First-Time Travel Abroad
When I was 14 years old, my parents agreed to let me go on a school trip abroad.

My classmates and I would be walking for two weeks in the Odenwald – a wooded and hilly area in southern Germany – ending our trip in the city of Heidelberg.

I must have been the most unfit boy on the trip because I always seemed to be watching the others trooping ahead of me in the forest.

But I had the travel bug and I went abroad the next year with a teacher from the school and a boy who had just left school.

We went to Germany and Switzerland and I can remember almost nothing about the trip except the lake where we camped. That and the teenage girl who invited me to go for a canoe ride to the little island in the middle of the lake.

Ready To Go Again
When the next summer holiday came around I was ready to go abroad again. Only this time it would be different. I would go with just one friend. This time it was for real – our own adventure.

We caught the ferry from Dover to Boulogne and set off walking. We had a detailed map of a fairly small region of northern France – probably about 100 miles square – and we intended to hitch-hike from place to place and explore this corner of France. That was a the plan.

We walked for two hours in the baking sun and were slowly readjusting our ideas of what was likely to happen over the next few weeks.

Now we envisaged a lot of standing and waiting.

Chance Steps In
Then a car pulled up. The driver was Scottish and on his way home. Home was in Switzerland. How far were we going?

He told us he had stopped to pick us up because we were wearing boots, so he thought we had a good attitude and wanted to help. I have a lot to thank those boots for.

We watched the French countryside drift by, and slowly we understood that we could have all of Europe. We could enjoy just what we wanted. The only thing that would hold us back would be ourselves.

Geneva
So we rode with him through the afternoon and through the night, arriving next morning high above Geneva where we sat in what seemed to me to be the most romantic cafe in the world – overlooking the town and the lake.

We drank coffee from bowls and ate crusty bread baguettes. Then we drove down into Geneva and watched the fountain come on – at 9 a.m., if I recall correctly.

Europe
Our journey that summer took us through Switzerland and Austria, down the length of Italy, and back up through France.

We got lessons in hitchhiking etiquette in Austria and got sunburned like lobsters in Genoa. We changed the course of our holiday and for me it changed the course of my life.

Romance Of The Road
My wife Tamara and I share a love of travel. When we drive somewhere new and have been on the road for a couple of hours, we get a hint of the adventures we have had and hope to have.

That’s why the signal that Tamara uses even for stopping for a coffee is – “Romance of the road?”

This article is part of the Lonely Planet Blogsherpa travel carnival. Click the link to read more about the excitement and adventure of first-time travel.

First-Time Travel Off The Map is a post from: Quillcards

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Marilyn’s Guitar
What pops into my mind first about traveling overseas is Marilyn’s guitar.

In my head, that’s what began it all for me. Marilyn, just back from Mexico, all those years ago. Marilyn singing in Spanish as she strummed away on her guitar. Marilyn, my close friend Judy’s eldest sister.

I am still close with Judy and I have seen Marilyn several times over the years.

At that time, however, we were kids and they lived just around the corner from me in a suburb in New Jersey only half an hour outside of teeming New York City.

The Guitar - A Quillcards Quotation Ecard

The Influences Of Foreign Languages
Marilyn was the most romantic thing going for Judy and me, as I recall. The sound of Spanish tripping off her tongue so easily entranced me.

I too had spoken a foreign language for as long as I could remember, and my mom taught English to foreign students.

So taking these factors into consideration, I was primed and ready to go.

Anywhere. Everywhere.

I wasn’t that discriminate at all, I just knew in my gut that there were all those roads with all those exotic people from places I ‘had’ to see.

That Ball Of Fire At Yosemite
We had relatives living in San Francisco and Los Angeles, so living on the East Coast meant that I traveled at a young age 3,000 miles to the West Coast.

It wasn’t a foreign country, but the distance was far and the experience was memorable.

Ah, Yosemite: I remember most the huge ball of fire that the fire rangers sent down the mountain every night, and the hoots and whoops as we tourists saw it glow and burn.

Hitchhiking in Nova Scotia
Next in my travels when I was still a teenager was Canada, which was my first official trip out of my native country.

I was 18 and I went with Sherry and Laura, two close school friends. We decided to hitchhike around Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

How did our parents allow it, I now wonder. It’s a different age now, however. I think things were a good deal less dangerous back then.

So, after we took a bus ride to Portland, Oregon and a ferry across to Nova Scotia, we hitchhiked all around.

I remember some slightly dicey-looking man who picked us up, looking at us provocatively.

Then there was a priest, or was it a nun? Well, someone picked us all up, and took us to a local church to sleep for the evening.

As we lay there with the tall, stain-glassed windows in a cavernous room, I recall feeling protected.

Visions Of Anne Of Green Gables
Next on our travels was Prince Edward Island. I don’t recall why we chose to go there, but I have always been smitten by the storybook character Anne from the classic “Anne of Green Gables” that was set there. So maybe that influenced our choice?

The answer to that is lost in the mist of time. However, I do recall that we went to see her house.

Who cared that it never existed except on some dog-eared page in my copy of the novel: I soaked up the vivid green countryside, the expanses with what seemed like far fewer houses than the leafy streets of our suburb.

And I had touched something associated with Anne. Such possibilities became another reason that I loved to travel – to experience the actual space where people and events that I had learned about had taken place.

The Orange-Red Earth Of Prince Edward Island
What I remember most about Prince Edward Island was that when the tide went out, the damp earth that was revealed in a shade of deep orange-red.

It took my breath away, I had never witnessed anything like it before.

Simplicity - A Quillcards Quotation Ecard

Lox And Salmon That Run For Real
I took some city ways with me on my travels.

Whether it was because I had never been in the countryside that much or simply plain ignorance, the bottom line was that I didn’t know that the ‘lox’ that I ate quite frequently in New Jersey and New York City was from salmon that were most likely from Canada.

This came up in our travels, and Sherry took me to see the ‘lox’. I blushed at my own stupidity, but eventually we laughed at it all and that was that.

Who cared, after all: The fish were such a gorgeous sight to see as they raced through the icy waters there on their home turf.

Barcelona

Sadly, everywhere we went there were security people looked in our bags for possible bombs.

Reality was starting to set in.

However, the romance of traveling around ‘the Continent’ then never left me: England, Holland, Italy, Spain some years later – I adored the architecture, the foreignness of the people, the sheer differentness of it all.

I was also influenced as well by my parents who traveled to so many places.

They brought back mementos from New Zealand, Turkey, Romania, and many other places. I salivated when I heard about their travels, and I vowed that I too would hear more foreign tongues and interact with other peoples and tread on the soil of their countries.

From West To East And Back Again
Now I have lived overseas for about 15 years, including in South Korea, Israel, and here in England.

In South Korea, I adored the Asian sensibility. That included the flying rooftops of the ancient temples and palaces; the attention to detail in cultural aspects from flower arranging to how one drinks a cup of tea; and the deep, enriching friendships that I made with a good number of families.

One Kind Word

I tried to learn a bit of the language, both to read and speak. The ways that humans create different sounds and writing systems fascinates me, and it did so even as I struggled to speak the language.

While I lived there, I also had the chance to travel to Australia, where sights like the harbor at Sydney with a glorious three-masted ship of old coming over the horizon has left a permanent slot of ‘wow, how beautiful!’ in my head.

In Japan I soaked up its difference to South Korea and marveled again at its exotic qualities, at the fabulous timbers in its buildings, the balance of its gardens, the attention to detail that I saw even in a place like a local graveyard in the middle of Tokyo.

In Israel I had the opportunity to use Hebrew which is the language that I have known and loved from very early childhood. I have been there twice in my life, and both times the blazing sun and the phenomenal blue of the waters combined with the marvelous high energy and intimate warmth of the people has stood out the most for me.

More locally here in Europe, I have been smitten several times by the glory of France. That language that oozes romance, its incredible culture and oh, its phenomenal food…

Paris Bookstore

The Never-Ending Lure Of India
Then this past spring, my husband David and I spent seven weeks exploring parts of India.

India: It always occupied a hallowed space in my psyche as a place with stunning people with flashing eyes and an atmosphere with the colors of the rainbow.

Green Sari

However, of course I also learned first hand during our travels about the country’s crippling poverty.

Similarly, I have absorbed that living day to day in a country is a far different kettle of fish than traveling there as a tourist.

The Countryside
Being fortunate enough to travel and live a fair bit in a number of places has been wonderful. It has also had its problems, naturally. If it hadn’t, it wouldn’t be real life.

I have also discovered places close to home that are beautiful.

Here in England, I love the beauty of the green countryside: the sheep, the cows, the horses, the deer; the hovering kites in the skies overhead; the local magpies and blackbirds; the colorful male pheasants in the hedgerows.

The pheasants always remind me of WWI pilots with their red caps on – or rather, the kind that the cartoonist Charles Schultz popularized through his beagle Snoopy whenever he sketched that crazy dog piloting one of those old aircraft.

All of this travel, be it far or near, has widened my world.

For this everlasting romance of the everyday and the exotic, I am as aware as I can be.

Though I fail at times in that no doubt, still I am eternally grateful for those moments – namely, for all those times when the little and the big have been revealed to me through travel.

Time Travels In The Real World is a post from: Quillcards

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Sheep Scratching

We have just added these photographs of this lamb to our ecard collection.

We came across this young sheep – still practically a lamb – scratching its fleece against an gnarled old hawthorn tree.

It was so preoccupied with this that we were able to walk quite close to it. We knew it would make a good subject for our ecards, so we took our time and walked slowly towards it.

From there I was able to circle around to get the rise of the ground behind the sheep so that I could keep the background plain and uncluttered.

In fact the sheep was so preoccupied that I was able to walk right around it and watch it as it scratched.

As I walked around and got nearer, my height meant that I could look down and take advantage of a plain background (the grass) and keep the sheep and tree in the frame.

I expected the sheep to run away at any moment. I didn’t want to scare it but things were unpredictable. It’s important in these kind of situations, therefore, to be completely familiar with your camera and know just what knobs and dials to twist in order to get the shot.

The sheep eventually took notice of me and moved a yard or two away from the tree. It still didn’t look bothered on account of me being so close.

I was shooting with my Nikon D700 and a 50mm lens, so the angle of view was quite wide. That was great for capturing the whole of the tree but not so good for homing in on the sheep.

So I walked a bit closer still and even then it didn’t panic or skedaddle as I expected. I was able to take several shots and then back off and leave it to get back to its scratching.

Did You Know That Farmers Mark Their Sheep?
You might just be able to see a mark on the back of the sheep in the photograph above. It is red dye or paint that farmers use to mark their flocks.

Sometimes farmers paint individual numbers on their sheep to identify mother ewes and their particular lambs.

It is fun to stand watching a flock of sheep and see a couple of lambs with a number, for example ’34′, written on their backs running across the field to their mother – which also has number 34 marked on its fleece.

Sheep Under Tree - A Quillcards Ecard

Sheep Under Tree - A Quillcards Ecard

Sheep Looking - A Quillcards Ecard

Sheep Ecards: Spending Time Under A Tree is a post from: Quillcards

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The Fall Of Phaeton

Visiting Country Houses
Visiting country houses is a very English pastime, and a very popular one.

Visits are made more interesting by the guides who stand in the various rooms in these country houses and wait – ready to talk to people. They are often very knowledgable.

I notice one theme that emerges time and time again when talking with them. It is the social and historical significance of the fact that these houses were once in private ownership and now belong to the nation.

The Death Of the Landed Gentry
Two world wars in the last century brought about the destruction of a large part of the landed gentry in England, with many country houses being sold to pay death duties.

That fact that one can visit these houses at all is because many of them are now owned by local councils or by national charities.

The National Trust – Guardian Of The Nation
Ask anyone in England to talk about country houses, and the name of the National Trust is certain to come into the conversation.

Three philanthropists set up the National Trust as a charity in 1895 ‘to act as a guardian for the nation in the acquisition and protection of threatened coastline, countryside and buildings.’

Today the Trust has over three million members and the entrance fees, subscriptions, and donations have helped to pay for the purchase and maintenance of more that 400 country houses, 600,000 acres (250,000 hectares) of countryside, and 700 miles (1,100km) of coastline, in and around the British Isles.

The Trust also has over 50,000 volunteers helping out and doing everything from acting as guides to selling souvenirs in the Trust shops.

Why is the Trust able to attract so many volunteers? Perhaps it is because they believe in helping to conserve Britain’s heritage, including its natural habitat.

Perhaps also because of a delight in taking over the stewardship of these properties from their former private owners.

Castle Howard
All of this makes Castle Howard stand out from the crowd because not only is it said to be one of the grandest country houses in Britain, it is still privately owned and by the same family who built it three hundred years ago.

It was built between 1699 and 1707 in the Baroque style and was the first commission of Sir John Vanbrugh who until that time had not built so much as a kitchen extension. He did not finish the entire building and part of one wing was built later by an architect who had different ideas about design and extended the wing and broke the symmetry of the original plan.

Castle Howard

When we visited a couple of weeks ago we entered via that wing of the house and, after paying our entrance fee, went upstairs via a grand staircase and around and along and down again and along a further passage until eventually we came to the entrance hall.

Of course, guests would enter via the front door and come immediately into the entrance hall, or ‘great hall’ as it is called.

Castle Howard - Front Door

The great hall is a strange room, dominated by four huge, square, fluted pillars. Two sets of staircases rise, peaking from behind opposing pairs of pillars. There is no wall to the front because the hall opens into a corridor. Similarly at the rear of the hall.

It is like being in a ‘non room’, an Escher drawing, or an indoor gazebo.

The room is massive and as you look up you see it is crowned by a huge domed roof some seventy feet above floor level.

There is a painting in the ceiling of the dome, upside down as one enters the hall from outside and the right way up if one is the master of the house, welcoming guests. The original was painted by Antonio Pellegrini in 1712 and represents ‘The Fall of Phaeton’. That is the image at the top of this article.

The ‘Fall of Phaeton’ is the classical Greek myth of Phaeton who wanted proof that his father was Helios, the god of the sun. As proof, his father lets him ride the sun chariot but Phaeton cannot control it and it plunges to Earth. To prevent the destruction of the planet, Zeus sends a thunderbolt to kill Phaeton and save the Earth.

Quite a salutary story to have painted on one’s ceiling.

The Dome
When the house was originally built, the very idea of a dome on a building was a contentious issue in Protestant England.

Only Catholic cathedrals had domes – with the ‘small’ exception of St Paul’s Cathedral in London that had just been rebuilt following the destruction of the previous building in the Great Fire Of London.

The story goes that the Dean and Chapter (that is, the members of the governing body) of St. Paul’s were expecting a spire in the newly-commissioned cathedral. Instead, Christopher Wren built them a building with a dome and kept the building shrouded in sheets until its unveiling.

It sounds hardly credible that someone could build a building of the size of St. Paul’s and keep the dome ‘under wraps’ until the unveiling.

However, what the story illustrates is that domes had a Catholic connotation and so it was a brave move to put one on Castle Howard. Sir John Vanbrugh designed it for the then owner, the 3rd Earl of Carlisle, and is said to have persuaded him that it was a good idea.

The Dome At Castle Howard

Fire!
In November 1940 a fire started in a chimney at one end of the house. It found an outlet in the dome and while the flames shot upwards, the dome came crashing down to the floor below.

Rather than spreading to the rest of the house, the fact that the fire raced up through the hole left by the collapsed dome may have saved the house from further destruction.

Britain had already been at war for a year when the fire broke out, so it is understandable that no repairs were undertaken at the time.

Seventy years on, though, the fire-damaged rooms have still not been fully repaired because of the enormous cost of doing so.

There are so many rooms and the building is so big that it is easy to underestimate how much work would need to be done to return the rooms to their original state.

Some repairs were carried out with the money brought in when the house was used in the late 1970s and early 1980s as the setting for the BBC television series, Brideshead Revisited.

More work was done when the film of the same name was shot there.

The dome itself was repaired in 1960, under the direction of one of the foremost engineers of the time – Professor E. H. Thompson. He designed the new dome working from old black-and-white photographs of the house.

The new version of The Fall of Phaeton was painted by Scott Medd who worked from a single black-and-white photograph. Because the painted ceiling is set into the curve of the domed roof, the artist painted a small version in a shallow bowl and then scaled up and transferred the design to the ceiling 70 feet above floor level.

Can you picture Medd working on scaffolding at that height? It makes me think of Michelangelo working on the Sistine Chapel in the Pope’s official residence in the Vatican City.

Castle Howard Ceiling

English Country Houses is a post from: Quillcards

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Iris - A Quillcards Ecard

We have just added this flower ecard to our collection and you will find it in the Natural World theme – and not surprisingly it is in the Flowers category.

Also A Free Ecard For The Month Of August
It seems that summer has finally reached this part of England, and to celebrate its late arrival we have also added this Iris flower ecard to our Free Ecards section, where it will appear for a limited time – in fact, until the end of August.

To go to the ‘Free Ecards’ page, click on the link above, or click on these thumbnails.

The Origin Of The Word ‘Iris’
When researching the word ‘Iris’, I found that its name comes from the Greek word ‘iris’ which means ‘rainbow’. It is a lovely origin for the name of the flower, don’t you think?

When Is Summer?
Apropos summer, I was surprised to learn that even in the northern hemisphere it is not the same period in different countries.

For example, in the United Sates it is calculated from astronomical data and officially begins on June 20 or 21 (depending on when the solstice falls in a given year) and ends on September 22 or 23 (depending on when the Equinox falls in a given year).

[Unofficially, summer in the United States begins on Memorial Day weekend at the end of May and ends on Labor Day weekend towards the beginning of September.]

Elsewhere, summer is fixed from meteorological data rather than astronomical data.

The meteorological data records summer as the warmest days that also coincide with the longest days.

So in the United Kingdom it begins in mid-May and ends in mid-August.

In some European countries, however, it is fixed as running from the beginning of June through to the end of August.

Changing Weather Patterns
With changing weather patterns in the world, who knows when this season will be in future years according to meteorological calculations?

A Free Flower Ecard To Celebrate Summer is a post from: Quillcards

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5. Why the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change is Important

My wife Tamara and I write this blog and manage the ecard site here at Quillcards.

With that introduction, I wanted to write to explain that Tamara has been volunteering her time to help the Endangered Species Coalition (ESC).

ESC is an important coalition comprising a network of hundreds of conservation, scientific, education and other organizations that are working to protect wildlife.

The members of the coalition include the National Audubon Society, Defenders of Wildlife, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Humane Society of the USA, the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, the National Recreation & Parks Association, and the Sierra Club.

Tamara has had several articles published on the ESC’s site, ‘Oil Spill: Wildlife Crisis’, which look at the damage that the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has done and continues to do to species that live there.

Animal Rights - A Quillcards Ecard

When The Reports Came In
For some years now, Tamara has been receiving regular updates from various environmental groups.

So when reports were coming in of the damage that was being done to the Gulf, Tamara knew about it very early on.

She knew that spreading the word was important because not only were the species threatened because of direct contamination, but because it was happening at the worse of times – during the breeding season.

So when ESC asked Tamara whether she would like to write about species threatened by the spill, she wrote several articles.

Tamara will continue to write for ESC about this and other important issues, and I will update this page when she does so.

You can read the articles that Tamara has written by clicking on the links below.

To give you a foretaste, Tamara’s article on the Alabama Beach Mouse starts by taking the perspective of the mouse itself:

A Resourceful, Monogamous Rodent
Imagine that excluding your tail, your light-colored head and body measures about three inches (7.5 centimeters), and you weigh about half an ounce (12.5 grams).

You’re a male Alabama beach mouse, and so you’re monogamous. Your mate can weigh up to about three-quarters of an ounce (20 grams), and you and she have about three litters with three to four offspring every year.

You are native only to the rolling, white sand along the coastal dunes of Alabama, and it takes two to three acres to support you and your mate. A noctural animal, you spend your days in the nest that you have made in your burrow and you only come out to feed when darkness provides additional cover.

People find you endearing because you are tiny with huge eyes and ears, but actually…

Here are the links. [Please note that they will open in a new window when you click on them]:

The Alabama beach mouse
The bluefin tuna
The brown pelican
The Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle
The piping plover

Other Endangered Species
These are not the only species impacted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Other species in the Gulf that have been threatened include the following in what is, unfortunately, a very long list:

Alabama red belly turtle
Alabama shad
American crocodile
Bald eagle
Beach jacquemontia
Blue whale
Choctawhatchee beach mouse
Elkhorn coral
Finback whale
Florida perforate cladonia
Florida salt marsh vole
Garbers spurge
Green sea turtle
Gulf sturgeon
Hawksbill sea turtle
Humpback whale
Key deer
Key Largo cotton mouse
Key Largo woodrat
Leatherback sea turtle
Lined seahorse
Loggerhead sea turtle
Lower Keys marsh rabbit
Night shark
Perdido Key beach mouse
Red knot
Rice rat
Roseate tern
Sei whale
Smalltooth sawfish
Speckeld hind
Sperm whale
St. Andrew beach mouse
Staghorn coral
Warsaw grouper
West Indian manatee
Whooping crane
Wood stork

Tamara’s Articles For The Endangered Species Coalition is a post from: Quillcards

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2. ARTICLES
3. Gulf Oil Spill Equivalent to Volume of 14 Million People

In the eighty-seven days that oil spilled from the Deepwater Horizon well this year, oil roughly equivalent to the volume contained within fourteen million people escaped into the Gulf of Mexico.

That’s about the population of Los Angeles or Lagos or Shanghai. It’s more than the population of Delhi or Beijing. It’s twice the population of London.

Imagine them all standing there, filled up to the brim with oil.

Or imagine them all floating in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Original Official Estimate Was Much Lower
The original estimate from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – the federal agency whose job it is to monitor and report on the condition of the oceanic and the atmospheric conditions – was 5,000 barrels per day.

That is equivalent to 210,000 gallons per day.

On June 15 the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command issued a revised estimate with a range seven to twelve times greater than the original NOAA estimate, stating that:

U.S. government and independent scientists estimate that the most likely flow rate of oil today is between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels per day.

That is equivalent to between 1,470,000 and 2,520,000 gallons per day.

On August 2nd, the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command revised their estimate upwards and stated that

approximately 4.9 million barrels of oil have been released from the well.

That is equivalent to a total of approximately 206 million gallons of oil that spilled into the Gulf over an 87 day period.

The Amount Of Dispersant That Was Sprayed In The Gulf
Then there is the 1.3 million gallons of dispersant spread to break the oil up into tiny droplets far smaller than the head of a pin.

I ignored that from the calculation – after all, it is not oil – but we should remember that this material was sprayed into the waters of the Gulf.

The Mathematics: How I arrived at the figure of Fourteen Million People
I made an assumption that the average human being weighs 160lbs (62kg).

The relative density or specific gravity of the human body is approximately 0.9. What this means is that the volume of a person is approximately 90% of their weight.

Now this is where the metric system proves itself, because weight and volume and specific gravity are all interlinked. Threfore we can immediately say that the volume of average human being is (0.9×62) = 56 litres.

56 litres is equivalent to 15 gallons and so the total number of ‘oil-filled people’ is 206,000,000 dived by 15.

So Once Again – How Much Oil Escaped In The Gulf Oil Spill?
As I said at the beginning of this article, this means that in the 87 days that oil spilled from the Deepwater Horizon well, an amount roughly equivalent to the volume contained within fourteen million people escaped into the Gulf.

Gulf Oil Spill Equivalent to Volume of 14 Million People is a post from: Quillcards

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2. Two Million Seabirds Killed In European Waters

Looking Down The High Street In Edinburgh

A Short Break
We drove to Edinburgh recently for a short break and to take some photographs for our ecard collection. So we were armed with maps and a guidebook and I took my main camera (a Nikon D700) and a Panasonic LX3.

We live in West Yorkshire, and according to Google Maps the journey should take four-and-a-half hours.

Well, Edinburgh is 200 miles from Leeds so that’s an average of just 45 miles per hour. Something didn’t add up, but I didn’t really think about it until we were in the Scottish border area when the reason became clear.

Although we were traveling along the A1 – a major arterial highway – it was just one lane each way for large parts of the journey through the Scottish countryside.

The A1 runs all the way from London, and for practically the whole length of England it is two or even three lanes in each direction. So just one lane each way in Scotland is remarkable.

For an island like Britain that is crisscrossed with roads, this was a major revelation. I really felt we were slowing down to a more relaxed and pleasant pace just by traveling on a one-lane highway. Scotland began to feel like the country at the end of the rainbow.

Drama All Around
When one lives in a place day to day perhaps it is easy to forget the backdrop of the town or city as one crosses the road, catches a bus, or goes shopping. As a visitor to Edinburgh, however, it is almost impossible not to be constantly aware of the drama of the place.

A Little Bit Of Background
Edinburgh is 56° north of the Equator, which puts it at about the same latitude as Copenhagen and Moscow.

In the three full days we were there, it rained on the first day, was bright and sunny the next day, and then on the third day the weather became overcast – as though the sky had been rubbed with a bluish-grey grit. That cold, overcast sky is reminiscent of a typical sky in Leeds, and is not my favorite kind of weather.

There is, however, a lively bustle about Edinburgh – all played out against the fine architecture – so the overcast weather was bearable.

Day Length
Because the Earth is tilted on its axis relative to the sun, places far from the equator have a more variable day length throughout the year. The summer days in Edinburgh are very long and so we had sixteen-and-a-half hours of daylight to enjoy.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that in the dead of winter Edinburgh only gets about seven-and-a-half hours of daylight.

But thanks to the warming effect of the Gulf Stream, it does not get as cold in winter as either Copenhagen or Moscow with which it shares the same latitude.

From John Knox's House: Looking Up The High Street

First Impressions
The center of Edinburgh is built along a narrow-sided valley that is just a couple of hundred yards across.

It would be romantic if a river ran along the bottom of the valley – it would be the icing on the cake. In fact, there is the railway station with the railway lines snaking away, so it is the glass roof of the station that fills most of the valley bottom.

Along one bank of the valley runs a series of tree-filled parks and behind them and higher up, runs Princes street, the main shopping street. Behind that are the ‘newer’ classical buildings laid out in fine terraces and crescents.

Behind that is the Scottish countryside. It is amazing that from some of the higher vantage points of the city center one can see beyond the built-up area to the rolling hills beyond. It made me feel that the place was friendly and manageable – perhaps because I don’t like long and arduous journeys just to get out of a city.

The Other Side Of the Valley
Across the narrow valley and parallel to Princes Street, runs the older, medieval drama of High Street that sits on a ridge that runs up to Edinburgh Castle.

The castle itself sits on the plug of a long-extinct volcano and below the castle walls there are the huge, sheer sides of the rock face. The sheer bulk of the castle marks a very dramatic end to the run of High Street.

The architecture of High Street dominates the skyline of Edinburgh with tall, solid, six-storeyed, granite buildings.

Seen from Princes Street, High Street look medieval, massive, looming, austere, and dour.

Anchor Close: Edinburgh

The buildings on the High Street seem to have been designed rather than to have simply grown together organically over the centuries. The strength of the architecture and the sheer scale of it is so great that when we passed it on the bus, it stopped me dead.

The architecture is in contrast to the large number of trees and green expanses of parkland lining the valley, to the friendly and appealing people, and to the cafe culture.

The city is busy, but not busy like London for example.

With a population of 450,000 Edinburgh is small as cities go, and very small as capital cities go. But there is a hum of people and tourists, and it does not feel far from civilization, as it might bearing in mind that it is a long day’s drive to London and further to continental Europe.

Looking Across The Valley From Princes Street To The High Street

The People
Is it possible to form a view of people after just a day or two? With that caution, they seemed open, ready to talk, ready to listen and interested in other people rather than just in themselves. There was a kind of frankness in people’s faces that was easy to respond to warmly.

The tone of the goings-on in the town and the constant backdrop of the architecture and the hills behind, gives the place a distinct feel that probably goes some way to explaining Edinburgh and Scotland.

As there is usually the skirl of bagpipes from somewhere or other, it is easy to somehow tune the city to the haunting background melody of the bagpipes.

Outdoor Cafes
There are outside cafes everywhere, reminiscent of Europe rather than of neighbouring England.

Along with the cafes, there are skittish herring gulls with pale pink legs and large webbed feet, looking nervously around with their beady eyes and picking up scraps of food. They pick up scraps from the ground around the tables – and occasionally land on the tables in bold moves to grab something tasty.

They fly in from the sea that is just a couple of miles away because Edinburgh is on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, a broad river mouth that gives out into the open sea just a few miles to the east.

Outside Edinburgh
On our way back home we decided to take the coast road for a while.

So on leaving the city, we followed the road east along the coast to the village of North Berwick. Here, just a couple of miles offshore lies the world-famous Bass Rock.

Bass Rock Viewed From North Berwick

It is a tiny, steep-sided island just a couple of miles across. Like Edinburgh Castle, it is volcanic plug from a long-extinct volcano. It is also the home to the largest breeding colony of gannets in the world and to huge colonies of puffins, kittiwakes, razorbills, and guillemots.

Sir David Attenborough has described Bass Rock as one of the wildlife wonders of the world.

From a distance, the top of Bass Rock is one mass of white from the packed bodies of the nesting gannets. Even from the shore and with the naked eye, the top of the rock looks white, especially when the sunlight falls on it, as it did late in the afternoon when we were there.

There are boat trips out the Bass Rock and to the nearby Isle of May – the whole of which is a national nature reserve – organized by the Scottish Seabird Center and I have made a note that taking a trip out to one or other of these islands is something I hope to do soon.

For those who might want to take a trip organized by the Scottish Seabird Center, you might be interested to note that it describes itself as “…a charity dedicated to inspiring people to appreciate and care for wildlife and the environment.”

North Berwick

Edinburgh: First Impressions is a post from: Quillcards

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1. Impressions Of Bundi
2. Almscliff Crag in North Yorkshire, England
3. A Memorable Hotel In Udaipur
4. The Jagdith Temple in Udaipur
5. Relaxing in Rajasthan

Dartmoor Ponies - A Quillcards Ecard

Memory And Travels

        Memory… is the diary that we all carry with us.
                                                        Oscar Wilde

What has often been most memorable in my travels are those moments that were unplanned and unexpected, and not necessarily those places about which I have had great hopes that something wonderful would occur.

One such space in time happened last month when my husband David and I went to Devon, a county in southern England. I was expecting gorgeous countryside because Devon is always described with such a superlative.

However, I hadn’t given much of a thought in particular to Dartmoor National Park and what I would see there – but it was in fact there where something took place that has become a lasting memory.

Ponies At Dartmoor National Park
First, however, some background about the area:

Dartmoor National Park is the largest and wildest area of moorland in the UK. It is well known for its Dartmoor ponies who roam free on its land, like the three horses pictured above. In fact, the pony is also the park’s logo since it is such an important part of life on the moor.

Ponies have roamed on the moor since prehistoric times. Many other kinds of ponies have also lived on the moor, such as those from the Shetland Islands. Shetland ponies like the one pictured below adapt well to the harsh conditions on Dartmoor.

Shetland Pony - A Quillcards Ecard

Aside from the Shetland, cross breeding also means that there are a lot of ponies living in Dartmoor who are of no particular breed.

Some History About These Dartmoor Equines
During the 1970s, an archaeological excavation came upon hoof prints providing evidence that domesticated ponies where found on Dartmoor around 3,500 years ago.

In fact, horses have been on Dartmoor for so long that an indigenous breed – the Dartmoor pony – evolved.

In the mid-1800s, Dartmoor was one of the main sources of granite in Britain. A railway was built to transport the rock, and ponies were used to haul trucks to and from the railway. By the first half of the 20th century, ponies were also used for farm work and for delivery of goods and services.

Locals, visitors, and tourists also liked to see the ponies then as they do to this day.

In Modern Times
By the middle of the 20th century, there were nearly 30,000 ponies on Dartmoor.

However, today there are fewer than 1,500 including fewer than 900 breeding mares left – which is why the Dartmoor pony breed is considered rare.

The reason for the decline is that in earlier years ponies were sold for horse meat – in Britain and then when that was no longer acceptable to the British public, in Europe.

With the rising tide of public opinion against the sale of horse meat to Europe, the number of ponies that the farmers could afford to keep declined.

A 1998 article in the Independent newspaper tells the whole story under the title The Ponies Killed By Kindness.

From Foal To Pony ‘Vital Statistics’
Some say that Darmoor ponies have the majority of their foals between April and July, others between May and August. At whatever time they are born, foals remain with their mothers for some time afterwards.

When a foal reaches maturity, it is never more than 12.2 hands (that’s 50 inches or 127 centimeters).

The colors for the breed include bay (which means that the horse has a reddish brown body color with a black mane, tail, ear edges, and lower legs), brown, black, grey, chestnut, and roan (which means that the horse has an even mixture of white and pigmented hairs that does not get gray or fade as the animal ages).

Piebalds (who are black and white) and skewbalds (who are brown and white) are crossbreds, and usually part Shetland pony.

Wild They Are Not, Though Close To It They Are
Some people mistakenly think that the ponies at Dartmoor are wild: They seem to roam as they wish; they don’t have saddles; and for the most part there are no people about.

Actually, all of the ponies are owned by local farmers, who mark the ponies to indicate their ownership and who let them out on to the Dartmoor commons to graze for most of the year. These farmers have rights to graze a certain number of sheep, cattle, and ponies on the moor.

Drifts
The ponies live out on the moor all year ’round. They spend the majority of their time in small herds of mares with young ponies and one adult stallion.

In late September and early October the local farmers get together to round up their ponies. These round-ups are called ‘drifts’.

During a drift, ponies are herded towards a small field or yard that’s easy to access. Not only people on horseback, but others using four-wheeled bikes and some on foot as well all get in on the act.

After they are herded, the ponies are separated into groups. They are checked out health-wise and treated if necessary. Those who are too old or ill or those to be sold are separated out, while the others return once again to the moor.

Out On The Moor
Intent on seeing the moors, we drove through the narrow roads that wind their way across Dartmoor.

Soon we came to a part of the moor where small clusters of the ponies with their foals were congregated on either side of the road. We parked our car and walked out gingerly on to the springy turf to try and get a closer look at the lovely creatures.

Here is a young foal that we saw at that time, cuddling up to its mom on the moor:

Dartmoor Ponies - A Quillcards Ecard

Visions On The Land
History, statistics and characteristics about the ponies aside, there are few things more peaceful and moving than being in the presence of these ponies as they walk and trot about, chomp down on the vegetation, snuggle against one another, and otherwise while away the time and play around at their home in Dartmoor.

The gentle mist wafting in the atmosphere during the afternoon when we were there also provided a soft and protective veil to the splash of colors and quiet sounds of these generally placid ponies and their foals.

Acknowledging Our Presence
The ponies and foals that we ‘met’ on Dartmoor quietly gave us the merest slip of a nod in a type of recognition of our presence.

We managed to get within a foot of some of them so we tried to pet them. However, they would have nothing of that: They skidaddled when they saw us get too near, and then they resumed their grazing and romping about further up a patch in that ancient and gloriously memorable setting.

Dartmoor Ponies - A Quillcards Ecard

A Beautiful Dignity
As we turned around from the horses to make our way back across the moor toward our parked car, we spotted this final scene:

Dartmoor Pony - A Quillcards Ecard

Seeing that pony looking majestically into the haze of the horizon with another grazing peacefully and the little one looking straight ahead at us, we felt a world away from our normal urban living in that serene and tranquil setting.

So as the mist softly drizzled over all of us humans and horses, this was the peaceful memory that I was lucky to get – and to remember, whenever I wish.

References
National Parks Authority: Dartmoor Ponies Factsheet
National Parks Authority: Dartmoor’s Cultural Heritage

‘A Celebration of the Dartmoor Pony’
By Tracey Elliot-Reep
Alpine Press, 2004

Ponies On Dartmoor - A Quillcards Ecard

Up Close With Ponies On Dartmoor is a post from: Quillcards

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It Always Rains On ‘Show Days’
There is a tradition that it always rains on ‘show days’ and sure enough it started raining heavily as we approached the showground of the Great Yorkshire Show that is held in Harrogate in the north of England in July each year.

The Threatening Sky At The Great Yorkshire Show

The Great Yorkshire Show is the largest agricultural show in England and, as we drove in and were guided by the stewards past fields full of parked cars, we envisaged a long and muddy tramp ahead of us from the car to the entrance gate to the show.

We parked and sat and waited out the rain. Through the steamed-up windows we sat and watched the comings and goings, trying to work out which way to walk to the showground.

As well as looking forward to enjoying the show, we were looking for opportunities to take photographs for the Animals category of our ecard collection. Consequently, the prospect of rain the whole afternoon was not what we had hoped for.

Then the rain stopped and the sun came out between banks of white clouds and we walked through the fields, dodging the puddles until we reached the track that led to the show.

Although the sky grew dark and threatening again during the afternoon – as you can see in the photograph above – it didn’t rain.

This sense of keeping one eye out for the unreliable weather is a facet of England that everybody learns to live with. It’s one of the jokes about the social interactions of the English that the first and most regular topic of conversation is the weather.

An Oddity
Agricultural shows are a long-standing tradition in England. They take place at various towns up and down the country, mostly in the summer months.

Yet these shows are an oddity in some ways. If a visitor from another planet were dropped into the Great Yorkshire Show, he might come away thinking that England was a country where everyone was involved in farming.

The fact is though, that the overwhelming majority of the people who attend the shows are urban dwellers because England is of course an urban society. It ceased being a network of rural communities generations ago

Yet going to these shows is like stepping into a parallel world of people who live and work in the English countryside, as though we rub shoulders with them every day.

Farmers And Their Animals
The English countryside is beautiful, but it is not quaint. English farms are amongst the most highly efficient and mechanised in the world.

Because of this mechanisation and efficiency there is a tendency to think that farmers regard their animals as ‘produce’ rather than as individuals. It is obvious however from watching the farmers at the shows that they have a caring relationship with their animals.

That was brought out very forcibly during the epidemic of foot and mouth (FMD) disease of 2001 when hundreds of thousands of cattle and sheep were buried in mass graves or incinerated under government orders to try to contain the outbreak. There were interviews on television then with farmers who were crying at the loss of their animals.

All For One - A Quillcards Ecard

Foot And Mouth Disease
The evidence suggests that the outbreak in 2001 began when pigs were fed catering swill that contained illegally imported meat that was infected with the FMD virus.

FMD is an airborne virus. Pigs are relatively resistant to infection this way, but having eaten the swill they became ‘virus factories’ pumping out plumes of the virus into the air where it then spread to cows and sheep.

In the acute stage, the symptoms are blistering around the feet and mouth. Animals rarely die from the disease but the long-term effect is that they don’t regain full health and they are often in pain. Therefore the disease is a risk both to the welfare of the animal and to the farming economy.

At the time of the outbreak, many farms were off limits to visitors. Nor were the animals permitted to leave the farms. We remember visiting farms outside the known areas of contamination and driving and walking through shallow troughs of disinfectant that were set across the entrance to farms. Everyone entering and leaving had to walk or drive through these troughs.

2007 Outbreak
There was another outbreak of FMD in 2007, but by then the lessons of the earlier outbreak had been learned and the outbreak was contained in the south east of England and stopped.

There were no disinfectant troughs at the Yorkshire Show and if there had been a reported outbreak this year, I do not think the Great Yorkshire Show would have taken place.

The Main Event
It is farm animals that dominate the events at agricultural shows, and showing animals and winning rosettes is a serious business. This is so whether it is for cows, pigs, or any other farm animals.

However, we spent most of our time looking at the sheep, taking photographs for our ecards, and in talking to the sheep farmers.

Sheep
There are over 40 million sheep in the United Kingdom, which in a population of 60 million people means that one doesn’t have to travel far to see sheep in the fields.

Sheep Saying Hello - A Quillcards Ecard

About 50 per cent of the flocks are from the hill regions of Scotland, Wales, and the Lake District. They are cross-bred each year with upland sheep who are then bred with lowland sheep to encourage the best genetic mix.

That is why there are 70 breeds of sheep and a further 12 recognised crosses in the UK living everywhere from the harsh, hill areas in the north to the lowland ‘downs’ or valleys near the south coast.

Sheep In Yorkshire Dales - A Quillcards Ecard

Lamb
If you are wondering where the lamb that reaches British tables comes from, it is the male cross-bred lambs that are taken off to market at about three months old.

When they have been taken away, it’s eerie and poignant to travel past a field that was full of sheep a few days before and now see only the mother ewes.

Benefits And Dangers
While cross-breeding helps maintain the health of sheep, transporting sheep to different parts of the country at breeding season was cited as one of the reasons that the foot and mouth epidemic spread so quickly throughout Britain.

Breeds
Some of the breeds of sheep have delightful names and wonderful appearances to go with the names. For example, at the show we saw the Leicester Longwool breed of sheep that has long strings of delicate, silky curls that stretch like beaded curtains to the ground all along its body.

Then there is the Hampshire Down breed, with short legs, short muzzles, and a characteristic chubbiness – as you can see in this photo.

Hampshire Down Sheep

We have seen the Herdwick breed of sheep many times. This is the breed that was saved for the nation by Beatrix Potter on her farms in the Lake District.

These hardy hill sheep and other similar breeds like the Blackface and the Swaledale are a the top of the cross-breeding chain. They are crossed with Upland sheep like the Border Leicester which produces mules or half-breeds that are then crossed with the lowland breeds like the Lincoln Longwool and the Hampshire Down.

For the first time, however, we saw Herdwick sheep that had recently been shorn. Then we were able to see that they have long, elegant necks that are normally hidden by a coarse grey and white fleece or jacket as farmers sometimes call the fleece.

Herdwick Sheep With Jacket - A Quillcards Ecard

Talking to a farmer who farms in the Lake District he told us that he knows the face of each one of his flock of Herdwicks.

When six of his sheep were stolen earlier this year, he knew immediately which six faces were missing.

Sheep Shearing Exhibition
At intervals throughout the day two sheep shearers put on an exhibition of sheep shearing. One sheared used electric clippers while the other used hand shears.

Sheep Sheering Exhibition

The commentator explained that all shearers know how to use hand shears because they travel the world with their trade and sometimes they are called upon to work far from a source of electricity.

As we have seen before, such as when we visited Masham Sheep Fair, shearers wear short felt bootees to prevent themselves sliding about on the floor when it becomes covered in lanolin from the fleeces.

Of course the electric clippers worked much faster than the hand shears, but it was amazing how quickly the shearer with the hand shears clipped the fleece off an animal.

In fact the whole business was over so quickly that the shorn sheep looked as though they were unsure what had just happened.

Somewhat Startled After Shearing

Sheep, Farmers, And The Great Yorkshire Show is a post from: Quillcards

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2. Sheep Ecards: Spending Time Under A Tree
3. Sheep in the Yorkshire Dales
4. The Masham Sheep Fair 2009 in England
5. The Yorkshire Dales Visitor Guide Features Our Photograph

Background
In 1991 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Oganization adopted a plan of action for the worldwide reduction of incidental catches of seabirds in driftnets, longlines and gillnets used by fishing vessels.

Terminology
A longline is a baited fishing line anything up to 75 miles (120km) in length that is let out into the water behind a fishing vessel.

A gillnet is a net hung vertically in the water behind a fishing vessel and kept vertical by floats at the top and weights at the bottom.

A driftnet is a string of gillnets tied end to end. They may be many miles long and instead of being anchored at the far end as gillnets are, they are allowed to drift with the current.

How They Kill Birds
Birds are attracted by the offal that the fishing vessels dump, and the birds will follow the vessels and congregate precisely because they know there are likely to be easy pickings.

Once there, the birds are lured by the bait on the hooks on the longlines and they crash into the gillnets as they dive and chase fish underwater.

For some birds, the easy pickings are fatal.

Estimated Two Million Seabirds Killed
The Royal Society For The Protection Of Birds and Birdlife International estimate that in the last ten years two million seabirds have died by being hooked on longlines or trapped in gillnets in European waters.

The record for the south Atlantic and the Pacific is better.

It is the European fishing areas that are failing to fish so as to minimise bycatch, as catching birds incidentally is called.

Driftnets
Driftnets of any length have been banned in certain waters worldwide since 1991 because of their impact on species such as dolphin, turtles, swordfish, and tuna.

Driftnets over one-and-a-half miles (2.5km) in length have been banned in European Union Waters since 1991 and completely banned in the Baltic Sea since 2008. This is all aimed at reducing incidental catches of creatures that inhabit the sea, but it does not address what is happening to seabirds that are caught in longlines and gillnets.

The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) says that the data is patchy but what is available indicates that it is albatrosses, shearwaters, petrels, fulmars, gannets, gulls, cormorants, shags, auks, divers, and grebes that are being killed by being hooked on longlines and caught in the nets of gillnets.

These birds are long-lived species and so their populations are sensitive to changes in the survival rates of adult birds.

Many of these seabirds are on the endangered species list. When they are caught on longlines and gillnets far out to sea – where their deaths are not recorded – it confounds efforts to monitor them and to protect them.

European Union Action
This year the European Union has issued a consultation paper that has been open for contributions since June 11th. The window within which to make contributions closes on August 9th.

Pending the formulation of the European Union Action plan, here is a precis of the recommendations of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) for fishing methods which reduce the numbers of birds caught as bycatch. The recommendations are described as combining “a set of very simple techniques which do not restrict fisheries and do not require any expensive equipment.”

Set hooklines with weights so they sink beyond the reach of seabirds as soon as they are put in the water.

Set longlines at night with only the minimum ship’s lights showing.

Don’t dump offal while longlines are being set.

Remove fish hooks from offal and fish heads before dumping them.

Run a brightly-colored streamer line above the water to scare away birds from the fishing line.

You Can Add Your Voice
The European Fisheries Commission action plan initiative states:

The European Commission intends to develop an EU Action Plan to reduce incidental catches of seabirds in fishing gears. The proposed initiative aims to reduce such catches, namely in longlines and gillnets, by reducing as much as possible the interaction between seabirds and fishing gear.

To this end, the Commission invites all stakeholders and general public to express their views on the questions identified in the consultation paper, as well as to present their opinions regarding further actions that could be introduced in a future Commission proposal for an EU-Plan of Action on Seabirds

If you wish to add your contribution, perhaps by suggesting that the recommendations of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) be implemented straight away, you can do so by clicking on the link in the consultation paper under the section headed ‘How to submit your contribution.’

Two Million Seabirds Killed In European Waters is a post from: Quillcards

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Good News For Quillcards
Lonely Planet – the publishers of the world-famous series of travel guides for the independent traveler – has chosen to showcase our travel articles on its online travel site.

Lonely Planet states on its site, “We sign up the best travel bloggers we can find and publish their articles on lonelyplanet.com.”

The fact that Lonely Planet has chosen to link with Quillcards is great news for us because it increases the exposure of our blog to thousands of new visitors. Of course, our blog amplifies exposure of the images we show in our ecard collection, so we are doubly pleased.

How Lonely Planet Links To Our Articles
The way it works is that we tag our travel articles appropriately. Then Lonely Planet picks them up, and publishes them on its travel site.

So for example, our articles about our experiences in Darjeeling in India are on the Lonely Planet page that highlights that city.

The Badge
If you take a look over to the right of this page, you will see we now have a Lonely Planet badge to show our new relationship.

Clicking the badge takes you to a couple of our articles on the Lonely Planet guide, this time about the holy city of Varanasi.

The Lonely Planet Story
The story of how the Lonely Planet series came into being is interesting in itself.

It started with the long journey of the founders, Tony and Maureen Wheeler, who traveled overland from London to Australia in an old car.

When they arrived in Australia, they wrote about the practical points they had learned from their journey. That became the first of the guides and was entitled Across Asia On The Cheap. Then came the ‘shoestring’ series, starting with South-East Asia On A Shoestring, followed by guides to individual countries, so that now there are hundreds of titles in the Lonely Planet (LP) catalog.

We Use Lonely Planet Guidebooks
I first started using Lonely Planet guidebooks before I went to South America. I was very impressed with one of the authors, Geoff Crowther, whose writing seemed to me to be authentic and whose accounts made me want to see some of the places he described.

I wasn’t going to lug the guides with me though, so having read them, I copied maps into an exercise book and made brief notes of places I intended to visit as I moved around.

Tamara started using LP guides when she lived to Korea. It was LP’s mention of the Korean branch of the Royal Asiatic Society that opened up a new world of exploration in Korea for her. Then when she went to Australia from Korea, it was Lonely Planet that guided her around Sydney and Melbourne.

Since then we have both used LP guides on many occasions, so we are happy to hook up with a series that we both appreciate and have been using for a long while.

The Digital World
Times have changed and now travelers can choose the destinations in which they are interested and download pdf versions of the guides – a tempting idea.

Now there are iPad, iPhone and Nokia apps for the city guides and phrasebooks, so the digital traveller can have it all as his or her fingertips.

From personal experience I appreciate having a guidebook to sort through the jungle of information that can greet one on reaching a foreign city.

A long and bumpy ride on a bus followed by trekking around to find somewhere to stay is not the best encounter one can have with a strange city at night.

That’s when a guidebook that treats you as though you can find your way out of the bus station and gives a quick rundown on good places is a godsend. Lonely Planet guides are that kind of guidebook.

Then once the essentials have been covered, you can strike out and follow your nose and leave the guidebook in the hotel room.

Quillcards Blog Chosen As A Lonely Planet Featured Site is a post from: Quillcards

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5. New Ecards Added To Quillcards

The ecards from our recent trip to India are now on line.

Organized under the theme of Focus: India, they are set out in categories as diverse as Animals, Architecture, Arts and Crafts, Religion, and the Sleeping Dogs of India.

Here are a sample six of the 115 images in this new section in Quillcards Ecards.

See The Full Range
As well as following the link above, you can always see the full range of our ecards by clicking on the links over to the left under the heading Browse Our Ecards.

What Is In The Range
We have monkeys, cows, and water buffalo in the Animals section, while our Architecture section covers buildings as well-known as the Taj Mahal but also includes the lesser-known but utterly beautiful Itimad Ud Daulah in Agra and the famous ‘sinking’ temple on the banks of the River Ganges in Varanasi.

You will find photographs from the dance evening we enjoyed in Udaipur in Rajasthan, as well as of the city’s famous hand-made puppets in our Arts and Crafts section.

Our Religions section covers everything from colorful coverings of Buddhist sacred texts to sadhus on pilgrimage.

Dogs are everywhere in India, and we wrote about the sleeping dogs of Delhi and Agra when we visited these two cities.

Since then we have experienced the not-so-quiet dogs of Darjeeling, who seem to prefer to sleep in the daytime and roam in packs and howl through the night.

Dog Confrontations
We saw several confrontations between lone dogs and packs of dogs.

One confrontation in particular that stands out in our minds took place on a busy street in Udaipur.

The yelping and barking started suddenly with one large, lone dog in a stand-off with a pack of assorted dogs. The lone dog looked worse for wear, with old wounds scarring his flanks – but he stood up to the pack bravely.

The leader of the pack looked in very fine condition and was obviously in command. The rest of his pack were an odd assortment ranging in size down to some very small dogs at the rear of the pack.

The dog that caught our attention however, was the one standing just behind the leader: Smaller than the leader and not as big as some of the others in the pack, he kept rushing forward ahead of the leader to confront the lone dog.

However, he would follow this behavior by turning in an obsequious, appeasing manner to the leader of the pack as though to say, “Well, of course, Your Majesty, I am not challenging your authority. I thought I would just help a bit. Of course, I will do whatever you want me to do. I was just helping you know, not questioning your position. See, I am moving back here behind you. See, look, I have moved back.”

Then a moment later – all overcome with excitement and seemingly unable to control himself – the dog would rush forward to bark at the lone dog, glancing backwards at the leader to see whether he had overstepped the mark again.

Magical India
India is a huge country, made all the more vast by its varied cultures and its tortuous train journeys.

It is a fantastical kaleidoscope, and we hope these images give you a taste of the magic.

The Ecards From Our India Trip Are Now On Line is a post from: Quillcards

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2. Delhi Dogs And Agra Dogs
3. Both Ways Around The Roundabout: Traffic In India
4. A Package From India: From Cloth To Sealing Wax
5. Dangerous Drains and A Magical Cultural Evening In India

We shoot most of the photographs for our ecards using digital SLR cameras. A few of our photographs are, however, shot on film and then scanned.

Whichever method we use to capture the photographs though, the aspect ratio of the images we use for our ecards – that is the length of the long side of the image compared to the length of the short side of the image – is 3:2.

Some people think the aspect ratio of an image changes with the size of the photograph. The fact is that if the image is scaled up or down, the aspect ratio doesn’t change. The ratio of the length of the two adjoining sides is the same no matter how big or small the photograph is.

As I said, 3:2 is the image format we use for almost all of our ecards. That includes the new Images Of India ecards that we added to this site recently.

Photographs For This Blog
It’s a different story with the photographs we take for this blog. Here we crop the images in different ways to illustrate a story and to suit the layout of the article. Sometimes we also set the text so that it flows around the cropped photographs as in this article about tea.

Nature Photographs Suit A Panoramic Format
Images of trees and fields suit a wide format because the interesting parts of the image lay more or less in a horizontal line and a panoramic photograph mimics the way we generally look at the landscape.

South Yorkshire Landscape

Orientation
One thing that causes confusion is the use of the word landscape when talking about photographs. That is because as well as refering to trees and fields, etc., it is also used to describe which way up a photograph is oriented.

It is easier to show than to describe.

Both of these blue rectangles have the same 3:2 aspect ratio but one is in portrait orientation and the other in landscape orientation. Of course, the principle works whatever the aspect ratio.

Also, if I were to turn a panoramic image that was in landscape orientation on its side I would get a bookmark.

Same Aspect Ratio - Different Orientation

Large Elements In Photographs
Panoramic images works can also ‘work’ where there is a large element in the photograph, such as a country house set in a landscape. Here is an example of an image that is an amalgam of six images merged in Photoshop. It shows a country hall in South Yorkshire, England set in its surroundings.

The house and its grounds are now owned by the local authority for the benefit of everyone, though it was once a privately owned house in which one family lived.

Cannon Hall - South Yorkshire

The existence of these country mansions makes me think of the fact that in a more equal society the house would never have been built nor the trees planted. On the other hand, everyone can now enjoy the house and grounds because of the inequality that went before.

Website Header Images
The header images at the top of our blog are long and narrow, as you can see.

What you may not have noticed is that if you refresh this page, you will see the image change.

This is because we have a number of header images stored on our server and a new one may appear each time you refresh the page or each time you visit this blog.

Portraits
Long, narrow, panoramic images can look great for landscapes but would look a bit unusual if used, for example, for a studio portrait. Having said that, a panoramic shot that shows the person and also includes some of the background can look good, as Arnold Newman’s 1946 portrait of the composer Igor Stravinsky shows.

Newman posed Stravinsky with his arm resting on his grand piano. Stravinsky is at one end of the photograph and the bulk of the photograph is taken up with the shape of the piano. It is a great example of the panoramic format working well for a portrait.

It’s an unusual portrait because the composer’s head and shoulders occupy only a six per cent of the total area of the photograph. Nonetheless it is a powerful photographic portrait.

Back To The Aspect Ratio We Use For Our Ecards
As I said at the beginning of this article, for our ecards we use the 3:2 image format. It is not just chance that we do so, and in fact the 3:2 aspect ratio has been the most popular format throughout the history of photography.

There is a very good reason why 3:2 is the most popular image format. It is a very good compromise – being neither too long and narrow nor too square – and therefore it suits a variety of subjects.

Aspect Ratios - From Square To Panoramic

The Dominance Of The Three To Two Aspect Ratio
But though it seems to be a good all-round compromise, how precisely did 3:2 become the dominant ratio for film and digital cameras worldwide?

The History Of Film
There is no absolute reason that film had to be in this format, and throughout the history of film there have been many film formats other than this.

None however has been as popular as the 35mm film that has been used by countless millions of people worldwide since the early Kodak and Leica cameras gave people the portability and ease of use they wanted.

In Thomas Edison’s Laboratory
The reason that the format became the most popular may simply be that the earliest roll film made for the new ‘compact’ cameras was in 3:2 format and the momentum grew from that.

That film was made in the 1890s by William Dickson in Thomas Edison’s laboratory.

What Dickson did to make the ‘new’ film for still photography was simply to cut lengthwise down the 70mm movie film stock supplied to him by the Eastman Kodak Company. Then as they say, the rest is history.

Putting It In The Frame
Of course, film is cut into rolls to fit in the camera, so it is the really the size and shape of the metal frame or mask that sits in front of the roll of film in the camera that determines the actual frame size and shape of the photographic negative.

Without that frame or mask, a roll of film is just that – a roll – and the individual frames can be any size at all, so long as the lens will focus a sharp image on it.

After a few false starts and a bit of haggling, the size of the frame or mask was settled on by Eastman Kodak at 36 x 24mm -which is of course the 3:2 aspect ratio because 36 is one and a half times 24mm.

And it is the shape of the frame that is really what we are talking about when we speak about the aspect ratio of the individual photograph recorded on a roll of film.

So for the best part of a century the film that you or I would buy from the store – whether made by Kodak, Fuji, Agfa, Ilford, or any of the other brand names that were once common but of which many no longer exist – would be 35mm film made to fit cameras that produced images in a 3:2 image format.

35mm Film From Kodak And Fuji

The Transition To Digital
Kodak, Nikon, and Canon were among the earliest manufacturers of digital cameras for the mass market. They already made film cameras so it was probably a matter of simple economics for them to make digital cameras that used the parts they already used in their film cameras.

Or perhaps they simply decided to stick with the 3:2 aspect ratio that people had become used to.

This aspect ratio is used in the dSLR (digital Single Lens Reflex) cameras we use and have used here at Quillcards – the Nikon D700, the Nikon D60, and the Nikon D200.

And that is why the photographs for the Quillcards ecards are in the proportions they are. That and the fact that the 3:2 aspect ratio is still a good compromise and suitable for all kinds of subjects.

Compact Point and Shoot Cameras
As digital cameras matured, camera manufacturers recognised that they were free to make camera sensors in any aspect ratio they wanted. As a result, the manufacturers of many compact point and shoot digital cameras have opted for a slightly squarer 4:3 format.

Some manufacturers even offer a range of formats within the same camera. Of course, what that really means is that when the format is changed, the frame masks off part of the sensor.

The compact camera that I use as a digital ‘notebook’ is the Panasonic LX3. It has a standard rectangular 3:2 format sensor but it also has a mask operated by a switch that changes the format to 4:3 or 16:9. It also has a custom setting in its menus that enables 1:1 or square format.

Cropping The Image
Of course once any photograph has been taken it is always possible to crop it to a different format. I took this with a Nikon D200 camera so the original image was 3:2. I isolated the model’s face in Photoshop and cropped it to the 1:1 square format image you can see here.

Square Format Portrait

Where Is All This Leading?
As you may have heard, a large number of Polaroid images were sold at auction by Sotherby’s in New York a few days ago under an order of the court following the bankruptcy of the Polaroid Corporation.

Among those sold were Polaroids of and taken by some famous photographers and artists such as Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh, William Wegman, Robert Frank, Andy Warhol, and Chuck Close.

If you are not familiar with the work of Chuck Close, he is a painter who paints very large photo-realistic paintings. In the case of the Polaroids though, he made a montage of his own face built up from a number of Polaroid photos.

Polaroid photos have a very recognizable shape. They are more or less square, but set within a frame that has extra depth at the bottom – all of which gives the shot a particularly attractive ‘finished’ look.

With the sale of the Polaroid Corporation to PME, the future of Polaroid as a brand is uncertain but if you are interested in Polaroid products, the Impossible Project is a good place to look for them.

From Polaroid To Poladroid
Now there is an application that enables anyone to take a digital image and make it into a Polaroid lookalike. The software can be downloaded from the Poladroid website.

I shot this photograph in India on the banks of the river Ganges at Varanasi. I shot a normal 3:2 image with a Nikon D60 and Nikon 35mm AF-S lens. Then I put the image through the Poladroid application, and this is the result.

The Lowdown On Photographs And Aspect Ratios is a post from: Quillcards

Related posts:

1. Framing Photographs
2. Nikon D700 and Nikon D60: Comparing Image Quality
3. Nikon D700: RAW and JPEG Files Compared
4. The Care of Photographs
5. Sculpting with Light in Photography

Stupa At Sarnath

Buddha’s Religious Teachings
Having adopted the life of a religious master from the age of 35 until his death in 486 B.C. at the age of 80, Buddha taught the ‘noble truths’ that the craving for pleasure and the avoidance of pain leads to existence and suffering.

To get out of this cycle, Buddha stressed, one must strive to take a middle path between indulgence and denial. He preached that to attain that desired path, one should strive to behave with correct views, intentions, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.

Buddha As The ‘Lord Of The Deer’
There are a number of different claims about where the name of Sarnath for this deer park was derived, with one of them explaining that one of Buddha’s titles is ‘Saranganath’, which means ‘Lord of the Deer’.

As the story goes, Buddha as an enlightened being took the form of a deer and offered his life to a king to take the place of the doe that the king was planning to kill. The king in turn was so moved that he created the park now known as Sarnath as a sanctuary for deer.

Sarnath
The park and the town that has grown up around it is situated 8 miles (13Km) north of the city of Varanasi in the State of Uttar Pradesh in India.

It is reached by road from Varanasi by crossing the Varuna river and traveling along the aptly named Guatam Buddha Rajpath road.

A Peaceful And Pleasant Place
After trying to deal with the constant clamor of staggering traffic in Varanasi, we were delighted to find that the road out to Sarnath becomes peaceful and pleasant.

Buddhist Monks At Sarnath

It was an enormous contrast to the city that lay only a short distance behind us.

The town of Sarnath is small and dominated by a number of temples and by the parked coaches that have delivered pilgrims here from all over the world.

There is also a very good museum devoted to Buddhist artifacts and of course there is the Deer Park where the Buddha taught.

Once inside the neatly trimmed and tranquil park, we saw many Buddhist pilgrims like these robed monks.

The Dhamek Stupa In The Deer Park
Dotted with the remains of buildings among close-cropped grassed areas, the remains of the Dhamek stupa dominates everything in the deer park.

This stupa was built about 1,500 years ago to replace the earlier stupa built by Ashoka almost 750 years before that.

The Influence of Ashoka At Sarnath
Ashoka was the emperor during the Mauryan dynasty who ruled almost all of the Indian subcontinent from 269 BC to 232 BC.

It was he who spread Buddhism all over the country and it was he who built the original stupa at Sarnath.

Pilgrims At This Holy Buddhist Site
The original stupa and its replacement commemorate the Buddha’s life and deeds and contains part of his remains.

Today it is visited by Buddhists from all over the world.

They come to listen to stories about the Buddha’s life, to sermons from this holy site which marks the place where the stream of his teaching first circulated, and just to be in contact with the place where the Buddha taught.

We saw many groups of such pilgrims exploring this area, like these men and women dressed in white who are walking around the base of the stupa.

Pilgrims Walking Around The Stupa At Sarnath

Other Visitors Absorbing The Tranquility Of The Park
We also observed other visitors dressed in everyday clothing who were similarly soaking up the atmosphere about the Dhamek stupa that day.

As you can see, they are sitting with umbrellas to shield themselves from the hot rays of the sun that day:

Sarnath Visitors

Remains From Earlier Times
Although Sarnath is now visited by many pilgrims and other visitors these days, the park actually lay forgotten until 1883 when a British Archaeological Society team led by Sir Alexander Cunnigham, J.D. Beglar and Dr. Rajendralal Mitra meticulously excavated the site and rediscovered the Ashokan stupa beneath the Damekh stupa.

This modern, carved stone inscription stands near the stupa and reads:

“According to an inscription dated 1062 A.D. recovered from the site its old name was Dharma Chakra Stupa. It is perhaps commemorating the spot where Lord Buddha preached his first sermon. In search of the relic casket Alexander Cunningham bored a vertical shaft through its center down to the foundation level and at a depth of 91.4cm [3 feet] he found a slab with the inscription “Ye Dharma Hetu Prabhava Hetu…” written in the Brahmi script of 6th -7th A.D.

Inscription Near The Damekh Stupa

Further below he traced out a stupa made of Mauryan bricks. However, the present diameter of this solid cylindrical tower is 28.5 meters [94 feet] at the base and 33.35 meters [110 feet] in height. Its total height is 42.60 meters [140 feet] including the foundation.

The structure consists of a circular stone drum up to a height of 11.2 meters [37 feet] from the ground above which rises the cylindrical mass of brickwork about 6.0 meters [20 feet] above the base eight niches are provided in eight directions which must have contained images of the Buddha, below them runs a broad course of beautifully carved stones having geometric designs, swastika, leaf and floral patterns combined with birds and human figures.”

Building Details
Here is a detail of the carving decorating one of the buildings in the park. Close inspection showed that the stonework was covered in small patches of gold leaf arranged in patterns.

We learned that some of the gold leaf laid on the stonework is very old, dating back to the earliest buildings in the park that pre-date the stupa itself.

Sarnath Temple Carvings

During our visit, we also saw groups of women rebuilding some of the brick walls of the ancient ruins in the park. All through the park, low walls indicate the outlines of the many buildings that filled the park at one time.

Women Rebuilding Walls At Sarnath

Deer In Sarnath Today
There is a small fenced off area at one side of the park where a group of deer were eating long, red Delhi carrots that a good number of people were feeding them at the time.

The Boy Seller
We had seen those carrots for sale on stalls and stands throughout India.

This time in Sarnath, I noticed several young boys hawking bags of these carrots which had been cut into thin, manageable strips.

I noticed that the deer were chomping down the vegetables with great relish. So I decided this time to buy a bag to feed the deer.

Cross-Cultural Sharing
I went back to the fence and started feeding the animals.

However, I saw a group of middle-aged women who were watching me and other people feeding the deer out of the corner of my eye.

They were shyly smiling at us as they also admired the animals.

Suddenly it occurred to me to share the red Delhi carrots with these visitors. So I turned and motioned to them, since I wasn’t sure they would understand English.

I got a great reception to my pantomime, and soon several sets of hands were politely thrust in my direction to receive the vegetables.

That Circle of Life
As I handed out the carrots, I received something in return – namely a row of sincerely warm smiles, meaningful eye contact with the women in question, and gentle pats of gratitude on my shoulders and arms as well.

And so it occurred to me that everyone in our little group benefited that day under the heat of the midday sun: From the boy who sold me the carrots; to myself who had the pleasure of sharing them with the women; to the women who seemed moved by interacting with me as a guest in their land – and ultimately to the gentle deer, those lovely animals who accepted the food so gratefully from all of us and made our spirits rise at the sight of their beauty.

Deer At Sarnath

References:
New World Encyclopedia
Wikipedia – Sarnath
Wikipedia – Ashoka
Education World – The Buddhist Circuit
Sacred Destinations – Sarnath
The Dhammapada

Sarnath, The Deer Park In India Where Buddha First Taught is a post from: Quillcards

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1. A Package From India: From Cloth To Sealing Wax
2. Both Ways Around The Roundabout: Traffic In India
3. Encountering Elephants In India
4. Delhi: Getting Into Town From Majnu Katila
5. Dangerous Drains and A Magical Cultural Evening In India