge to kneel down, a juicy murre poop landed exactly where I was sitting one second after I left. I was lucky, though a woman next to me was not so lucky and got a good dose of murre excreta on her head.

The birds have only, it seems, about a foot to nest, and I think they incubate eggs right on the rock ledge, without a nest. Wikipedia says this:

Thick-billed murres form vast breeding colonies, sometimes composed of over a million breeding birds, on narrow ledges and steep cliffs which face the water. They have the smallest territory of any bird,[requiring less than one square foot per individual. A breeding pair will lay a single egg each year.[Despite this, they are one of the most abundant marine birds in the Northern Hemisphere.

Here they be:

The cliffs. There must have been more than a mile of breeding birds along the ledges. It’s impossible to estimate numbers; there might have been close to a million.

First, approaching the “bird cathedral,” you see a place without many ledges to give you an idea of the geology:

The birds:

These are nest sites! Look how crowded they are:

Less than a square foot per pair!  They go out fishing, with one pair staying on the egg, so, as you cruise around, the air above is filled with thousands of wheeling, calling murres. See video below.

Two videos from the ride (filming was tough in a boat with nine other people, all trying to film or photograph):

Thousands wheeling above in the blue air:

This short video shows why I call it a “bird cathedral”. Truly a stunning site.  A few days later we saw another murre cathedral on Jan Mayen Island.

A visit to Christina’s for ice cream

September 30, 2025 • 10:30 am

It is a tradition that when I visit my friends in Cambridge, we all go to Christina’s Homemade Ice Cream, which, in my view, is the best place in America to get the stuff. Not only is it truly homemade on the premises, but it’s fantastic and creamy AND comes in a gazillion flavors. They had 45 flavors of ice cream yesterday and additional flavors of sorbet.

When you see the selection below, you’ll see the difficulty of choosing a flavor.  This time I had a lot of trouble, as they had my favorite flavor (burnt sugar, which is ethereal) but there was so much more!

Some photos:

The entrance, same as in years past:

A panorama of the inside (click to enlarge), which also never changes. (There is only one store.) Betsy can be seen eating at the left side, while the ice cream selection is on the striped board to the right:

Below: the Big Board (click to read)!  There were 45 flavors yesterday. Some of the ones I considered ordering included mango, burnt sugar (the best!), sweet cream (yes, that’s what you taste), ginger, ginger molasses, chocolate lavender, chocolate banana, malted vanilla, banana cinnamon, dulce de leche, chocolate Chinese five spice, and orange pineapple. In truth, I would want them all!

Please put in the comments which ones you’d order (maximum three flavors). You can have them in either a cone or a dish, but cones are drippy and it was hot yesterday. Plus my theory is that you get more if you get it in a dish.

Tim always gets the same thing: mint chocolate chip, and I always razz him about it.  And he gets only one scoop, even when I’m paying!

BORING!

Betsy got two scoops of salted caramel; I consider it a great shame not get only one flavor if you get two scoops, but at least it was an excellent choice of flavor:

My haul: three scoops. From nine o’clock clockwise: sorghum ginger snap, green tea, and adzuki bean.  The sorghum ginger snap was just as you might expect: a superb Indian Pudding of ice cream. And when I get green tea, I always get adzuki bean, as it makes a nice Japanese combination of flavors.  They were all terrific, though I much mourned the absence of burnt sugar. If you go to Cambridge, you must go to Christina’s and get that flavor, which they always have.

Me and my haul.  I’m a happy complacent man! (For a lugubrious Jew, complacency is the highest state of being.)

When you go to Christina’s and order burnt sugar ice cream, tell them that Jerry sent you. They’ll have no idea what you’re talking about.

Cambridge and Boston: more travel photos

September 29, 2025 • 10:06 am

Today is my last full day in Boston/Cambridge, and tomorrow evening I’ll be back in Chicago.

The other day my friends Andrew and Naomi took me to Oliveiros’s a Brazilian steakhouse in Somerville. If you haven’t been to one, they all work the same way. There’s a big salad bar with stuff you largely want to avoid so you can eat more meat, and then the servers bring skewers of freshly-cooked meats to your table, and you indicate which ones you want. It’s mostly beef (sirloin, flank steak, etc.), but also lamb and sausages. They slice a long, thin piece from the skewer and you grab it with your tongs. This can go on forever, or until you’re sated.  If you like meat, it’s a great experience, assuming you pick the right steakhouse—like this one.

Below: a famous pre-drink cocktail, the Brazililian caipirinha. It’s delicious, and here’s Wikipedia’s take:

Caipirinha (Portuguese pronunciation: [kajpiˈɾĩɲɐ]) is a Brazilian cocktail made with cachaça, sugar, lime, and ice.  The drink is prepared by mixing the fruit and the sugar together, then adding the liquor. Known and consumed nationally and internationally, caipirinha is one of the most famous components of Brazilian cuisine, being the most popular national recipe worldwide and often considered the best drink in the country[3] and one of the best cocktails/drinks in the world, having reached third place in 2024, according to the specialized website TasteAtlas.

Cachaça is distilled sugarcane liquor. It differs from rum by being made from freshly squeezed juice of sugarcane, while rum is made from fermented molasses. Cachaça also is not aged as long as is rum.

Doesn’t this look good? It was.

The buffet (aka “salad bar”). In the second photo, my friend Andrew is trying to rile me up by taking all the platanos, or fried ripe plantains. We both agree that that is the only item you should get at the salad bar (I also got a bit of potato salad).  I can eat many, many fried plantains.

Andrew trying to deprive me of platanos. Look at that evil expression!

Where’s the beef?  Here it is, and skewers of various meats keep coming:

A visit to Dorchester the next day, where my hosts Tim and Betsy used to live. (We all lived together on Beacon Street in Boston for my first two years in graduate school, inhabiting the tiny basement of the man who founded the New Balance Shoe company. I then moved to Cambridge and Tim and Betsy to Dorchester.)

Tim needed a pastry cutter to make real Southern biscuits, and we found a lovely, crowded kitchen store in Dorchester. It also sold cat clocks. I used to have one of these, black and looking like Felix the Cat. The tails wag back and forth with the seconds:

Lunch at the Steel and Rye Restaurant in Milton, right across the small Neponset river from Dorchester (Dorchester is formally part of Boston, while Milton is its own town). I had the Italian sandwich: “coppa, salami, mortadella, provolone, shredded lettuce, chili vinaigrette, ciabatta.” Quite tasty.

The restaurant was right by the Dorchester-Milton Lower Mills Industrial District, The old factory buildings remain, especially the one where they made the famous Baker’s Chocolate. They’re now apartment or office buildings, but are still lovely. The area as described in Wikipedia:

The Dorchester-Milton Lower Mills Industrial District is a historic district on both sides of the Neponset River in the Dorchester area of Boston and in the town of Milton, Massachusetts. It encompasses an industrial factory complex, most of which was historically associated with the Walter Baker & Company, the first major maker of chocolate products in the United States. The industrial buildings of the district were built between about 1868 and 1947. They were listed as part of the district on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, with a slight enlargement in 2001. The buildings have been adapted for mixed industrial/retail/residential use.

Here’s one pair of buildings from 1905 with a nice metal bridge connecting the parts:

Back in Cambridge, you see this sign towering over Porter Square. I’ve not seen the likes of it before. It’s not far from Harvard.

My big doings yesterday consisted of going to the Japanese restaurant Yume Wo Katare in Porter Square. Although the link says “This is not a ramen shop,” it certainly is. (It’s the equivalent to Magritte’s “This is not a pipe.”) In fact, the only thing they serve is ramen.  You get a very large bowl in a delicious, rich, porky and garlicky broth with bean sprouts and pieces of pork (choose two or five big pieces). Your only other choice is whether you want extra garlic (you don’t need it; the broth is plenty garlicky) or a more spicy broth.  It’s delicious, with plenty of hand-pulled noodles and big pieces of juicy pork.  But the restaurant is also known for something else (see below, noting the “dream workshop” on the window):

The inside. I was heartened by the almost exclusively Japanese clientele, which testified to the quality of the ramen. There are no tables—only benches.

Below: my bowl. It was HUGE (I chose the five pieces of pork). I was able to finish everything except a cup or two of broth, but my stomach was absolutely distended: full of noodles sloshing around in broth. I had to take the bus home though it was only a 20-minute walk, simply because I was too full to walk. Needless to say, I had no dinner.

Each customer gets judge by the staff when they’ve finished, rated on how much food is left. I got a “good job!”, but I think everybody gets that.

My giant portion. This was the first time in my life I did not completely empty a bowl of ramen. But I ate all the solids!

The aspect of this restaurant that has made it especially well known is that customers are asked at some point in their meal to tell everyone in the restaurant their Big Dream. (They ask you if you want to recite one when you enter, and if you do they put a placard saying “Dreamer” at your place. ) Three people recited their dreams during my lunch: one woman wanted to visit all of America’s National Parks (there are 63), and a guy said his dream was to participate in an Ironman Triathlon, which includes a full marathon, a 2.4-mile swim, and a 112-mile bike ride. I can’t remember the other dream.

When they asked me as I entered the restaurant if I wanted to recite a dream, I said I was too old to have dreams, but of course that was not true. I still have them, but I am too shy to recite them.

Later today: a visit to Christina’s Homemade Ice Cream in Cambridge, the best place to get ice cream in America.

Random photos from Cambridge

September 26, 2025 • 8:15 am

It’s been raining here, so I haven’t got out much, but when I did I dined with old friends, and I won’t show those photos.  So far I have only a few pictures of Cambridge, MA, and here they are.

The city (once a town):

A panorama of Harvard Yard. Click twice to enlarge. The group of people in the middle are tourists (mostly Asian) waiting to get their photo taken with the statue of John Harvard.

The center of the picture above:

. . . and across the street from the Yard is the Coop, Harvard’s official bookstore.  In truth, they don’t have nearly as many books as they should, but a surfeit of Harvard memorabilia to fleece the tourists. I don’t have any Harvard tee-shirts (though I have over a hundred college tee shirts); I looked at one in the Coop, but it cost $35!

There was this book, though, and perhaps it bears reading:

Why Evolution is True has historically been on sale at the Coop since 2009, but now the biology section is PATHETIC, and my book is gone. But looking for it alphabetically by author in the tiny, tiny evolution/genetics section, I found Matthew’s last book on prominent display:

Out to lunch in Harvard Square, we passed the house of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a house also used as George Washington, headquarters:

This historic yellow mansion in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was home to one of the world’s foremost poets, scholars and educators. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lived here from 1843 until his death in 1882 and produced many of his most famous poems and translations here. Geneneral George Washington also lived in the yellow house and used it as his headquarters during America’s Revolutionary War, planning the Siege of Boston here between July 1775 and April 1776.

Here it is on Brattle Street, which is flanked by many fancy and famous mansions. Longfellow must have made a good income from his poetry.

. . . and a statue of the poet in an adjacent park:

A nearby Quaker meeting house. I went here once in graduate school, as my adviser’s assistant was a Quaker, and she invited me to go. I went since I was curious about how the services went. They were very strange to me. The preacher (or whoever was in charge) asked us to introduce ourselves and explain why we were there. I was flummoxed as I hadn’t expected to speak, but I stammered a few words. Then there was a long period of silence until finally one member stood up and said what was on his mind. Then another person spoke, and so it continued. (You’re encouraged to say whatever you’re thinking.) This creates a sense of community without too much mishigass, so it was an enlightening experience.

However, as you see, the Quakers are “progressive”. This isn’t so bad but I’m told by one of them that they are also anti-Israel.

Finally, breakfast at my friends’ house, where I’m staying.  They eat healthy, as you can see. No, this is not my breakfast; I had two pieces of cold pizza and a mug of coffee:

As I brushed my teeth this morning, I noticed that the faucet looked like a face—not just the face, but the face of a Fat Bear: