14 Endangered Animals And Where To Find Them

Humans have always been fascinated with animals – there are few we haven’t hunted, feared, bred, domesticated, drawn on cave walls or composed songs and poetry about. But nothing compares with the thrill you get when you see an animal for the first time. Just seeing the brute majestic rhino or the effete elegance of a tiger can be a life-changing experience.

Even Stephen Fry, famous international clever chap, couldn’t help but giggle like schoolgirl when he swam with a manatee for the first time. ‘Last Chance To See’ (BBC2, Tuesday evenings) sees Fry travel in search of endangered animals, and goes to show that we don’t just need animals to do practical stuff like regulate our ecosystems – when we’re communicating with an animal, we humans feel less alone too. Watching Fry, heart caught in his throat, shaking hands with a gorilla is a joyous thing in itself.

But many of the rare creatures we dream about one day meeting and forging life-long bonds with are being threatened by extinction. For some it is only so much time before the only place we’ll get to see them is in specimen jars in a zoological museum, bottled, labelled and vanished for good.

Climate change is a contributing factor, of course, but used intelligently and in moderation, our holidays can have immense benefits. Relatively few threatened species have been directly effected as a result of climate change, with poaching, overfishing, deforestation, overpopulation, disease, the effect of introduced species and civil war far more likely to precipitate collapse.

Lend your support when traveling by visiting some of the many national parks, zoos, nature reserves and conservation projects around the globe who rely on visitors not only for income, but also to spread knowledge and awareness of their cause.

Where the wild things are

So in homage to Mr Fry, we present 14 of the rarest animals to see (one for every chapter of The Jungle Book, certainly every animal-lovers first journey into the animal kingdom):

It is ill-advised to track animals in their wild, non-captive habitats, so please always consult a professional first.

There is also a good helping of useful information on offsetting air travel emissions already on the web and – where long flights are unavoidable – take care to travel by plane less often in the future.

Thought I’d change the subject from travel for a post or so, having been given a great book recently that has changed the way I think about certain things!

Some of us like to think we know a lot. We spend most of our lives absorbing tidbits of knowledge and simply regurgitating them when necessary; but there are so very many things that we don’t know. Even worse, we think we know them, but we really don’t.

See how many of the following commonly misunderstood facts you really know… maybe you’ll find out that you aren’t quite as smart as you thought you were.

▪ 1. The driest place on Earth is the Sahara Desert.

Yeah, the Sahara is pretty dry. But it’s quite a long way away from being the driest place on the planet. The Sahara may be the largest, but with only around 0.1mm (~0.004 inches) of rainfall per year, the Atacama Desert in Chile is around 250 times as dry as the Sahara, which gets around 25mm (1 inch) of rainfall per year.

However, when you’re talking about ‘dryness’ purely in terms of ‘lack of moisture’, both of these places pale in comparison with the Dry Valleys in Antarctica.

Wait, how can a continent covered in snow be the driest place on the planet, I hear you asking? Well. Due to the katabatic winds (look it up), all moisture evaporates (or rather, sublimates) in a reall hurry, whether it’s water, ice or snow. It’s funny to think that part of Antartica can be considered a ‘desert’, but in terms of dryness, parts of Antartica have not felt rain for more than two million years. That’s pretty damn dry, and makes the Sahara seem rather damp by comparison.

These pictures demonstrate how dry the valleys really are – glaciers move into the region but disappear quickly due to the winds, leaving only a ‘tongue’. Kinda cool.

▪ 2. The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell.

OK, there’s no way this ‘fact’ can possibly be wrong, right? Everybody knows that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, right? I mean, come on, right?

Actually, he didn’t. Sure, he turned it from a working prototype into a practical device; but all evidence would indicate that he didn’t actually invent it, even though he filed the first official patent.

The telephone (or teletrofono, as he named his prototype) was actually invented by an Italian by the name of Antonio Meucci, in 1860. Meucci, an unemployed but talented inventor, filed a temporary patent for his device about ten years later – still five years before Bell’s patent for his telephone.

So why is Bell remembered, and Meucci a complete unknown? Well, it’s a bit sad, actually. Meucci fell ill the same year he filed his temporary patent. As an impoverished non-English speaker, he neglected to send his $10 patent renewal fee in 1874.

Meucci had previously sent his invention’s blueprints and working prototypes to the Western Union patent labs – the same lab in which Alexander Graham Bell just so happened to work. Both the blueprints and the prototypes were ‘mysteriously’ lost, coincidentally right around about the same time Bell patented his telephone. Meucci sued him for blatant theft, but sadly died in 1889 before the court case could be completed. Thus, Bell ended up getting the acclaim for arguably one of the most important inventions of the 19th century.

This should now be reasonably common knowledge – as recently as 2004, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution that officially recognises Meucci as the inventor of the telephone. Even Wikipedia lists Meucci before Bell in its telephone timeline. but that’s not stopping parents and teachers alike from telling their kids that the phone was invented by Bell. The thieving Scotsman.

▪ 3. Cinderella’s slippers were made of glass.

OK, so folk tales usually go through a whole lot of changes – this is mostly due to the tradition of oral storytelling, creating a kind of ‘Chinese whispers’ effect, where certain details and elements of stories become distorted and fragmented over time.

However, pretty much wherever you’re from or wherever you first heard the tale, Cinderella loses a glass slipper in her rush to get home from the ball before midnight; which the prince then uses to track her down (suspending for a minute the belief that 2 women living in the same area code could possibly have the same sized feet).

The most recognisable version of the story was written by the 17th century Parisian author of ‘Tales of Mother Goose’, Charles Perrault, using the medieval folk tale that he had heard as a basis. The commonly-held theory is that he misheard the French word vair, meaning ‘squirrel fur’, and replaced it with the homonym verre, meaning ‘glass’. So there you go, Cinderella’s shoes were actually made from squirrel fur (pantoufles de vair).

Or were they? The Cinderella tale is ancient, and versions can be found over 300 years before Perrault’s famous version. The oldest known version comes from the Chinese from about 700AD, in which the slippers were made of gold (which, to be honest, seems to make a bit more sense than either glass or squirrels fur). However, Perrault’s rendition is still the only one that claims the slippers were made of glass.

▪ 4. The aeroplane was the first man-made device to break the sound barrier.

This seems quite an obvious one. Where else would we have managed to reach the kind of speeds needed to break the speed of sound (about 340 metres per second at sea level – around 1,225km/h)?

Funnily enough, the first invention to break the speed of sound was the good old-fashioned bullwhip. They just didn’t realise it for a while. Up until the advent of high-speed photography, everybody thought that the crack of a whip was just the sound of the leather tail hitting the handle, but in 1927 it was proven with photographic evidence that a whip’s crack was actually the result of a mini sonic boom. Here comes the science:

When properly whipped, the whip forms a loop at the handle, which travels all the way to the tip. Since the thickness of the whip tapers off to a slim tip, the loop speeds up on its way along the length of the whip, until it is travelling at more than ten times the original speed. When this speed exceeds around 340m/s – the speed of sound – you (and everyone around you) get to hear that familiar ‘crack’.

It’s also very useful for swinging across gorges in Indiana Jones movies. Not so much in real life; the full weight of a person would generally rip the whip apart. Indy’s whip in the movies was reinforced with steel.

Take a look here for a more in-depth explanation (with videos) on how the ‘mini’ sonic boom works.

▪ 5. The planet Mars is red.

Well, clearly it is. Just look at it. It can’t possibly be any other colour than red; otherwise it means that Val Kilmer movie was not only hideously awful, but also incorrectly named!

Well, generally people remember Mars as the ‘Red Planet’, and it’s always portrayed in popular culture as a dynamic deep red colour. However, what gives Mars this red appearance is actually the dust in the planet’s atmosphere. The planet itself is somewhere between orange and brown to our eyes.

So what about those famous photos from NASA’s Viking rovers from the 70s? Well, funnily enough, the cameras on those rovers were black and white cameras, but the images were run through several colour filters in order to give a result closer to Mars’ ‘true’ colour. Thanks to the more recent images sent back by NASA’s Spirit rover (which arrived on Mars in January 2004), we can see that the planet surface is much closer to an orangey-brown than red.

Kinda rocks your world, doesn’t it?

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References/image sources
Most of the facts were taken from The QI Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd & John Mitchinson (©2006 Faber & Faber). Highly recommended book. The internet filled in the gaps.

Pictures lifted from various Flickr accounts and sites found through Google Image search:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bikinibandit/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/madebackwards/
http://www.inkart.com/
http://www.4mybday.com/
http://www.enjoyfrance.com/
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/

How do the Dutch manage to stay so trim? I bet it’s got more to do with the 15,000km of cycle tracks rather than the dietary staples of potatoes and margarine.

Or perhaps it’s because of a ban on foie gras, the controversial French delicacy, which is still “fatty liver” no matter how you spin it (‘a liver that has accumulated a large quantity of lipids through lipogenesis or the transformation of maize carbohydrate and fatty acids’ with ‘unique nutritional and organoleptic properties’… hmm… very unique…)

It may be part of French cultural and gastronomic patrimony, but it doesn’t make it any healthier! I was actually surprised the first time I came to Europe and was confronted by the amount of fatty and deep-fried food on offer. Isn’t this supposed to be from the recent realms of the New World?

But Old World junk food can be as fast as it comes, something I try to push from my mind whilst wolfing down pub fare like smažený sýr (a thick, bread-crumb-coated slab of fried cheese) in a bread roll on the streets of Prague or some hot and oily rösti (potato pancakes) in Germany. I’m still yet to try the deep-fried steak from Serbia, Karađorđeva šnicla (Karadjordje’s steak), or the Bavarian schweinshaxn (deep-fried pork knuckle)!

What really takes the cake – or in this case, the chocolate-smeared animal fat – is salo from the Ukraine. Stereotyped as indispensable for the Ukrainian as vodka for the Russia, salo is a chunk of pig fat. Plain and simple. I think this description best dispels any salo myths: ‘unlike lard, salo is non-rendered pork fat. Unlike bacon, salo has little or no meat.’ Ouch! Talk about a direct hit. Not this, not that, just fat.

“Salo v shokoladi” (salo in chocolate) is a humorous expression akin to the English “chalk and cheese” – but it became reality in a Kiev restaurant a few years ago. This sweet salo, dubbed the “Ukrainian snickers”, is even more gut-churning than a deep-fried Mars Bar.

But as for my favourite of all strange snack foods (with a milder accompanying health warning) is the Russian sirok, which I’ve nicknamed “chocolate cheese.” It’s a little chocolate-coated bar, filled with a light and flavoured tvorog, and best served cold. Sirok is almost like a small chocolate coated ice-cream, but filled with a curd cheese like the French fromage blanc or Italian ricotta. It comes in all sorts of chocolate, fruit or even jam-filled flavours, and I am certain that this was the real scientific breakthrough of the Cold War (forget that space race, the Soviets just mastered cheesy confectionary!)

I haven’t met anyone else who shares my passion for this “chocolate cheese”… although I have a sneaking suspicion that the perpetual popularity of singer Tom Waits in Russia might have something to do with a misinterpretation of his “immaculate confection” song Chocolate Jesus…

‘It’s got to be those chocolate cheeses… makes me feel so good inside…’

It’s inevitable. With the change of seasons, I’m bound to get sick. Especially as springtime looms with its temperature changes and pollen influx, I’ve got a bit of transitional stuffiness to get used to…

Which got me thinking about rich tradition of folk cold and flu remedies in Russia, for there are a whole host of suggestions for every sniffle.

So here are my five all-time favourite Russian cold and flu remedies – and what NOT to do if you actually want to rest, recuperate and eventually be nursed back to health!

1. Vodka
2. Vodka with pepper (do you notice a theme emerging here?)
3. Sunflower oil and milk. In fact, one of the old women who held fort at the dormitories of the university (our don’t-mess-with-me granny) suggested gargling a cup of sunflower oil to my flatmate. She suggested that with each swirl and spit the throat infection would be caught up and sent down the sink in an oily trap. My flatmate, highly sceptical of this approach, instead preferred to…
4. Visit a doctor (but honestly, why go there? You’ll only encounter more sick people!)
5. Nemiroff Ukrainian chilli vodka in a hot cup of tea with honey and lemon juice. This was my preferred method – a failsafe way of injecting a little fire in your belly and throat.

The only problem with three of these five suggestions (I’m sure you can determine which ones), was that they were so darn conducive to multiple dosages in a social context (forget a spoon full of sugar to help the medicine go down – just shoot it back and chase it with some delicious snack gifts from the gods of grazing, otherwise known as zakuski). I would take my “medicine” then someone would suggest some more “for health” and then I would find myself going out to a cosy home-away-from-home nightclub, Dacha, until the wee hours…

As my Dutch courage (or pseudo-health) dissipated, I would realise with horror that I had only set back my road to recovery further.

For the record, it took a prescription of antibiotics and sobriety from a doctor in Berlin (who wasn’t afraid to bandy around the word “bronchitis” a few times in diagnosis) to fix what ailed me… but I much preferred the Russian approach!

Speaking of Kazan, it’s an amazing city to see for the World Heritage kremlin site (and to eat sweet Tatar treats and traditional triangular meat pastries, but that’s a whole other story!). Housing the sixteenth-century Annunciation Cathedral, the legendary Söyembikä Tower and the remarkable Qol-Şärif mosque, the Kazan Kremlin is stunning.

As I’m always one for a tale, the Söyembikä Tower caught my attention. Apparently, or so the story goes, the tower’s namesake was the lovely Söyembikä, the last Tatar queen of the Khanate of Kazan. After conquering the khanate in the sixteenth century, Ivan the Terrible turned his attentions to Söyembikä in the form of a marriage offer. Söyembikä agreed on the condition that Ivan’s artisans complete this tower in one week. The impossible was achieved and the tower finished within the specified time period.

I don’t know how the subsequent conversation ran, but perhaps it was something along the lines of Söyembikä wanting to survey the structure and take one last look at her lands. Of course she threw herself off the highest tier of the tower rather than marry the subjugator of her people.

(So there’s some scholars out there who date it from the seventeenth or eighteenth century, but who let’s truth get in the way of a good story?)

The tower used to be part of the world-famed group of leaning towers, but the estimated incline of 194cm has been largely remedied by stabilisation and straightening measures during the 1930s and 1990s.

By way of homage to Tatarstan and the famous Tatars of the arts, history and politics – have a look at this clip by Alisa Husainova a.k.a SuperAlisa. Using a blend of Tatar and Russian language lyrics, and combining Tatar folk melodies with tongue-in-cheek electro beats, SuperAlisa is well… how else can I say it… super good!

Every year, the dwindling numbers of Venetian residents are augmented by some eighty million tourists. Tourism throughout the rest of Italy is thriving – there are numerous other places to go – so why join this already well-trodden track?

no cars

So you don’t have a choice but to get those legs moving! A further bonus is that there are no hell-bent manic drivers (although this does add a certain spice to any European holiday). If you’re an avowed cyclist like myself, this may mean undergoing some withdrawal symptoms, but on the flip-side, no four-wheeled nemeses!

canals

Have a moonlit stroll when all the bustle of the waterways has subsided and the murky waters lap gently against the sides the buildings. It provides a wonderful sense of calm in the otherwise silence of the night.

architecture

As John Julius Norwich writes in his masterpiece History of Venice, even as early as the eleventh century Venetians invested heavily in the beautification of the city. Any works of piety were undertaken ‘in true Venetian style, almost invariably result[ing] in the glorification of the city at least as much as that of the Almighty himself’. So why not lap up some of the sumptuous excess? With an abundance of occidental and oriental architectural influences, wander down any alleyway for a visual treat.

food

Picture this – a sunny afternoon in a lush, green park overlooking Venice Lagoon. Vast areas of grass in Venice, am I out of my mind? No, just head down to the south-eastern end of town to the Parco delle Rimembranze. Pack a picnic of olives, cheese, fresh bread rolls bespeckled with pumpkin seeds, and thrown in a carbonated water, wine and peach puree Bellini for good measure. Bliss!

drink

After you notch up your eight hour of ambling, you’ve probably worked up a thirst (and a lot of fatigue). It’s not quite time for dinner and you already have four gelati under your belt… lucky it’s aperitif hour! Head to the nearest atmospheric, dimly lit wine bar (or even a bakery!) and reflect on your hard day of trinket shopping over a vino rosso or spritz. It’s sure to ease away any walking or wallet aches and pains!

Maybe you’ve stumbled across my blog in search of some travel advice and found it sorely amiss. Or not. Either way, I thought I’d include some budget travel advice for anyone out there considering travelling across Russia without an extensive network of couch-surfing buddies.

This is a handy hint that I only found recommended in one section of my well-leafed through Lonely Planet Trans-Siberian Railway: A Classic Overland Route. I think they had a few authors working on it, and one was more adventurous than the other – or lazier, depends on how you look at it – as he or she had realised that for accommodation in almost any Russian city, one needn’t go any further than the train station.

This is marvellous, in my opinion, as you can get into your room, dump your luggage and have a slight cover of backpack-free incognito as you venture onto your first tentative and lost wanderings. Just like a Russian café (coffee – 25 roubles, tea – 20 roubles, milk – 4 roubles, sugar – 1 rouble, stirrer – 1 rouble) it also offers you the choice to pay for exactly what you want. A shared room with eight, four, two or single, for 24, 12, 6 or 2 hours, with a shower, a hairdryer, possibly even towels… the choice is yours.

As I was travelling light, I’d often just carry my bag, spend the afternoon exploring, and check in for 12 hours in the evening. This way you can also choose accommodation times convenient to your trains.

There are some notable exceptions to this rule – namely St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vladivostok and Kazan. In the two latter cities, it’s possible to enquire about shared rooms at any hotel.

Whoever coined the phrase “a change is as good as a holiday” was delusional. There’s nothing as good as a holiday, and it took a self-decreed long weekend away in Lisbon for me to come to this conclusion.

Lonely Planet writes that Lisbon is ‘beguiling’, and I have no qualms about agreeing with that.

It’s a kick-back-and-enjoy type of place, all from the quaint comfort of Tram 28. Tracing through narrow alleys, climbing hills and linking all the central tourist attractions, this Lisbon route is like Bus 100 in Berlin or Vaporetto 1 on Venice’s Grand Canal – i.e. filled with people with no intent to actually go anywhere except the end of the line, with no rhyme nor reason to capriciously alight at any other station. A pity for anyone who actually wants to get anywhere, but that’s just the way it goes. There’s ways to avoid all the craziness if you live somewhere. Don’t try and get across Nevsky Prospekt in a hurry on a summer’s day in St. Petersburg, and flee town for peak-season in Paris… otherwise sit back, relax, and take that tram to the terminus.

Sorry, where was I? My first ever visit to Portugal…

On Friday, Guillaume and I (needless to say, it was all due to my bad influence) got side-tracked from seeing any sights other than tall, cool beers and short, hot coffees, but we made up for it in the evening, being shown around Belém by our indefatigable local tour guide (and French sibling), Marion. Just a stick’s throw from Lisbon’s centre, along the Tagus River, Belém has more UNESCO World Heritage sites than you could poke a stone at… if you were that way inclined.

I couldn’t get enough of the Jerónimos Monastery and Belém Tower, and decided that ‘Manueline’ or Portuguese late Gothic architecture from the early 16th century is alright by me. Especially when it’s deemed necessary to incongruously plonk a solitary tower on a river bank… Of course it was more strategically relevant in 1520, but I wasn’t there back then (like I said, first visit to Portugal) so I’ll forever consider it as another weekend whim!

Having had my old diary recently posted to me (and opened up trying to find out the particulars of the Ural Youth Museum), I thought I’d share with you all some of the “profound” thoughts swimming around there and committed to paper when I’m off travelling by myself.

June 4, 2005

I’m facing off against a latte soup. The kind of thing that, heaven forbid, you were to fall face forward into, you would end up entirely coated in foam. Or drown.

Now I had sworn never to buy a coffee with milk in it in Russia, but this smells good. And after the first sip, lives up to all expectations.

I had also vowed that Novosibirsk held no interest for me, but then being jolted by the memory that “small town” Russia isn’t necessarily a piece of cake, so maybe I’ll settle back here for another night, continue to be a little bourgie in the geographical centre of Russia, and enjoy my coffee with milk and the surprise of supermarkets with organic sections and bio juices…

It’s not all rosy here though, despite the socially-conscious ‘Papa don’t drink’, ‘Recycle’ and ‘You’re twice her size’ (anti-domestic violence) banners in the streets. There were some drunken soldiers using the showers at the train station before I did. The women who worked there gathered around, shooing them out. But they were still stifling giggles and clucking ‘Soviet Army’ to themselves and anyone in earshot.

I don’t know. I’d be busting some balls if anyone came into my hotel and commandeered the showers, not able to stand or support themselves against a wall, at 6pm. I’m not anti-drinking, and indeed, those who know me will attest that I’m quite pro- the activity. But I really find the general acceptance and tolerance of those who are so slaughtered a little perturbing. What can you do though?

Speaking about the politics of plunder, it seems like a logical next step to go from the British Museum to the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Don’t get me wrong though, it’s one of my favourite places in the world. I have spent as many hours marvelling at London goldsmith and jeweller James Cox’s Peacock Clock with the tour groups in their hovering hoards, as I have in the desolate and far-flung halls of ancient Scythian burial ground gold from southern Russia.

However, the Hermitage has its fair share of interesting history. Established in the late eighteenth century by Catherine the Great, the Hermitage is now home to over three million works of art. I’ve heard something along the lines of ‘not the largest museum in the world, but definitely not the second largest’ being said about its sheer size, but apparently the Guinness Book of Records isn’t afraid to lump accolades upon it – recognising the Hermitage as having the world’s largest collection of paintings.

The Hermitage also contains a sizable amount of Trojan treasures, which were apparently unearthed from Troy by Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s, and in turn unearthed from Berlin museums by the Red Army in 1945. So it goes…

Despite gifts from artists and ‘donations’ of private art collections seized from the Tsars’ palaces during the early Soviet period, the years pre-1945 are regarded as a time of shocking loss for the museum. During the 1920s and 1930s, when art was smeared with the label ‘bourgeois and decadent’, many thousands of priceless masterpieces were sold internationally or redistributed to other museums across the Soviet Union in a process of nationalisation.

Maybe you are familiar with the regal exhibition halls of the Winter Palace (part of the Hermitage collection’s complex of buildings) without even having set foot in the museum. The film Russian Ark (which I still haven’t managed to see in its entirety, and if you have I congratulate you, I just don’t have the stamina) was an ambitious attempt by Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov to chart the three-hundred years of life in the Winter Palace, albeit, filmed as a single-shot walkthrough period piece.


This is not art: pick the odd one out! I’ll give you a clue, Marcel Duchamp is NOT exhibited at the Hermitage…
For all you eagle-eyed out there, you would have noticed instantly that while the sculptures in the images on the left and right are of Greek origin, the image in the middle is a toilet. On a stretched budget it’s all about the art, and not about fancy facilities and providing toilet paper. They might be a necessary port of call, but they aren’t part of the display!