Happy 100th Birthday Machu Picchu (Peru)

It was one hundred years ago when a young American Yale student Hiram Bingham, guided by locals arrived at Machu Picchu and discovered and unveiled this iconic location to the outside world. Over the years, Bingham cleared four centuries of growth, mapping and studying the site and solving some of the mysteries of this advanced civilisation.

Strings of special events are planned to celebrate the special event (putting pressure on the delicate area) from musical concerts to indigenous rituals. In one moving tribute and after considerable international pressure, a number of treasures taken by Bingham to add to his university's collections, for further study and protection, are going to be returned to Peru to start a museum in Cusco.

Gilbert H. Grosvenor, editor National Geographic magazine, eloquently summed up the wonder of Machu Picchu when he wrote in April 1913 in an issue of the magazine dedicated to Bingham's story and photos (one example included showing the same area as the modern photo) said "What an extraordinary people the builders of Machu Picchu must have been to have constructed, without steel implements, and using only stone hammers and wedges, the wonderful city of refuge on the mountain top."

Indeed, Machu Picchu is one of the finest travel wonders I have ever witnessed, made special by remarkable architecture and techology for the time, the exceptional Andean mountain setting and the superb multi-day hike along the Inca Trail to first see this mysterious lost city on sunrise from an entrance that sits high above the city.

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Bucegi Mountains

 
TheBucegi Mountains cover 115 square miles (300 square Kilometers) of the renowned Transylvania region of Rumania.The mountains' history dates back about 100 million years to the time when sandstone, shale, conglomerate, and limestone began forming in this region, which marks the boundary of two major crustal plates. Within the Bucegis lie sinkholes and caverns, while strange rock formations rest upon the slopes. This variety in landform results from the rocks differing degrees of resistance to water and wind erosion. Where limestone predominates, water may dissolve it, forming sinkholes and caverns. Where conglomerate and sandstone prevail, the harsh wind and weather may cut peculiar shapes - for example, Sphinx and Babele.
Glaciers and rivers also modeled the Bucegi terrain. At the head of some of the highest valleys, glacial ice chiseled semicircular hollows known worldwide as cirques. Rivers have carved the mountains, creating deep ravaines and gorges. Within the Bucegis is a national park, a preserve for the extraordinarily diverse plant and animal life found there.

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Deepest Place in the Ocean

Deepest Place in the Ocean: Challenger Deep

Challenger Deep got its name from the British survey ship Challenger II, which pinpointed the deep water off the Marianas Islands in 1951. Then in 1960, the US Navy sent the Trieste (a submersible - a mini-submarine designed to go really deep) down into the depths of the Marianas trench to see just how far they would go . They touched bottom at 35,838 ft/10,923m. That means, while they were parked on the bottom in the bathyscaphe, there were almost seven miles/11km of water over their heads!

If you cut Mount Everest off at sea level and put it on the ocean bottom in the Challenger Deep, there would still be over a mile of water over the top of it!

Hydrostatic Pressure

When you get into the ocean (or any body of water) and you start diving down from the surface, the deeper you dive the more water is over the top of you. The more gallons of water you put between you and the surface of the ocean, the greater the pressure is on your body because of the weight of the water over the top of you. This pressure is calledhydrostatic pressure.

Plate Tectonics and the Subduction ZoneYou can really get a sense of hydrostatic pressure when you go into a swimming pool and dive all the way to the bottom of the deep end. You'll feel the hydrostatic pressure against your ear drums, like they're being squeezed or pushed in. Well, you can imagine how incredible the pressure must be in the Challenger Deep with almost seven miles of water overhead - it's 16,000 pounds per square inch!

Why the Challenger Deep is so deep? Well, the earth's crust isn't one solid piece of rock, it's really pretty thin, like the shell of an egg is compared to the size of the egg. In fact, it's made up of huge plates of thin crust that "float" on the molten rock of the earth's mantle. While floating around on the mantle the edges of these plates slide past each other, bump into each other, and sometimes even crash. The oceanic crust is much heavier than the continental crust so when the plates crash into each other, the oceanic plate plunges downward toward the molten mantle, while the lighter, continental plate rides up over the top. The forces driving the two plates together are really intense so the underlying oceanic plate (the subducted plate) creates a trench where it drags the edge of the continental crust down as it descends underneath (check out the picture at left).

How Do They Know?This is what's happening on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean off the Marianas islands. The really deep part of the ocean is in the bottom of the trench created by the subducting ocean crust.

In 1984 the Japanese sent a highly specialized survey vessel out to the Marianas Trench and collected some data using a piece of equipment called a narrow, multi-beam echo sounder.

What an echo sounder does is send high frequency sound waves (outside the range of human hearing) through the water down to the ocean bottom. Sound waves will travel through water, even faster than they travel through the air, and bounce off solid objects, such as the ocean bottom. The echo sounder measures precisely how long it takes for the sound waves to be returned to the surface and determines the depth based on the rate of return. These soundings are plotted on a graph by a computer to make an "echo map" of the ocean bottom.

The deepest measurement of the Challenger Deep currently available was taken by the Japanese and was found to be 35,838 feet.

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Uluru

 
Uluru, also referred to as Ayers Rock, Northern Territory, Australia, is believed to be the world's largest free-standing rock. It is made of sandstone and measures 335m high, 3.6m long and 2 kilometer wide. The rock was formed more than 450 million years ago from horizontal layers of soft sands deposited on an ocean floor. Subsequent movements of the earth's crust upended the formation, turning the layers to a vertical position. The projecting remnant of a mountain that was once much larger was whittled to its present size and contours by long periods of wind and water erosion. The differences in the hardness of the upturned layers of sandstone have caused them to erode in different rates, resulting in the pattern of ridges and furrows across the surface of the rock.

The rock is composed of arkose, a course-grained sandstone rich in the mineral feldspar. Depending upon the atmospheric conditions and the time of the day, the rock can dramatically change color, anything from blue to violet to glowing red. During sunset the rock glows red and during rainy seasons the rock acquires a silvery-grey color, with streaks of black algae forming on the areas that serve as channels for water flow. Large caves are most numerous near the base of the rock. They have been used since time immemorial by the Aborigines, who decorated their walls with paintings and pictographs.

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Mariana Trench

It is the deepest part of the earth's ocean and the deepest location of the earth itself. Mariana Trench is located in the Pacific ocean, just east of the 14 Mariana Islands near Japan. The trench is about 1580 miles long with the mean width of only 43 miles. It reaches a maximum depth of about 10,924 meters at the Challenger Deep, a small slot-shaped valley in its floor, at its southern end.Mariana Trench was created by ocean-to-ocean subduction, a phenomena in which a plate topped by oceanic crust is subducted beneath another plate topped by oceanic crust. The deepest part of the Mariana Trench is the Challenger Deep, so named after the British exploration vessel HMS Challenger II. So how come the Challenger Deep is so deep? - Well, the earth's crust is not one solid piece of rock, its really pretty thin. In fact its made up of huge plates of thin crust that float on the molten rock of the earth's mantle. While floating around the mantle the edges of these plates slide past each other, bump into each other and sometimes even crash. The oceanic crust is much heavier than the continental crust so when the plates crash into each other, the oceanic plate plunges downward toward the molten mantle, while the lighter continental plate rides up over the top. The forces driving the two plates are really intense so the underlying oceanic plate creates a trench where it drags the edge of the continental crust down as it descends underneath. This is what is happening on the bottom of the Pacific ocean off the Marianas Islands.

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7 The World's Largest Lake

1. Caspian Sea

Location: Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, IranArea (kmТВ): 394 299Length (miles): 1199Maximum depth (m): 946
Caspian Sea or Mazandaran Sea is a landlocked sea between Asia, Azerbaijan, Iran (province of Guilan, Mazandaran and Golestan), Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, and Europe (Russia), Dagestan, Kalmykia and the Astrakhan Oblast. He is the largest inland body of water, with a surface area of ​​371 000 kmТВ, and therefore has the characteristics possessed by the sea and lakes. He is often ranked as the world's largest lake, though it does not contain fresh water but salt water. 

2. SuperiorLocation: United States, CanadaArea (kmТВ): 82,414Length (km): 616Maximum depth (m): 406
Lake Superior is the largest North American Great Lakes that restrict Ontario in Canada, and Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan in the United States. He is the largest freshwater lake in the world in surface area. 

3. VictoriaLocation: Tanzania, UgandaArea (kmТВ): 69,485Length (km): 322Maximum depth (m): 82
Lake Victoria or Victoria Nyanza (also known as Ukerewe) is the largest lake in Africa, the world's largest tropical lake, and the second largest freshwater lake in surface area of ​​the world after Lake Superior.The lake is located in a plateau in the western Great Rift Valley of Africa and regulated by Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya. 

4. HuronLocation: United States, CanadaArea (kmТВ): 59,596Length (km): 397Maximum depth (m): 229
Salsh Lake Huron is one of the five Great Lakes United. Is that all three of the estuary. Such as Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, and Lake Superior, the lake is also shared between the United States and Canada

















5. MichiganLocation: United StatesArea (kmТВ): 58,016Length (km): 517Maximum depth (m): 281
Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes in North America that restrict U.S. states: Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Chicago is the largest city on Lake Michigan. 

6. AralLocation: Kazakhstan, UzbekistanArea (kmТВ): 59,596Length (km): 397Maximum depth (m): 229
The lake is located in Central Asia are in northern Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the south. 

7. TanganyikaLocation: Tanzania, Republic of CongoArea (kmТВ): 32,893Length (km): 676Maximum depth (m): 1435
This lake is the largest and deepest canyon lake in deepest Africa or number two in the world and save the largest freshwater reserves in the Western Rift in the Great Rift Valley and is in the area of ​​four countries, namely Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Zambia,

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Trekking to the Lost City - Part One

Our small group is half way through day two and we reach the high point of our Camino Incatrek on the evocatively named Dead Woman’s Pass (trail map). Breathing heavily in the rarefied air at 4,200 metres, our spirits lifted when we discovered that this was the highest point in our walk. Three hours earlier, most of us were regretting signing up for this famous four day venture to the Incan “lost city” of Machu Picchu (my number one South American travel wonder). Looking back, other trekkers are hunched forward, heads down, slowly trudging up the steep slope. They dare not look up at the distant goal ahead for fear. They are probably sharing the same regrets but refuse to be daunted by the steep featureless final slope and plough on.

Mind you, there is a strange feeling of privilege in walking on the same paths as followed by the Incan Indians some five hundred years ago. The mountain vistas, cool, clean air and patches of refreshing forest keep the spirits going when the legs become unwilling and the body flags.

By contrast, the guide and porters are making easy passage. Shod only in old sandals made of car tyres, they have walked it many times before and despite being weighed down with our packs, food, clothing and tents, they seem to enjoy tracing the steps their ancestors took, five hundred years earlier.

I walked the trail several years ago but today the government have placed a strict daily limit of 500 people (counting guides, porters and tourists alike) on the trail to help protect this ancient Incan highway. The officials seem to be battling a delicate balance between the lure of the tourist dollar and preserving the very thing attracting these tourists. This means you have no option but to book some time ahead to ensure that you can get access to one of the most famous treks in the world. You must walk the trail with an official operator and you cannot join at the last minute (the agencies have to register the names several days in advance). This is something that you need to be organized for. As a rough rule, there will be between one and a half to two guides/porters/cooks for each paying walker and all rubbish walked in must be walked out. It is a travesty that plastic water bottles litter the path in some places – all of us must play our part to preserve this remarkable heritage area.

There are a number of different walks. This post describes the best known and highly recommended four-day “Classic” trek but there are one-day, two-day and seven-day versions as well. The trail passes some thirty different Incan sites and is surrounded by spectacular Andean mountain backdrops.

Yesterday, we started this journey in high spirits for a short train ride from the lively village of Ollantaytambo, itself rich in Incan structures and possibly the best preserved Incan town of all. Alighting at the drearily named Km88 (representing the distance from Cusco) with our group of six eager trekkers and guide, around nine porters and cooks organise their loads in good spirits. There is a strict code to ensure that everyone carries an even share and that the loads don’t exceed an agreed weight.

Almost immediately we cross the Urubamba River over the appropriately named Bridge of Happiness and walk at a brisk pace, locating the first of numerous Incan sites at Llactapata, an Incan residential site. Day One is twelve kilometres (eight miles) long with a slow ascent for the second half of the day. Camp areas vary but we stayed with a superb valley outlook, the towering snow-capped peak of Salkantay and Veronica (lead picture).

Refreshed from resting on Dead Woman’s Pass, we started our descent, falling away into the Hidden Valley and back up to a milder Andean pass at Runkurakay, an Incan watchtower, animal shelter and food store. Dinner is enjoyed viewing the incredible valley vista under the light of a gleaming full moon, before we all head for our tents - the soothing sound of a tumbling waterfall easing us into our evening slumber.

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The Walled Cities of Spain

Throughout history, large walls surrounded many cities to protect their citizens and leaders from siege and attack. Sadly, most of these city walls have gone either torn down by attackers, removed by cities to allow expansion or simply taken apart to provide building materials for more useful buildings.
Spain has an impressive number of cities whose complete (or near-complete) city walls (or muralla) are so significant, well preserved and impressive that they meritUNESCO World Heritage listing. All are rich in history with four of the five can be easily visited as day trips from Madrid.

Ávila (Avila)

Not that far from Madrid, the city of Ávila is impressively located perched on a high plain that rears sharply from the arid treeless surrounds. With a domination of churches, monasteries, convents and basilicas under the name of the ascetic Saint Teresa (whose mummified hands are in one of the churches), the pious city was subjected to battles for centuries between the Muslims and the Christians. The 12th century construction of 2.5 kilometres of superbly maintained walls, 88 towers and 9 gates eased the battles and today the exterior makes for a superb walk. At night the elegant crenellations add a regal imposing look to the city while three parts of the walls can be walked for a closer look.

Segovia

Near Ávila, Segovia is an enchanting small honey-coloured city strategically perched on a rocky outcrop and encased in an 11th century wall. With history dripping around every corner of its narrow lanes, its undoubted highlights include a towering double-arched Roman aqueduct that cuts through the city, a cavernous cathedral and the fairytale Alcazar (and the world’s oldest existing industrial plant with the 1583 Mint). The Alcazar is an evocative 900 year old royal palace that emerges majestically from a rocky crag, its long narrow shape, sheer sides and witches-hat roofs being the inspiration forSleeping Beauty’s residence.

Toledo

Immortalised by El Greco and aformer capital city, Toledo is a treasure trove of medieval buildings and cultural sights. Dating back to Roman times and ideally sited for fortification with a loop in the river protecting three sides and two imposing walls protecting the fourth, the city is jam-packed in a maze of streets with places of worship for Christians, Jews and Muslims, highlighting its wars and battles over past centuries. Toledo makes for a superb one day trip from Madrid walking the labyrinthine laneways soaking the medieval charm of so many historic structures.

Cuenca

Just east of Madrid and encased by deep gorges on three sides, Cuenca was purpose built for fortification. More famous than its city walls are its exceptionalhanging houses (las casas colgadas) grimly clinging to the cliff sides, their balconies protruding into fresh air and highly unsuited for those uncomfortable with heights. One excellent example now serves as the Abstract Arts Museum.

Lugo

In the very north-west of Spain and surrounded by over two kilometres of Roman walls built in the third and fourth centuries (yes, over 1700 years old), it is the only complete Roman wall anywhere in the world. With the wall being six metres thick and with a twenty metre wide moat around the walls, Lugo was near impregnable. Eighty-five towers rise out of the wall giving vantage points in every direction to give the city warning of any pending attack.

While there are a number of examples of walled cities throughout Europe, north Africa and Asia, Spain has an impressive concentration of them, each making for a superb one-day visit. Other Spanish cities including Girona and Badajoz also boast well preserved city walls. While all the cities have sprawled well beyond their medieval bounds, it is a chance to imagine the importance that these walls bought in protecting the city and the efforts that leaders went to maintain the city against the constant threat of attack.

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