Tag: travel

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The last place in Oklahoma

The last place in Oklahoma

“I could go for something cold and wet.”

Sometimes you’re travelling along, lost in your own thoughts alongside your travel mate, also lost in their own thoughts. You’ve gone for a while without realising your thirst, and you go a while further before some remote possibility of quenching that thirst comes along on the road. Then, just before you can verbalize the emotions and needs, your travel mate, whom you believed was on some other mental voyage, anticipates your thoughts and says something like, “I could go for something cold and wet.”

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Give me shelter

Give me shelter

Roofs. Shelter and safety.

First, a tangent.

 安   is   ān   ~  peace in Mandarin Chinese
安 is ān ~ peace in Mandarin Chinese
Chinese characters are beautiful things. The more interesting ones often contain characters within characters, known as ‘radicals’. So any character containing the character for water is inflected with the sense of liquid, and any character containing the roof radical is inflected with the sense of shelter/safety, or lack of it.

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Black Sand Basin

Black Sand Basin

The earth heaves up boiling water and steam, and from these mist coalesces, drifts with the light wind. We walk out over the simmering pools lined with vibrantly coloured minerals and flecked with obsidian, giving the basin its name. Vapour rises all around us. Every now and again, a burst of trapped air escapes, jetting sprays of searingly hot water well above our heads, and fortunately well away from the viewing platform built right over the bubbling land.