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To the beginning of photography in Texas

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The world is awash with photographs. Anyone with a camera in hand is a photographer. Billions of photos are taken every day worldwide and a vast majority of them never even get a second look, let alone take a physical form, lost in the vast emptiness of the digital cloud. However, things were different back in the day. In the early 19th century, pioneers of photography were busy developing new techniques and demonstrating their results to the public, starting a revolution that would go on to transform the world. Practical photography was generally accepted to be born in 1839, the year Louis Daguerre commercially introduced the photographic process that he developed, which came to be known as the daguerreotype process . The photograph that was developed using this process was itself called a Daguerreotype . Parisian Louis Daguerre had been working on this process since the mid 1820s. The process was faster and demonstrated commercial viability making it the first successful photographic...
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The history that is not consigned to the past

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There are historic sites that, time has ensured, are no more than ruins – for example, the Roman forum, Machu Picchu, and Acropolis. Then, there are historic sites that are still physically intact eliciting grandeur – the pyramids of Giza, Chichen Itza, the many castles of Europe – but have lost their vitality and their intended purpose. Finally, in my mind, there is the third kind – heritage sites that still live today and retain their authenticity; the historic sites that take you back hundreds of years but refuse to consign themselves to history. Ait Benhaddou is one such place. Our road trip started in Casablanca. We were on our way to Merzouga to celebrate the New Year in the middle of the Sahara desert. We spent two days in the beautiful Marrakesh and the night before at Ouarzazate. The next morning instead of driving east our friend, Hakim, took the road back to Marrakech. After driving for about 15 mins, he took the detour north. The air got thinner as we got higher. He said he...
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Galapagos Islands: How I met the animals

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Galapagos Islands is one of the most biodiverse spots on the planet. It's a melting pot of diverse fauna and home to more than 2000 species found nowhere else in Earth. Since the islands were first discovered in 1535, anthropogenic (man-made) changes are the biggest environmental threat affecting the species on the islands. Charles Darwin visited the islands in 1835 and his research here inspired him to produce his seminal work on evolutionary biology, “On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection”. This brought increased attention to the islands. Conservation efforts increased in recent years but the ecosystem degradation continues unabated, driven by a myriad of factors including climate change, deforestation, overfishing, pollution and introduction of invasive species. Today, around 30,000 people live in the Galapagos and another 200,000 visit the islands each year putting enormous strain on the delicate ecosystem. I visited the islands to see the animals I had researched about...
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Livingstone & Stanley: Journey into Africa

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Mid-nineteenth century saw multiple explorations of Africa by European explorers. Nothing obsessed these explorers more than the quest for finding the source of the Nile which, to this day, is under contention. One such exploration was led by David Livingstone in 1866, a veteran who had already spent twenty years in Africa and whose past adventures had sparked such awe and who exercised a strong influence on attitudes towards Africa in Victorian England. Livingstone did not succeed in this quest to find the origin of the Nile - John Hanning Speke had earlier claimed that honor - but this epic journey over seven years, intertwined with an equally audacious exploration by Henry Morton Stanley (more on it later), had such an impact on our understanding of Africa and provided a detailed journal on what an expedition looked like in the 19th century.  Livingstone was already a household name at that time and his disappearance early on during this mission sparked huge distress and many ex...
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The map of the motorcycle diaries

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Ernesto "Che" Guevara along with his friend Alberto Granado set out on a travel around South America in Granado’s motorcycle Norton La Poderosa II in 1952 from Buenos Aires. When they started the trip, they were just two adventurous souls keen on taking a semester off to see the world that they had only read about in books. Over the next seven months, Guevara would visit Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela, and witness social and political injustices that would have a profound impact on him, the history of Latin America, and the history of the modern world. His story is more a discovery of self. This is not a political article. In this article, we track the footsteps of Guevera and Granado with the curiosity of an adventurer, a traveler, and a history buff. Guevera, in an alternate universe, would have become a great traveler and a travel writer as evidenced by the eloquence and knowledge with which he describes the experiences of his travel. In my favorite line f...
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The Travels of Ibn Battuta

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Abu ‘Abdallah ibn Battuta, a pious Moroccan pilgrim, left Tangiers for Mecca – for hajj – in 1325 on a pilgrimage that would usually take a year to complete at that time. Little did he know in 1325 that he would travel for 24 more years before returning to Morocco, in the process covering, arguably, more distance than Marco Polo did a century earlier. His story, like many other great travels, is a story of perseverance, ingenuity, and discovery. Ibn Battuta visited some of the same places that Marco Polo did a century earlier. However, the similarities end there. They are different personalities from different backgrounds. One, a merchant from the famed Venetian business fraternity. Another, a pious sunni muslim, whose world revolved around Islam and whose life goal was to visit Mecca. Polo set out to establish a direct trade route between the East and the West. Ibn Battuta took advantage of favorable conditions in Dar-as-Islam – the wider Muslim world – by traveling to Muslim Kingdoms...
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The Travels of Marco Polo

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What makes someone a great traveler? Some of the factors, in my humble opinion, include longevity of travel, cultural sensitivity, perseverance in the face of danger and failure, ingenuity to get out of tricky situations, level-headedness to take both good and bad experiences in one’s stride, being grateful for the opportunity to travel, and most of all, the sheer love for travel and discovery. Marco Polo personified all of this. In addition, he was lucky to chronicle his travel experiences in detail. Polo met with Rustichello da Pisa – in prison - together with whom he compiled “Livre des Merveilles du Monde”, in English commonly called “The Travels of Marco Polo”. The below map takes one through the journey that Polo took from 1276 to 1291. Click on the markers which will pop up to provide additional details and commentary. Notes: Each leg of Polo’s journey is highlighted in a different color. Polo did not visit Kharkorin and Baghdad listed in this map. The two places are only marked...
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