I drove through Virginia countryside for five hours on my way to Goose Point Recreation area on Philpott Lake, passing scenes like this much of the way. This shot was taken off Route 221 in Floyd County heading north to Roanoke.

I’m fascinated by barns and farm scenes lately—working farms, abandoned barns falling over, the differences in barn architecture as you move from New England to the South, the different ways hay is bundled up for the winter, the amount of hay harvests each region can produce before the winter arrives. This is what I’m thinking about as I wind my way along the roads that skirt the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Text and photo by Stephen Bugno

Such was the popularity of Anthony that work on the basilica in Padua began immediately after his death in 1231. The site was already attracting pilgrims and it was deemed necessary to raise a proper monument. The exterior was fashioned without a precise architectural style. The elaborate mix of a Romanesque Gothic facade with an eight-domed Byzantine roof and several small belfries give it an eastern look.

St. Anthony was beatified by Pope Gregory IX less than one year after his death. Thirty-two years later the immense Basilica was completed, and the time had come to transfer the body to its new resting place. When the sarcophagus was opened, the body had turned to dust while the saint’s tongue was found miraculously intact and red in color.

Today in the Baroque Chapel of Relics, in the apse at the back of the church, you can see the actual tongue presented in a gold reliquary. Also on display are the saint’s jaw bone and vocal chords.

Text and photo by Stephen Bugno

A visit to Beirut is not complete without a long stroll along the Corniche. Walk for hours past others out for a leisurely walk, men fishing, kids swimming, teenagers smoking shisha in between cliff dives, and women sunbathing on the sand. All before catching a sunset high on the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean.

Beirutis continue to live and love life despite a recent history of much violence. It seems like everywhere you go there’s a building that’s been bombed out, a bridge that’s been blown up or a local telling you that this is the spot where a politician was assassinated.

Text and photo by Stephen Bugno

After a vomit-inducing hydrofoil ride from North Cyprus, we docked at Alanya, Turkey—a big city filled with Scandinavian and Russian package tourists. From there we went an hour west to the little town of Side, which was even more densely packed with European package vacationers. From there we moved on to the Lycian coast to the anti-Side resort: Olympos.

We found this ghetto of independent travelers to be as equally annoying as places like Side. However, the great beach in an incredibly beautiful setting made up for the lack of Turkishness, expense, and loud, drunken nineteen year-olds crawling in and out of every treehouse hostel.

Turned off by the whole Olympos scene, we walked 3km north on the beach to the quiet village of Çıralı where we camped alongside Turkish families and enjoyed two days in the sun and sea.

Text and photo by Stephen Bugno

A Photo Essay of Cajamarca, Peru

By Danielle Krautmann

Charlie and I just got back from a long weekend in Cajamarca, where we celebrated my husband’s 30th birthday. Cajamarca is the city nearest to Cerro Corona, the mine where Charlie works, which is about a tw0-hour drive from the city.  Although Charlie knew he liked Cajamarca, he had never spent much time in the actual town as he’s usually only there for an hour or two between arriving at the airport and going to the mine.  I met Charlie there on a Thursday, and from the moment my plane landed in the middle of the cow field, I fell in love with the place.  Being surrounded by trees, mountains, and green farmlands was just the start of it.  One of my favorite things was being able to walk around without hearing the whistles, kissing noises, and disrespectful comments from Los Hombres.  It is far safer than Lima.

 

 

Our third day, we visited Granja Porcon.  This is a successful cooperative that houses 53 families who all contribute and take stock in the exports of the farm.  Since they don’t allow new members into the coop, marrying between families is encouraged and common.  Incest is best!  I had a dream once that mom made me marry my brother.  Gross!  No offense, Brent.  Members recently decided to allow tourists to visit, and added a zoo and small 10-room hotel to their community.  The drive there took us through beautiful wooded forests.  We drooled over the idea of taking backpacking (trekking) trips through them.  Apparently getting a permit to camp in that area is fairly simple.

On the bus ride there, we stopped to see the work of some stone carvers in the area.  In this photo, Charlie is standing in front of the Inca leader Atahualpa.  Cajamarca has historical significance because its essentially where the Incan empire ended.  In 1952, Francesco Pizarro’s 160 Spanish troops armed with cannons and swords slaughtered 7000 Indiginous people who’s slings and axes were no match.  The Spaniards captured Atahualpa and held him for a ransom for more than a year.  What the Spanish sought was gold, and soon hoards of it began coming in.  Indiginous artifacts and ornaments were melted down to 6000kg of gold and 12,000 kg of silver that would now be worth more than $60 Million US dollars.  Despite the ransom, after learning that Atahualpa was sending for help from his followers in Quito, they killed him by strangulation.  That wasn’t very nice.

We saw women carrying bundles of wood and digging trenches.  I would be curious to know what the men do to pull their weight.

One of the most valuable exports from the farm is Vicunya wool.  Vicunyas are wild relatives of alpacas and their fur is sold for $500 US dollars per kilo.

We visited a shop in the coop where the women wove beautiful rugs and blankets on looms.  They use yarn that they make themselves from sheep wool.  Most of the yarn is colored with natural ingredients from plants and insects.

The zoo housed a surprising variety of animals including an enormous condor, a Puma, the Speckled Bear (only bear native to South America), Jaguars from the jungle of Peru, and the adorable little Peruvian deer that about a third the size of the deer we’re used to seeing in the States.

We were encouraged to feed bread to the bear, who opened his mouth and waited for you to throw it in, and the monkey who reached out through his fence to take the bread from our hands!

 

This is the local fire department in Banos Del Inca.  Complete with cows walking through the field.

The fruit market is enormous and goes up and down both sides of a long street.  Cajamarca’s proximity to the jungle provides them with a large variety of fruits and vegetables.

Here is Charlie standing in front of a woman selling Mamey and Pacae.  Two fruits from the jungle.  Mamey (not your Mamey) is the one that looks like a potato.  The inside is bright orange, and it has a sweet flavor and peach like consistency.  The Pacae is the green bean looking plant.  It has large seeds inside that are covered with a white fleshy substance.  You eat the sweet flesh, not the bean.

This is a woman breastfeeding while she’s selling different varieties of rice and grains.  Cajamarca got its first large grocery store “Metro” a couple years ago.  Before that, I think the majority of people used markets and small stores to get their food.

An outdoor “restaurant” that we ate at.  I had stuffed hen, Charlie ate curried pork.  Both were served with rice and beans.  The clothing you see this woman wearing is the typical dress of the campesinos (peasants).  In the city of Cajamarca, you see plenty of people dressed in typical jeans and t-shirts just as often.  But once you get into the mountains, most of the women are dressed in these wool skirts with petticoats and bright colored sweaters, always with their hair tied back in a long braid.  Their wide-brimmed hats are made from a very fine fiber from the palm tree and serve multiple purposes.  Other than keeping the sun out of their eyes, they use the hats to measure the good they trade.  For example, “I will trade you a half hat of rice for a full hat of beans.”

If we had ordered chicken, it would have been fresh!  These poor chickens were awaiting their demise.

 

One of my favorite views of probably my favorite city of its size in all of Europe, Porto, Portugal is a city I would visit again and again.

Despite the many tourist friendly activities in the city, I somehow avoided most of them and just spent most of my five days wandering through the maze of cobbled streets, admiring the architecture, socializing with university students, staying up until daylight gaining an appreciation to the city’s authentic vibe.

This shot, looking out over the rooftops of Old Porto was taken from the Sé do Porto, the Porto Cathedral, which stands on a rocky outcrop above the city.

Text and photo by Stephen Bugno

One of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen, the Mumbai Victoria Terminus train station stands as a glorious testament to 19^th century architecture in this city of nearly 14 million people. It has been renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.

The famous landmark, built in the Gothic style, was designed by Frederick William Stevens, in 1887-1888 and took 10 years to build.

As we approached the station by foot we crossed through a huge park, weaving our way in and around several pickup cricket matches.

Text and photo by Stephen Bugno

On a Sunday afternoon my brother and his coworkers and I took a trip 35 km out of Bordeaux to the vineyards surrounding Saint- Émilion. The village, now a World Heritage site, was overrun with day-trippers (like us), souvenir shops, and wine stores. An easy five-minute stroll in one direction landed me in a quiet street with no signs of tourism and great views of the beautiful town and surrounding vineyards.

We toured and tasted at one of the many wineries on the outside of town and took a walking tour through the historic sites, most notably the hermitage carved into the rock of the 8^th century monk and travelling confessor, Émilion. The monks who followed him started up the commercial wine production in the area.

Before leaving, we visited a huge church carved into the limestone cliff which was reminiscent of the churches I had seen in Cappadocia, Turkey, the previous year.

Text and photo by Stephen Bugno

We took the road south out of At-Bashi immediately passing a huge animal bazaar. Our Kyrgyz driver carefully weaved his way through the cows and horses being led across the main road. We continued, overtaking huge 18-weelers full of Soviet scrap metal, lined up miles before the Torugart Pass border, the back way into China’s Xinjiang province.

We turned east onto a gravel road, passing plenty of yaks before reaching the Tash Rabat Caravansarai. There were a few yurts set up in the grass covered river valley and some horses for riding. The very well preserved stone structure of Tash Rabat is thought to be from the 15^th century, when Silk Road travelers used it as an inn.

Text and photo by Stephen Bugno

After hopping a train two stops south from Apatity, my hosts’ father and I walked about an hour further along the railway and then cut through the forest on a trail and over a short mountain with and old rusty lookout tower. The mosquitoes were incredibly huge and we constantly swatted them from our face as we walked. After another hour we arrived at the small family dacha set back about 50 feet from Lake Imandra. We grabbed the bamboo fishing poles and set off with the dog in the rowboat in the late evening.

This photo was probably taken at 2am. Being above the Arctic Circle in Russia’s Kola Peninsula, the sun never really set that evening; it just dipped below the mountain and came right back up again. We returned to the dacha at around 4 am and scaled the fish, threw some lake water in the pot on the wood-burning stove, and sliced potatoes and onions to make Ukha, Russian fish soup.

Text and photo by Stephen Bugno

The Giant’s Causeway is a series of 40,000 interlocking hexagonal basalt columns thought to have been formed from rapidly cooling lava some 50-60 million years ago. In the morning, I left my hostel in Portrush on a rented bicycle and peddled the 10 miles through a strong headwind along the beautiful coast of County Antrim, Northern Ireland. Legend has it that the Irish warrior Finn McCool built the causeway to walk to Scotland to fight his Scottish counterpart Benandonner.

Text and photo by Stephen Bugno

1) The Plaza de Armas in Arequipa.  Arequipa is also known as “the white city” because many of its buildings are made from a white volcanic rock called sillar.  The city rests in the Andes around 7,800 feet above sea level and is the second most populated city in the country (around 904,900 residents)

2) Our wonderful hosts; Alberto (who works with Charlie) and Rosa.  Along with letting us stay in their house, they showed us around our first day in Arequipa and Rosa prepared breakfast for us every morning!

3)  Yummy Arequipena cheese in the market.

4)  The city is filled with colonial-era Spanish style churches made from sillar.

4)  We visited El Monasterio Santa Catalena.  A photographer’s dream, it is enormous and often described as a city within a city.  Founded in 1580, it originally only accepted nuns who came from rich families who could pay a significant dowry.  Although it was traditional for rich, upper class Spanish families to send their second child to serve God in chaste poverty, in this case the nuns each had between one and four slaves and had frequent parties inviting musicians from town.  They lived it up in the style to which they were accustomed.  After 1871, the Pope got word of this and sent a strict nun to whip things into shape.  She fired the slaves (although some stayed on and became nuns), and sent the dowries back to their families.  From this point on, the nuns were not allowed to venture outside the walls of the monastery.  Currently around 30 nuns still live in a newer section where they have no interaction with society outside of the monastery.  To their credit, it didn’t seem all that bad there.  There were lots of beautiful courtyards and the nun’s chambers were spacious and comfortable.  Each nun had their own “cell”  with a bed, a praying area, and its own kitchen.

5)  The place is filled with beautiful courtyards and brightly colored flowers.

6)  Praying in one of the nuns cells.

7)  Charlie cooking in one of the nun’s kitchens.  To his credit, I begged him to pose for this picture.  He would not have done it voluntarily.

We were in Arequipa during Carnival time.  As far as I can tell, they celebrate Carnival in Arequipa by throwing water balloons and spraying each other with foam.  We got nailed by several water balloons and I was not happy about this.

9) Here we are in another one of the brightly colored courtyards we found throughout the city

10) We took a four-hour bus ride from Arequipa to our hotel in Colca Canyon.  It made several stops along the way.  A lot of the ladies selling their crafts had baby alpacas with them….a well planned strategy; I was much more likely to buy a sweater from a lady who had a cute baby animal I could pet.

11) A great view of Mt. Misti from our bus ride.

12) Another great view of the mountains with some alpacas grazing in the field.

13) View from the road above of the beautiful Colca Lodge and Spa where we stayed in Colca Valley.  Complete with thermal springs, and an incredibly friendly catering staff, this was a wonderful place to stay.

14)  View from our cabin.

15)  A bbq style lunch was prepared for us each day with three different types of meats of our choice, served to us at riverside.

16)  We went horseback riding in the canyon on one of our days there.  Twice as deep as the grand canyon, Colca Canyon is said to be the largest and tallest canyon in the world.

17) A local woman from one of the nearby villages farming with her mule.

18)  The happy couple and their horses.

19) Another view of the canyon.

20) Part of the Colca Valley.  This does a nice job of showing the terraced gardens they use here.

21)  The happy couple at the condor overlook.  The condors fly very close to the walls of the canyon so it’s a very popular spot for tourists to come and look.  We didn’t get any great pics of the condors, but did see a lot of nice views of the canyon!

-Posted by Danielle L. Krautmann,  11 March, 2010

The Jinshaling section of the Great Wall of China is located in a mountainous area 125 km northeast of Beijing.  We spent the afternoon hiking the 10.5 km along the wall to Simatai, passing 67 towers, five passes and two beacon towers, much of wall rubble beneath our feet.  This section was built about 1570 during the Ming Dynasty.

Text and photo by Stephen Bugno

After changing trains in St. Moritz, I rode through the Bernina Pass and chugged slowly down into Italian-speaking Switzerland. I enjoyed an espresso and a short stroll through the town of Poschiavo and snapped this photo while hanging out of the train window as we returned up the steep grade to the alpine pass.

Photo and text by Stephen Bugno

After a day of cycling and walking through a cold, rainy, gray December day in Copenhagen, a friend and I ducked into this cozy cafe for this artist creation of a sandwich. After an hour of trying to talk over rowdy, drunk English football fans in town for a match, we got back on our old bikes and continued pedaling through the old cobblestone streets.

Photo and text by Stephen Bugno

This photo of the Armenian Cowboy was taken in Nagorno-Karabakh. Earlier in the day we visited Gandzasar Monastery, a beautiful 13th century hilltop Armenian monastery.  A few miles down the road from the monastery, at  junction in the road, we tried to hitch a ride on a country road north to Dadivank Monastery complex.  After a few hours waiting, no vehicles passed. We gave up and decided to pitch our tent in a nearby river valley. After taking a dip in the river and lighting a fire, this Armenian cowboy came down off the hillside with his cattle.

The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is an unrecognized, de facto independent state established within the territory of Azerbaijan.

Photo and story by Stephen Bugno

Photos by Tata Nadaryan

Photos by Tata Nadaryan