This blog is about the lesser known but beautiful, wonderful, huge, unique and sometimes bizarre places around the World. Started on January 1, 2009, it is an outcome of my association with Google Earth Community, which I joined in July 2006. Since then I have been regularly flying to almost all the corners of WWW (Whole Wide World) and have virtually adopted the age old motto - Perfect time to see the World is after retirement.
Google Earth Community Forum is full of information which ranges from, but not limited to; history, geography, nature, environment, architecture, military, transportation, beliefs, festivals, huge, unique, bizarre items, current happenings etc etc.
My favourite section in the Community is "Fun and Games" - in which members post riddles and puzzles on almost all subjects and generally give hints for searching and locating the relevant places and or events on Google Earth. I have made several hundred posts in this forum and must have solved about the same number, though several were beyond my grasp. Believe me it is not easy to solve these riddles - Finding the answer is 90% perspiration (research) and 10% inspiration but it is pure 100% joy and sense of exhilaration.
This forum provides a stimulus to my brain and keeps it active. I strongly recommend this for those who have time and penchant for solving puzzles, but a word of warning – it is highly addictive.
My travels around the World are not limited to Fun and Games only, however many of the places being covered in this travelogue were found as a result of my researches for making posts in Fun and Games or trying to solve the riddles given therein.
The Original Google Earth Community was frozen by Google in April 2015 and finally killed in April 2019. However the dedicated moderators of the defunct Original GEC created a new Board for the GEC enthusiasts and the new Community is known as "Google Earth Community Forums". This new community continues to function as the old GEC but is independent of google.com
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An amazing sight in the Xialu Village, Tuling Town, Quangang
District, China, is the banyan trees growing at the top of two red brick
chimneys of now defunct state-owned Hui'an Sugar Factory. The sugar factory
built around 1960s had ceased working in 1980s, though the building was
continued to be used for other businesses but the chimneys were disused. Around
mid eighties locals observed small banyan trees on top of the chimneys. The
foliage now has become quite large and can be seen from distance. The locals
call these as "Chimney with Green Hat.
The two chimneys are about ten meters high and the banyan
trees have never withered despite the dry seasons and have withstood both wind
and the sun. As per locals there was a drought in the village for a year yet
both trees were fine, and they grew more and more lush.
Banyan tree grows very easily in cracks or crevices on
buildings. The seeds of banyans are generally dispersed by wind or fruit-eating
birds. When the seeds germinate they send roots down towards the ground, and may
envelop part of the building structure, giving banyans the casual name of
"strangler fig". A typical example of such an strangulation are the temple
structures in
Siem Reap,
Cambodia.
Bosco Verticale are a pair of residential towers in Milan,
Italy, designed by the Stefano Boeri, an Italian architect and urban planner.
Bosco Verticale (English: "the Vertical Forest") is an
amazing architectural concept of creating a vertical forest in heavily populated
urban area and has been billed as World’s First Vertical Forest. The first tower has height of 110 metres (360 ft) and hosts 550 trees on its
1.3 metres wide concrete balconies. The second tower with a height of 76 metres (249 ft) has
350 trees. In addition to these trees, which have a height varying from 3 - 6
metes, the green area also have about 5,000 shrubs, and 11,000 perennials.
Scaled model of the building was tested in wind tunnel to ensure that the trees
don't topple during high winds.
The green cover is equivalent to about one hectare (2.5 acre)
of forest and it helps in not only reducing the fuel cost of cooling/heating but
also acts as noise suppressant. In words of it's architect;
"The Bosco Verticale is a system that optimizes,
recuperates and produces energy. The Bosco Verticale aids in the creation of
a microclimate and in filtering the dust particles contained in the urban
environment. The diversity of the plants and their characteristics produce
humidity, absorb CO2 and dust particles, producing oxygen and protect from
radiation and acoustic pollution, improving the quality of living spaces and
saving energy. Plant irrigation will be produced to great extent through the
filtering and reuse of the grey waters produced by the building."
The concept of Bosco Verticale has received world wide acclaim and has
received the 2014 International Highrise Award as well as "2015 Best Tall
Building Worldwide".
Update June 29, 2014: Subsequent to making this post I found that this house is not only the Oldest Wooden House in Europe, it is also the "The Oldest Still Inhabited Wooden House in the World". I have therefore made a fresh post about it by using text/images from this post and have also added more information/images in the new post. Please therefore view the Latest Post and ignore this post. Thanks.
While researching for my earlier post about the "Amazing
Turf Houses of Iceland", I came across an old turf-roofed house in the small
village of Kirkjubøur on the the island of Streymoy in Faroe Islands. As per several sources, it is one
of the oldest still inhabited wooden houses of the world and reportedly the
oldest inhabited wooden house in all of Europe. (Please see the note at the
end of this post)
The house dates back to 11th century and was originally the
residence of the bishop of the Diocese of the Faroe Islands. As per local legend
the house was initially constructed in Norway, then disassembled, its logs
numbered and then floated to the Kirkjubøur where these were reassembled.
The house and the big farm around it are called
Kirkjubøargarður (King's Farm) and are now owned by Faroese government. Its main portion, called Roykstovan,
houses a museum, however a part of the house is still occupied by a
local family whose past several generations are the traditional tenant since
16th century.
It is interesting to note that although this house and
several other houses on the Island have turf roof yet these are a bit
different from the turf houses of Iceland. The walls of these houses are made of
wood, unlike the houses in Iceland where the walls are also covered with layers
of earth and then turfed.
Note: Several websites especially those of Swiss
origin claim that a wooden house known as Bethlehem House (Bethlehem-Haus)
in the small village of Schwyz Switzerland is the oldest in Europe. As per
swissinfo.ch and other related websites the Bethlehem House was built in
1287, while the Kirkjubøargarður in the Kirkjubøur dates back to 11th
century. The claim that the house in Switzerland is the oldest in Europe,
therefore doesn't appear to be correct.
It may also be worthwhile to note that the World's Oldest Wooden Building is a five-story pagoda in Ikaruga, Nara Prefecture, Japan, which dates back to early seventh century.
These days many architects who want to go green are turning to
earth-sheltered houses as these are built from very basic natural material -
"Earth" and provide good insulation year round. Such houses popularly known as
Turf Houses were in use from way back as the Iron Age, especially in the
Northern Europe which has harsh cold winters. Gradually houses made from brick,
stone and timber with roof made from slate, clay tiles, reinforced brick/cement
etc became more popular in most of the European countries, however many
Icelanders have retained their turf houses even now.
One of the main reasons many such houses can still be found in Iceland is the year
round harsh climate in the country and lack of good quality material for modern
house building. Even the essential material for concrete houses - aggregate and
sand, has to be imported, as local aggregate/sand, being of volcanic nature, is
too acidic and not fit for construction work. Further there is lack of good
quality wood in Iceland, most of the forests in Iceland are birch forest which
is not suitable for houses.
These Icelandic turf houses generally have a stone foundation with walls
made of
stone and earth and the roof made of wooden frame covered with layers of sod, thus providing
good insulation and saving in energy. Besides the roof, the walls are also
covered with layers of earth and then turfed.
The turf houses however require special skills to prepare the roof for the
turf topping and if not designed or built properly, the turf houses may have
some drawbacks like water seepage, internal condensation, and poor indoor air
quality.
In this post I have showcased some of the Iceland's amazing turf houses;
The waste incineration
plants are generally drab grey buildings. However the Incineration Plant at Maishima Island in the Osaka harbour,
Osaka, Japan is a modern energy efficient plant with
colourful façade.
The colourful building, architecturally refurbished and redesigned by the famous Austrian artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, looks more like a theme park than an incineration
plant.
"Three stories were designed as an adventure world with a didactic
component in order to make visitors, especially school children, conscious of
the problems of waste and to encourage their cooperation in working towards a
garbage-free society".
A building in Osaka aptly named "Organic Building" has a striking architecture with planting-pots fixed all over its façade. The embedded containers are lined with steel and fitted with fibreglass pots. More than 80 varieties of indigenous shrubs/trees are planted in these pots. The plants are irrigated by means of computer controlled irrigation pipes permanently fixed on the wall.
The nine-storey building designed by Italy-born architect Gaetano Pesce, was constructed in 1993. The 7,052 square meters of interior space has restaurant/shops at the lower floor and office space on the upper floors.
The building is now one most famous landmarks in Osaka and is often referred as the precursor to present day living wall concept. (see Vertical Green Garden of Madrid).
The town of Khun Han in Sisaket province, Thailand boasts of a unique temple built using more than one million (as per some sources about 1.5 million) empty beer bottles.
The temple officially called Wat (meaning Temple) Pa Maha Chedi Kaew is also known as "Wat Lan Kuad" - Million Bottle Temple.
The temple was born out of a simple idea of local Buddhist monks who wanted to utilise the discarded empty beer bottles littered all over the town. In 1984 they started collecting the empties and also encouraged the local population to bring in the empty bottles. Work on the temple was started once they had collected one million bottles.
The result was a remarkably colourful structure made mainly with green (Heineken) and brown (Chang Beer) bottles. Entire structure including the floors were built with bottles embedded in cement mortar. The wall murals/ decorations were made from the bottle caps, however out of respect for the Deity, the statue of Buddha was not made from the recycled bottles.
The monks didn’t stop once the main temple was completed and they continued to collect empty bottles to make other buildings in the complex with glass bottles - the shelters, the water tower, monks' quarters, visitors' rooms, crematorium, toilets etc.
To the monks it is a continuous process and they say the more bottles they get the more they will build.
Using the recycled bottles is not only eco-friendly but also provides natural lighting and ease of maintenance. The glass doesn’t fade and is easy to wash as compared to normal mortar.
Lake Titicaca - World's highest commercially navigable and South America's largest lake (by volume) is home to Uru people (aka Uros), a pre-Incan people, who live on small man-made floating islands on the Peruvian side of the lake.
The islands or rather the islets are made of thick (1-2 metres) layers of totora reeds - an indigenous reed which grows in abundance in the marshy shores of the lake. With passage of time the reeds which are spread on water like a mat, develop dense roots and interweave with nearby roots to form a thick solid floating platform. The islands are normally moored to the shallow region of the lake bed with ropes attached to sticks driven into the bottom of the lake, however if needed these can be moved/towed away.
The reeds have a short life (about 3 months) and fresh reeds have to be piled regularly on the top surface of the floating platform to replace the rotting reeds at the bottom.
Reportedly Uros have been living on these man-made floating islands for more than five hundred years. They had come to live on the waters to escape the Incas and whenever a threat arose they used to move their floating micro islands to deeper waters. Even today the largest island has a watchtower made almost entirely of reeds.
As per Wikipedia there are forty-two such islands, though in the Google Earth imagery fifty-seven islands could be seen. The width of individual islands is about 20-30 metres and their length varies from 30 to 100 metres. A great advantage of these floating islands is their expandability - smaller islands can be combined to make larger islands as per the needs of the family. The large islands generally accommodate about ten families, while smaller ones house two to three families.
The life of Uros revolves around the totora reeds. Not only they use it to make their islands but they also make their housings and boats from dried bundles of these reeds. In addition to fish and sea birds meat, the totora reeds is part of their diet, its flower provides them with tea like drink and they even use it for medicinal purposes.
Besides fishing, totora reeds are also a source of income for them. The Uros make small hand-crafted items/souvenir from these reeds and sell it to tourists who come to their islands frequently. They also collect and sell the dried reed bundles to the towns people.
Satellite view of the Uros islands - Source: Google Maps
The Rock Garden at Chandigarh, India, is unique in the sense that it was clandestinely created by one man, in a reserved jungle land, over a period of 18 years, before it was discovered by the authorities. By the time of its discovery it had grown to a size of about 12-acre (49,000 sq. metres) and had a vast collections of statues and figurines built from scrap and pilfered material.
Its creator, Nek Chand Saini, a young refugee from the recently created Pakistan, joined Punjab State Public Works Department (PWD) in 1950 as road inspector. At that time the city of Chandigarh, India's first planned city, was being built, based on the designs of famous architect Le Corbusier and Nek Chand was looking after the stores.
In 1957-58 he set upon to create statues from the waste material like broken ceramics, bangles, rubble stones etc and installed these secretly in a small patch of jungle adjoining the store depot under his control. He used to work in spare hours as well as in the night. As his collection grew he started pilfering the store for construction material and also utilised the labour working in store for clearing the jungle and constructing platforms for his artwork. He escaped detection because at that time the stores were set away from the main road and the quantity of Government material pilfered by him was peanuts as compared to massive construction activities which were going around in creating the Chandigarh city. Perhaps he balanced his books by showing the items pilfered as wastage.
Upon its discovery 1976 the authorities were in a dilemma. Some officials wanted it to be declared illegal and demolished alongwith punitive action against Nek Chand, while others felt that it should be preserved. Ultimately opinion of the public and art lovers prevailed. The Rock Garden as well as its creator were spared. The Government took over control of the Garden and officially made Nek Chand its in-charge so that he could openly work full time. Later Rock Garden Society was established to look after the Garden. The Central Government also honoured Nek Chand and bestowed on him Padma Shri (4th highest civilian award) and a stamp was also issued in 1983 depicting a sculpture from the Garden.
The Rock Garden is now spread over forty acres (160,000 sq. metres) of land with several thousand sculptures set within large mosaic courtyards linked by walled paths and deep gorges with waterfalls. Even after official recognition all the later additions were made out of recycled materials. Nek Chand with the help of local authorities has established collection centres all over the city to collect waste material especially rags and broken ceramics.
The Rock Garden has achieved a fame and tourist traffic reportedly second only to the Taj Mahal. About 5000 persons visit it every day.
Screen captured images from Google Earth / Google Maps and Street Views / MSN Bing Aerial Views / Yandex Maps etc. are under the copyright of their respective owners. Similarly all other photos/images from various other sources are under the copyright of their respective owners, web portals/application etc from which these were obtained. Wherever possible due acknowledgement has been made about the source. Actual terms of copyright/reuse is available in the source link given below each image.
I solicit comments on my posts and also request information/ links to unusual places for inclusion in this travelogue. I will duly acknowledge my source of information.
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