Openskies | September 2013

THE SEARCH FOR THE FENN TREASURE ried a millioenu b s a h n a m is th som h of treasuremexico t r o w s r a l l o d wilds of new where in thee wants you to find it and h

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Editor’s LEttEr

editor@ openskiesmagazine. com

Adventure means different things to different people. For some, taking a different bus route home constitutes an exploit, while for others, hunting for rare vinyl in Ethiopia or exploring Marseille’s underbelly are what get the juices flowing. Of course the real adventurers were the ones who went first, and with that in mind, Monte Reel examines the adventurers’ guidebooks that were must-reads for the pioneers of the past. Closer to the present, we take a trip to one of Africa’s most fascinating countries, Ethiopia, and discover the retro music that is still going strong. Elsewhere Noah Davis takes us on a bike ride through one of New York’s most misunderstood boroughs, and we discover a motorbike shop with a difference in Cape Town. Closer to home, we profile a new independent magazine shop in the heart of Dubai Media City, which, thankfully, has a number of travel magazines on sale – perfect for the modern-day adventurer. Enjoy the issue.

Emirates takes care to ensure that all facts published herein are correct. In the event of any inaccuracy please contact The Editor. Any opinion expressed is the honest belief of the author based on all available facts. Comments and facts should not be relied upon by the reader in taking commercial, legal, financial or other decisions. Articles are by their nature general and specialist advice should always be consulted before any actions are taken.

Media One Tower, Dubai Media City PO Box 2331, Dubai, UAE Telephone: (+971 4) 427 3000 Fax: (+971 4) 428 2261 Email: emirates@motivate.ae

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Printed by Emirates Printing Press, Dubai, UAE

edItor-In-ChIef Obaid Humaid Al Tayer ManagIng partner & group edItor In ChIef Ian Fairservice edItorIal dIreCtor Gina Johnson • gina@motivate.ae group edItor Mark Evans • marke@motivate.ae edItor Conor Purcell • conor@motivate.ae deputy edItor Gareth Rees • gareth@motivate.ae desIgner Roui Francisco • rom@motivate.ae sub edItor Salil Kumar • salil@motivate.ae edItorIal assIstant Londresa Flores • londresa@motivate.ae head of produCtIon S Sunil Kumar senIor produCtIon Manager C Sudhakar assIstant produCtIon Manager R.Murali Krishnan general Manager, group sales Anthony Milne • anthony@motivate.ae dIgItal developMent Manager Helen Cotton • helenc@motivate.ae group sales Manager Jaya Balakrishnan • jaya@motivate.ae sales Manager Rameshwar Nepali deputy sales Manager Amar Kamath edItorIal Consultants for eMIrates: edItor Jonathan Hill arabIC edItor: Hatem Omar deputy edItor: Andy Grant WebsIte • emirates.com ContrIbutors James Brennan, Richard Kiely, Bachar Mar-Khalifa, Brian Purcell, Gemma Correll, Guillaume Gaudet, Ethan Stowell, F Towsli, Christopher Beanland, Mar Hernandéz, Sarah Khan, Henrique Wilding, Iain Akerman, Monte Reel, Noah Davis, Ryan Heffernan, Vanessa Thorpe, Alastair Philip Wiper Cover photo: Ryan Heffernan InternatIonal MedIa representatIves: AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND Okeeffe Media; Tel + 61 412 080 600, licia@okm.com.au BENELUX M.P.S. Benelux; Tel +322 720 9799, francesco.sutton@mps-adv.com CHINA Publicitas Advertising; Tel +86 10 5879 5885 GERMANY IMV Internationale Medien Vermarktung GmbH; Tel +49 8151 550 8959, w.jaeger@imv-media.com HONG KONG/MALAYSIA/THAILAND Sonney Media Networks; Tel +852 2151 2351, hemant@ sonneymedia.com INDIA Media Star; Tel +91 22 4220 2103, ravi@mediastar.co.in ITALY & SPAIN IMM International; Tel +331 40 1300 30, n.devos@imm-international.com JAPAN TANDEM INC.; TEL + 81 3 3541 4166, ALL@TANDEM-INC. COM NETHERLANDS GIO Media; Tel +31 6 29031149, giovanni@gio-media.nl TURKEY Media Ltd.; Tel +90 212 275 51 52, mediamarketingtr@medialtd.com.tr UK Spafax Inflight Media; Tel +44 207 906 2001, nhopkins@spafax.com USA TOTEM Brand Stories; Tel +212 896 3846, faith.brillinger@totembrandstories.com

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Open skies / september 2013

contents / sePteMBeR 2013

33

A remarkable new Van Gogh exhibition in the centre of London

52 38

The summer may be over but Bestival will be entertaining the crowds

72

A road trip through the heart of Brooklyn on two wheels

40

A wry look at the London Underground

74 64

A stroll down one of Birmingham’s coolest streets

A magazine shop opens in Dubai’s Media City

25

Open skies / september 2013

A South African motorcycle shop with a difference

contents / sePteMBeR 2013

82

94

On the vintage trail in Ethiopia

How to travel like a Victorian Adventurer

106

Hunting the Fenn Treasure

122

Stunning shots of the cutting edge of science and industry

116

How Marseille got its groove back

FRont (31) Bits Question/Grid Calendar The Street Skypod Room Consume

33 37 38 40 45 49 51

Our Man BLD Mapped Local Knowledge Place Column Store

BRieFing (137)

Main (81) Ethiopia Victorian Adventure Marseille Science

52 59 60 64 71 72 74

82 94 116 122

News Visa Guide Route Map Fleet

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Open skies / september 2013

137 144 146 150

contributors JAmes brennAn

James writes about travel, food and lots of other subjects for publications and guide books around the world.

Birmingham born and bred, he also travels widely.

iAin AkermAn

Iain is a writer, editor and travel enthusiast living in Dubai. His obsession with vinyl around the region has seen him travel everywhere from Ethiopia to Egypt on the hunt for hard-to-find records.

chris beAnlAnd

Christopher is a writer based in London who has written for The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express and the Guardian as well as magazines such as Voyager and Real Travel.

28

monte reel

Monte is a former South America correspondent for The Washington Post, and he also reported for the newspaper in Washington and Iraq. His first book, The Last of the Tribe, chronicles the story of the last surviving member of a tribe in the Amazon.

Open skies / september 2013

AlAstAir PhiliP wiPer

An English photographer based in Copenhagen, Alastair has had his work published by the likes of Wired, New Scientist and Wallpaper*.

His focus is on architecture, science and industry.

28

FRONT 64 DUBAI

A new haven for print fans in the heart of Media City

72

74

LONDON CAPE TOWN

Why do Londoners have such mixed emotions about The Tube?

One of Africa’s most interesting motorbike shops

Birmingham Beats A trip down one of the most interesting streets in England’s ‘second city’

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OPEN SKIES / SEPTEMBER 2013

(40)

Bits

Van Gogh in Paris (in London) A fAscinAting new exhibition showcAses vAn gogh’s work And influences during his two yeArs in PAris

l

ondon’s eykyn Maclean gallery will be hosting van gogh in Paris from september 26th to november 29th; an exhibition devoted to the artist’s years in Paris from 1886 to 1888. surprisingly van gogh’s career lasted less than a decade and his two years in Paris saw a transition from the dark works of his dutch period to the brighter, expressive works he is so well known for now. the exhibition will centre around van gogh’s works – many of which are rarely seen in public – as well as the work that would have

influenced him during his stay in the french capital, with paintings by Monet, Picasso and gauguin. this is van gogh at the turning point in his career and the joy of van gogh in Paris will be seeing an artist in transition – through his own work, and the work of his contemporaries. fittingly, a number of paintings are of Paris itself, from views of the city’s skyline to the windmills and ramparts that dotted its outskirts. the exhibition also focuses on the work of the Japanese artists hiroshige, whose asymmetrical compositions had a profound effect

33

Open skies / september 2013

on van gogh’s own compositional organisation. this is a fascinating look at an artist and his influences and shows the development of the one of the great artists of the past 200 years. Admission is free, but due to the expected high demand, booking is essential. the gallery is open fromtuesday to saturday, 11am to 4pm. this is a rare chance to see many rare van gogh works as well as the work of his contemporaries, and is a must-see for those in interested in the artistic process. eykynmaclean.com

Circus Eats

A new Athens fAst food restAurAnt combines A circus feel with innovAtive design Biribildu is a stunning new souvlaki restaurant in the Kalamaki area of Athens. Designed by renowned Greek architect Minas Kosmidis, the design takes the traditional Greek fast food restaurant to another level.

The word Biribildu comes from the Basque country in Spain and means to revolve (hence the carousel horses), but it also refers to the movement of the customers, from the area where the orders are taken to the pick-up area and the bright yellow tables.

The kitchen, washrooms and storage areas are

hidden inside huge wooden ‘boxes’ that are inspired by the transportation crates used by a travelling circus.

While this rather surreal decor could be over the top in the wrong hands, Kosmidis’ restraint ensures that form never overshadows function.

A line of tables outside offers al fresco eating, although with cages, knives and all manner of circus paraphenalia inside, it may be more fun to try out the rather large menu indoors.

It is reassuring to see that Greece has not lost its sense of humour, or its creative ability. www.minaskosmidis.com

Shopping at Qatar Duty Free is a pleasant and relaxing experience.

As the second largest Duty Free operations in the region, we are committed to offering you good service and value for money. A key part of its strategy is to offer something for every passenger profile and to make Duty Free shopping a memorable experience.

With a wide selection of the world’s finest brands, enticing promotions, and exciting raffles, shopping at Qatar Duty Free is your destination of choice.

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THE QUESTION

WHY IS PHILOSOPHY IMPORTANT?

Philosophy in its history has been concerned with exploring questions that have little research and no answers. It’s a gateway field. It has given rise to many schools of thought; pretty much all of education. For example, back in the day Thales said: ”There is one thing in the universe that makes up everything.” That thought is responsible for modern physics. You might be asking, What has it done for us lately? Well, it deals mainly with language and society now, and has for the past century. On a day-to-day basis philosophy can help with formulating logical arguments analysing the arguments of others. This of course helps with problem solving; a vital part of many jobs. On a broader scale it allows one to lead a healthy inner life – that is, to examine one’s own life, to work out what makes one happy, motivated and fulfilled. Of course, many can answer these questions without the help of philosophy, but none of this is new, and it can be very helpful to look at what the great minds of history had to say.

THE GRID An Indian dance-drama musical production, Dance of the Devadasi is a fictional story set in ancient India.

The narrative travels through the history of Indian dance, its glory, downfall and revival through the life of a temple dancer. There will be two shows on September 13 at Madinat Theatre. maayavi.com

Stefan Temingh is part of the young generation of world-class recorder players who are bringing the classical instrument back into popularity. His second CD, The Gentleman’s Flute, was nominated for the International Classical Music Awards 2011. A night for classical music lovers at Ductac on September 18. dcc.ae

It’s not that hot in Dubai in September. No, really, it’s not.

So there is no excuse not to take advantage of the 3.9km running track that surrounds Safa Park.

Mornings and evenings see walkers, joggers and runners of all nationalities circling the park.

Added bonus: the smell of fresh flowers that floats across the track. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safa_Park

Ageing Welsh lothario Tom Jones graces us with his presence at the Yas Arena on September 19.

Expect all the classics as well as some of his newer numbers. Also expect to pay Dh300 for a ticket. thinkflash.ae

septeMber

CALENDAR

Until september 29

bUilt fOr speed

a fascinating look at some of the fastest creatures under the sea, this exhibition features the most streamlined ocean dwellers and a high-speed sailboat designed by the america’s Cup defending champions.

Watch how the designers took their cues from nature, and revel in the glories of the ocean.

CalaCadeMy.org

September 5 to 8

Bestival

It’s hard not to love Bestival. This four-day music festival on the Isle of White is pretty much perfect: Autumn sunshine, manageable crowds, and a line-up that is always surprising. Curated by Rob Da Bank and his wife Josie, the soundtrack is eclectic: everything from blues and jazz to pop and minimal techno. One of the best long weekends of the summer.

BeStival.net

September 21 to 24

La Merce Until september 22

ibrahiM el salahi

the first tate Modern exhibition dedicated to african Modernism traces the life and work of ibrahim el Salahi. this major retrospective brings together 100 works from across more than five decades of his international career. the exhibition highlights one of the most significant figures in african and arab Modernism and reveals his place in the context of a broader, global art history. tate.org.uk

One of the oldest and most enjoyable festivals in Europe, La Merce is a crazy Catalan party that sums up their attitude to life – have fun. Expect papier maché ‘giants,’ gallons of wine, pyrotechnic parties, fancy dress and long nights of local dancing. This is one festival worth making the journey for.

MerCe.BCn.Cat/en

Our Man

Brooklyn by Bike page 52 38

Open skies / september 2013

38

the street

Digbeth High Street It may be one of Birmingham’s oldest thoroughfares, but Digbeth High Street is enjoying a new lease of life. Even before the industrial revolution pumped its first piston, the street was at the heart of the city’s manufacturing district. Today, many of its Victorian factories, warehouses and civic buildings have been converted, and the street has become a vibrant hub for the creative industries. Leading south from the futuristic bulge of the Selfridges building and the Gothic spire of St Martin’s in the Bull Ring, it reveals independent shops, eclectic art spaces, ancient pubs, and bouncing gig venues. Enough gritty urban energy remains to keep its newfound arty side in check, making it one of Birmingham’s hippest and most streetwise of streets.

Words by James Brennan / Images by Richard Kiely

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Open skies / september 2013

The Old Crown

Shrouded in myth and legend, this Grade II listed building dates back to 1368, which apparently makes it the oldest pub in Birmingham city centre. It’s believed Queen Elizabeth I stayed here in 1575, and that the building saw action during the English Civil War. There have also been reports of at least three ghosts hanging around the original well at the back. Today it’s the haunt of Digbeth’s artistic community, including Birmingham indie starlets Peace, who come for the fine ales, pub grub, pretty beer garden, cosy accommodation and on-site coffee shop.

188 Digbeth High Street Tel: +44(0)121 248 1368 theoldcrown.com

Urban Village

Of all the outlets selling vintage and retro gear in Digbeth, Urban Village is the original and best. Occupying a prominent corner of the Custard Factory, it boasts an impressive horde of pre-loved clothes, shoes, bags and pin badges, including classic labels from Fred Perry to Sergio Tacchini (you can even get your hands on a Ben Sherman Chopper bike here). Down in the cellar there’s plenty of old books, videos and DVDs to leaf through, not to mention a nice little stash of vinyl covering everything from northern soul to Paul Weller. Mod heaven.

Gibb Street Tel: +44(0)121 224 7367 urban-village.co.uk

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Open skies / september 2013

The Custard Factory

When Alfred Bird invented custard powder in Birmingham in 1837, a world-famous food brand was born. When Bennie Gray acquired the derelict Bird’s Custard factory in 1988, he created an energetic space where the arts and creative industries could flourish. Now run by his son, Lucan Gray, The Custard Factory is home to offices, galleries, cafés and bars. It has shops selling everything from vintage clothing and skateboards, to art supplies and DJ equipment. There’s also a slew of art, including a 40ft Green Man statue. All as sweet as custard.

Gibb Street Tel: +44(0)121 224 7777 custardfactory.co.uk

Diamond Sheesha Lounge

At some point you’re going to need to relax, and there’s no better place on Digbeth High Street to do that than this laid-back sheesha lounge – a hit with Birmingham’s young Asian community. As well as a rainbow of smooth and fruity sheesha flavours, there’s a whole raft of juices, desserts and ice creams to get stuck into as you kick back on comfy sofas and let the DJs do their thing.

175 High Street Tel: +44(0)7950 482934

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Open skies / september 2013

Irish Centre

The Zen Shop

Birmingham’s large Irish population was originally centred around Digbeth at the time of the industrial revolution. Today Digbeth plays host to Birmingham’s lively St Patrick’s Day Parade, the third largest in the world after Dublin and New York. The Irish Centre is a key player in the community, providing bars and function rooms, plus regular live Irish music, live boxing matches and Gaelic football on the big screen. Across the street is the JF Kennedy Memorial, a colourful mosaic commissioned by Birmingham’s Irish community in tribute to the former US president.

175 High Street Tel: +44(0)7950 482934

This spiritual refuge and ‘hippy hub’ offers everything the New Age adventurer could possibly need, from candles, crystals and incense, to buddha statues, chakra pendulums and aromatherapy oils. Zen has courted controversy in the past with urine therapies and magic mushrooms. These days, holistic healing is the main vibe, with workshops and courses on meditation, Tarot reading and massage to help you escape the frenetic pace of city life and let your mind, body and soul unravel.

162 Digbeth High Street Tel: +44(0)121 643 3933 thezenshop.co.uk

The Rainbow

The Rainbow is much more than just a finely revamped Victorian pub. With its ornate stained glass windows, exposed brickwork and stripped down wooden floors, it has that traditional English pub feel. But the presence of a Doctor-Who-Tardis-cum-photo-booth and vintage video game consoles suggest there’s more to this place than meets the eye. The venue extends to some of the old warehouse space at the rear of the building, where various parties, DJs and live bands keep Digbeth banging till dawn.

160 Digbeth High Street Tel: +44(0)121 772 8174 www.therainbowvenues.co.uk

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Open skies / september 2013

SKYPOD

Experimental Lebanese musician Bachar Mar-Khalife shares his top tracks

1.

2.

3.

Philip Glass Koyaanisqatsi

Plastikman Psyk

This music is from the 1982 movie Koyaanisqatsi. We used to watch it every night at home, but we never could talk about it. It is music tortured about humanity, and our place on earth.

A masterpiece.

I discovered electronic music through this track

by Richie Hawtin. For me, it was a revelation, an introduction to a new, cold, minimalistic reality.

45

4.

Nazem El Ghazali Ya om El Ouyoune Essoud

Suzanna And The Magical Orchestra Believer

The late Iraqi singer Nazem El Ghazali’s voice was the finest in the land.

This track has a 10/8 rhythmic base known as ‘Gorgina,’ used a lot in Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Kurdish music. He sings about love, and falling for a girl with “dark eyes.”

I discovered Susanna Wallumrød’s voice through her wonderful cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division.

Her Magical Orchestra makes a huge sound, like the whole world in one note.

OPEN SKIES / SEPTEMBER 2013

5.

Limousine Lila An instrumental group from France, with a taste of Sigur Ros and Radiohead. There’s a real power to their playing – the repetition is trance-like, like road music to infinity.

6.

Nick Drake River Man I always remember the lyric, “Betty said she prayed today/For the sky to blow away/Or maybe stay/She wasn’t sure.”

7.

Johann Sebastian Bach Goldberg Variations (Aria) I would choose Glenn Gould’s 1981 performance, so much slower than his first recording of it back in 1955. You can hear a man’s surrender to time.

SePtemBer

CALENDAR

august 24 to october 6

Ai Weiwei - Baby Formula The Chinese artist will be bringing his latest work, Baby Formula, to Singapore for the month of September. The piece, made up of 1,800 tins of milk formula from the most popular brands in the country, is a statement about the baby milk controversy of 2008 when more than 300,000 children got sick after drinking contaminated products. The so called milk map is being toured around Asia and, according to Weiwei, is a statement about the absurdity of modern Chinese life: “We can put a satellite into space but cannot put a safe bottle teat into a child’s mouth. I think it’s extremely absurd.” The piece will be on display at the Michael Janssen Gallery. gillmanbarracks.com

Seoul

Temple Visions

8.

Arvo Pärt Magnificat Music that feels close to emptiness. It is as blue as the colour of empty space. Simple, and simply magnificent.

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Open skies / september 2013

page 71

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the Room

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rOOM 302

hÔTEL LE A, pArIS

Hôtel Le A is perfectly located close to the beating heart of Paris, the Champs-Élysées. The hotel exudes a sophisticated calm with dark wood, white walls, and brushed steel dominating. The whiteness of the room decor is almost sterile but it’s softened by the ten dimmable lights and an orchid stem. The junior suite is not overly large but comfortably accommodates two guests, while the bathroom is clad in dark stone with a separate bath and glass-walled shower area. Again there are a number of dimmable lights so the guest can create the atmosphere they desire. The comfortable bed and a double layer of double-glazed windows ensure a quiet night’s sleep.

The hotel also houses a quiet bar and a small library of books. The staff are coolly professional with a certain Parisian aloofness. Rue d’Artois is an unassuming street and is home to a number of other hotels as well as cafés and restaurants and close to a metro station for trips further afield. However, for most guests, the prime attraction of Hôtel Le A is its location within walking distance of the Champs-Élysées, where luxury brands like Louis Vutton rub shoulders with more populist stores like H&M, all overlooked by the magnificent Arc de Triomphe.

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Open skies / september 2013

INTERNET SPEED: 3MB PILLOWS: Four BED SIzE: 180cm x 200cm iPOD DOCK: No – Bose Soundlink Bluetooth speaker CLUB SANDWICH DELIVERY TIME: 34 mins COMPLEMENTARY SNACKS: One bottle of Evian water TOILETRY BRAND: La Bottega Dell’Albergo ExTRAS: DVD player and free Wi-Fi TV CHANNELS: 54 VIEW: 2/5 RATE: $660

consume book

Dog solDiers Robert Stone One of the best novels to tackle the counterculture movement of the 1960s and ‘70s in the States, Dog Soldiers is a blistering piece of writing. Part thriller, part treatise on the end of hippy idealism, it focuses on Converse, a failed war reporter in Vietnam who gets his friend Hicks to smuggle a large quantity of heroin back to California. Hicks – on arriving in the States – takes off with the drugs and Converse’s wife Marge, with a dishevelled Converse in pursuit. This is far more than a boilerplate thriller, however; it’s a treatise on the loss of innocence, the death of an American dream, and the moral decay that seems to be eating away at society.

Stone’s characters are almost perfectly formed; his ability to set a scene unparalleled, and the dialogue whip sharp. If you want to understand why the 1960s failed, this book is a good place to start.

film

The family

Robert De Niro teams up with Luc Besson for the latest in a seemingly never-ending line of mafia comedies. De Niro and his family are relocated to France in the witness protection programme, which results in all manner of cultural hilarity – particularly since his teenage children seem to be as adept at the dark arts of corruption and violence as their father. In truth most of the gags fall flat, the cartoonish antics quickly growing old – which is a shame given the quality of the cast (De Niro is joined by Michelle Pfeiffer and Tommy Lee Jones) and the premise itself. De Niro winces and grimaces his way through the film, and you get the feeling the pay cheque, rather than the script, brought him to this role.

album

The Diving BoarD Elton John You may know Elton John from the pages of celebrity magazines, and witness him grinning and clapping at a variety of sporting events. What you may not know is that he is also a musician (and a quite good one at that), and so here he is with his 30th solo album, The Diving Board. In truth the world’s most famous Watford supporter has not released a decent record in years – and any genius he once possessed has long been submerged beneath his riches, his ego and his social diary. Fans of the man will still buy this, and with T-Bone Burnett producing, and a promised back-to-basics approach, who knows – this might be worth a listen.

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Open skies / september 2013

our man in

Brooklyn by Bike

Noah Davis takes a bicycle tour of one of New York’s coolest boroughs in the company of a man who knows where to find Images by Guillaume Gaudet the neighbourhood’s hidden gems

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lya Nikhamin boasts a truly excellent bright red beard that’s easily visible as he rides up on his Brompton folding bike. The owner of the wonderfully and accurately named Red Beard Bikes agreed to give me a tour of Brooklyn.

But not the Brooklyn of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and CitiBike – the new bike-share programme that caters to the neighbourhoods frequented by hipsters, yuppies, and the finance set. We’re heading to the Brooklyn he knows from growing up here after moving from Moscow with his family when he was seven.

We meet in Prospect Park, the 585-acre space architected and designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux soon after the duo finished Central Park in the mid-1800s. It’s filled with ball fields, bicyclists, and joggers, but Nikhamin leads us to a secluded clearing overlooking the park’s lake. Four turtles sit on a log 30 feet from shore. A green heron hides half hidden in the weeds. It’s an island of calm amidst the chaos of Brooklyn’s morning rush hour. We pause, reflect, and then move on, but not before Nikhamin takes a few photos of the birds.

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We head southwest for half a mile to Brancaccio’s Food Shop. It’s old school Italian: meatballs with pine nuts and raisins, and massive pot roast, horseradish, and cream pickled onion sandwiches. Nikhamin asks if I want one. It’s 8.45 am. I decline, also turning down a cup of Brooklyn Roasting Company coffee from Steeplechase, the cafe next door. Brooklyn is enormous, and there will be time for coffee later. Right now, we need to ride.

Our bikes mix seamlessly into the cars on the road. The drivers aren’t particularly pleased by our presence, but we get along okay. On some level everyone understands that we all need to co-exist.

We are trying to find an entrance to Green-Wood

Cemetery when Ilya turns around and tells me his actual favorite thing about Brooklyn is when he finds something new that’s really old. He points across the street to a subway station. “I used to get off there a lot but I never knew where it was,” he says. This sounds ridiculous, but I understand what he means: Brooklynites experience the city in streets, neighbourhoods, and small pockets of space, moving from point A to point B but rarely having an opportunity to grasp the larger map. The subway, which is mostly underground, exacerbates this sense of disconnect. A meandering bike tour allows us to understand the borough on a larger conceptual level. Deep thoughts for 9am.

Green-Wood Cemetery features Battle Hill, the highest point in Brooklyn at roughly 200 feet above sea level, and a colony of monk parakeets that nest in a nearby power station. They are incredibly loud. Bikes aren’t allowed inside the gates, so we dismount, lock up, and hike for a few minutes before turning around to look out over New York Bay. Two bright orange Staten Island Ferries pass in the distance.

TWITTER PITCH

Sushi may grab all the headlines, but for us, Korean food is Asia’s finest. We trawl the globe, chopsticks at the ready, for the best in galbi, kimchi and bibimbap Kogi BBQ

Four mobile Korean street food trucks that deliver street bites everywhere from the centre of LA to the edges of Orange County. Cheap, cheerful and delicious @KogiBBQ

Seoul Metro

Apparently Melbourne’s best kept secret, this Korean restaurant has a wide range of traditional street food to choose from and an authentic vibe. Well worth a vist @seoulmetromelb

Seoul Food oven FreSh/ Pizza made the oldfashioned way at Di Faras

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Classic Korean food with a Mexican twist – think Koreanstyle tacos and spicy burritos at this New York mainstay.

We like the bibimbap and the eclectic crowd of tourists, regulars and commuters @seoulfoodnyc

Open skies / september 2013

Teji Tokyo

Sleek interiors and delicious high-end Korean food at this beautiful restaurant in the heart of Shinjuku. It’s not cheap, but then, you are in the centre of Tokyo. One to impress business associates @tejitokyo

Bums Seoul

OK, so Seoul has thousands of restaurants, but few match the simple home-cooked style of Bums, which is located in the upscale Cheongdam-dong neighbourhood @bums888

Myungga

One of London’s best Korean restaurants – the same chef has been there since 1990 – serves a variety of hot and cold dishes from its King Street location @myunggalondon

Our next stop is Cortelyou Road in the Kennsington neighbourhood.

It’s named for Jacques Cortelyou, who drew the first map of what would become New York City in 1660. The survey, commonly called the Costello Plan, serves as the namesake for one of Nikhamin’s favorite wine bars. We don’t go in because it’s 9.30am Its treeand closed. lIned and We also don’t go to Mimi’s beautIful, Hummus, the stuff another favorite of tV shows of my tour guide, as they and IdyllIc don’t serve youth hummus for breakfast. Nor do we hit up Purple Yam, with its excellent Filipino food like chicken adobo.

The White House pastry chef came specifically for the dish. I make a mental note to return for dinner.

We settle on The Farm on Adderley, one of the first restaurants to open in the neighbourhood. The name of the establishment means ‘a long shot’ and comes from co-owner Gary Jonas’ youth. He grew up in South Africa and Adderley goes through Cape Town. Hence having a farm would be difficult. But a restaurant

Garden state / Ditmas Park, a Historic District filled with Victorian houses

in Brooklyn isn’t. I order a Farm Omelet with cheddar and caramelized onions. Nikhamin gets an egg sandwich. We spilt some excellent grits.

Refueled, it’s bike time again, but not before we walk past Sycamore, a flower shop by day and bar by night. Nikhamin says they have a yearly pig roast. I laugh. I mean, sure, why not?

Breakfast / Morning sustenance at The Farm on Adderly

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We continue south through Ditmas Park, which features a remarkable concentration of Victorian houses from the 1900s.

So many so, in fact, that the entire neighbourhood has officially been designated as a Historic District. It’s treelined and beautiful, the stuff of television shows and idyllic youths, not the chaotic, industrial Brooklyn that’s too often shown as the entire borough.

The next neighbourhood in our journey to the beach is Midwood.

We pass Di Fara’s Pizza, which has a reputation as the best pie in the country. Pro tip from a man on a bike who knows things: “It’s good, but not worth the two-hour wait.

Go on rainy Wednesday or go with a full stomach because you’ll be hungry by the time you eat.” Noted.

We keep riding, heading into Sheepshead Bay where Nikhamin grew up. “I have a great place,” he exclaims. “Have you ever been to a Russian supermarket?” I

on brand / Eastern delights at Net Cost Mart, a Russian supermarket

LocaL pride / Nikhamin and his bike in front of the Brooklyn Bridge

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have not, so soon we reach Net Cost Mart, lock our bikes, and walk into the blocklong behemoth. We browse the aisles as Frankie Valli’s I Love You Baby plays over the speakers. Fresh currants – one of the best things about Russian supermarkets, according to Nikhamin – are out of season, but there are plenty of varieties of dead fish for sale, Russian beer, Russian candy (“We take our bad candy very seriously.”), Russian juice, “Sprats,” and other items you wouldn’t find in the Union Square Trader Joe’s. “It’s a cultural tour of Russia, very condensed,” Nikhamin says with a laugh, grabbing a few packages of tea that he and his wife drink.

In another mile, we reach Emmons Ave. and the water. Fishing boats and yachts bounce in the inlet and Manhattan We head home Beach lies just on the ocean beyond another parkWay bike spit of land.

Nikhamin came lane, built here after his in 1896, the eighth grade graduation and a oldest in the child about that country age walks by in a blue cap and gown. Hurricane Sandy ravaged the area in 2012, as the sea swelled 15 feet or more, but the area’s residents have rebuilt their stores, their shops, and their houses. Life goes on in Brooklyn. It always does.

We’re close to the Coney Island boardwalk, but running out of time so we decide to head back after one more stop.

Bensonhurst’s L&B Spumoni Gardens sells some of the best square pizza around and ices to match. This is “fuggedaboutit” Brooklyn. A sign on the chain link fence that surrounds the concrete yard with picnic tables for seating reads “No Motorcycles on the Sidewalk.” Nikhamin holds the bikes while I grab to ices, chocolate for him and lemon for me. After more than 15 mile of riding, they are well deserved rewards.

It’s finally time to head back. We jump on the Ocean Parkway bike lane, which was built in 1896. It’s the oldest one in the country. The road to our destination is long and straight. It feels like home.

Open skies / september 2013

BLD

ethan Stowell, chefowner of Ethan Stowell Restaurants, shares his favourite Seattle dining spots

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Wandering Goose 403 15th Ave. E Seattle, WA 98112 Tel: +1 2063239938 thewanderinggoose.com

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L

BreakfaSt

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D

Dinner No restaurant says Seattle like Canlis does. It’s been open for 60 years and it’s better than it has ever has been. With Mark and Brian Canlis you get the most thoughtful and kind service in the city. And with arguably the most talented chef in Seattle, Jason Franey, you get food that has a lasting memory in every bite. It’s a combination Canlis of service and food that doesn’t come along very 2576 Aurora Avenue often, and it’s simply great. The restaurant itself North, Seattle, Washington 98109 is quite incredible, offering 180-degree views of Tel: +1 2062833313 the city, Lake Union and the Cascade Mountains. canlis.com

Lunch The Pike Place Market is a special spot, and Café Campagne is my favourite place to eat in the market. If it’s winter my wife and I will go and enjoy the only true cassoulet made in the city.

And in the summer it has to be the fresh salad Nicoise accompanied by a glass of chilled rosé. Both experiences are amazing, and being on Post Alley in the market just makes this a true one-of-a-kind Seattle experience. It is little surprise that Café Campagne has picked up so many awards since it opened.

Wandering Goose is a wonderfully relaxed southern-inspired breakfast and lunch place, and the food is simply delicious. It’s on Capitol Hill, and it’s a great spot to get awesome Café Vita coffee and the most amazing biscuits you have ever tasted. Whether it’s a biscuit with homemade jam and butter, a fried egg and bacon or fried chicken, it is all amazing. I like to go here for breakfast, but the Wandering Goose is a great spot for lunch too.

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Campagne 1600 Post Alley Seattle, Washington 98101 Tel: +1 2067282233 cafecampagne.com

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mapped Saint-Maurice

SEDAWATTA

Musee Matisse Rue puget SINGHAPURA

Mantega Cimez La Conque Riquier

Carabecel

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Thiers

Jeab-medecin

Gambetta

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06

Vieille Ville

Nice

Hotels 1. Hi Hotel 43.697506,7.255476

Restaurants 5. Le Bistrot du Port 43.694667,7.282958

Bars/Clubs 9. Rosalina Bar 43.699883,7.284141

Galleries 13. Musée Matisse 43.719536,7.275381

2. Hotel Gounod One of the 43.699090,7.260062

6. Le Comptoirdestinations, du Marché 10. undisputed Deli bo.

14. Théâtre de la Photographie et de l'Image world’s most romantic Nice is an haven for all things bright 43.697503,7.274952 43.700772,7.281818 43.701348,7.27055 and beautiful. From the winding streets of the old town to the abundant fresh fruit and flower 3. Le Negresco Kamogawa to all five senses simultaneously.

11. Snug & CellarBlessed with year-round 15. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice markets, this coastal city7.appeals sunshine 43.694502,7.258332 43.697187,7.262127 43.697233,7.277346 43.694539,7.248851 and spectacular scenery, Nice offers up an irresistible slice of French life, alongside generous 4. Hotel Windsor 8. Bistrot L’Ecole de Nice 12. Aqua Bar (Clarion Grand Hotel Aston) 16. Maison Abandonnée portions of world-renowned gastronomy.

43.697834,7.261435

www.Hg2.com

43.69724,7.262259

43.698018,7.272229

43.712043,7.265488

HOTELS

rESTauraNTS

BarS / CLuBS

GaLLErIES

01. Hi Hotel 02. Negresco 03. Windsor 04. Hotel Gounod

05. Bistrot du Port 06. Kamogawa 07. Comptoir du Marché 08. L’Ecole du Nice

09. rosalina 10. Déli Bo 11. Snug & Cellar 12. aqua Bar

13. Musée Matisse 14. Théâtre de la Photographie et de l’Image 15. Musée Beaux arts 16. Maison abondonnée

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Image

rESTauranTS 05 Bistrot du Port Run like clockwork by the Orsini family since the early 1980s, Bistrot du Port is the ne plus ultra of South of France seafood. Tables look out onto Nice’s Vieux Port.

Dishes like scallop carpaccio and cod brouillade with truffles pay homage to the local fishing fleet.

07 Comptoir du Marché Experimental Niçois cuisine at honest prices inside a vintage French kitchen. Regionally inspired modernist dishes include local poutine fish on anchovy toast, and slow-cooked beef cheeks in a black olive and tomato sauce. Book as far in advance as you dare.

06 Kamogawa Family-run for three decades, Kamogawa’s chefs are three besuited Japanese gentleman who prepare classic sushi, from before the age of wasabi burgers and Peruvian nigiri.

Lunchtime bar-side dining deals include a $21 set menu of Kyushuan starters, salmon platters, fresh fruit and green tea.

08 L’Ecole du Nice What happens when you team Michelin-starred Nice-based chef Keisuke Matsushima with two top local restaurateurs? L’Ecole is a Niçois-Japanese fusion of goat’s cheese, figs and fresh fish combined with soy, noodles and crispy tempura cooking techniques. Twocourse lunch and dinner set menus from $24.

HOTELS 01 Hi Hotel Take 38 rooms. Cross them with nine different style concepts, including ‘Indoor Terrace,’ which features an in-room glass shower cube and bamboo plantation. Add one rooftop swimming pool. Then mix in a secret courtyard garden where an organic breakfast buffet is served. Bliss.

02

Negresco The Negresco is a living, breathing monument to rococo Riviera excess. So OTT is its pink and white wedding cake façade that it’s listed as a National Historical Building by the French government. Every VIP from the last century has passed through its gilded revolving doors, from The Beatles to Salvador Dali.

03 Windsor The Riviera art world finds its spiritual home at the Hotel Windsor. Every year, an acclaimed artist designs a new guestroom – and now 30 one-of-a-kind rooms (themes include graffiti, forest and gold leaf ) are available to book. The Windsor’s unkempt tropical garden – WiJungle – is a leafy Eden.

04 Hotel Gounod Nice’s best bargain is housed in a 1920s belle époque mansion, five minutes from the 5km-long public beach. Better still, it combines 3-star prices with 4-star facilities, as it shares the rooftop 61 swimming pool of the Hotel Splendid which is right around the corner.

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GallErIEs

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CulTuRe huBS / Musée Matisse and Musée Beaux Arts in the centre

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13 Musée Matisse In 2013 the City of Nice celebrated the 50-year passing of its most celebrated adopted son, Hénri Matisse. The Frenchman moved to the seafront Hotel Beau Rivage in 1917, then painted Nice’s Old Town, markets and seafront promenade. This national museum showcases his most famous Blue Nudes and Jazz series of work.

14 Théâtre de la Photographie et de l’Image The TPI is a vintage cinema, local photo gallery and cutting edge exhibition space all in one. Oh-so-romantic French photography – previous shows have been dedicated to Hénri Cartier Bresson and Brassaï – contrast with black and white images of Nice by local chronicler Charles Negre.

bars / clubs 09 Rosalina The newest addition to Nice’s party scene is housed in a converted garage repair joint.

According to Elle this retro bar is “a home inside a loft with vintage furniture.” Prosecco and cocktails come with Niçois mini-tasting platters of queen olives, anchovies and capers.

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Déli Bo Many establishments in Nice claim to be gourmet cafés and delicatessens. Déli Bo tops the lot. Positively palatial club sandwiches are laced with gorgonzola and warm beef salad.

Beverages come courtesy of Kusmi and Dammann – Paris’ two finest tea houses.

11 Snug & Cellar In the heart of Nice Old Town, this British gastropub is infused with French sophistication. There are no microwaves and no freezers here. Instead, ingredients are purchased fresh from the Cours Saleya street market a few blocks away. And yes, there’s fish and chips on Friday, all washed down with Provençal wine.

12 Aqua Bar Only a handful of locals know about this breathtaking rooftop bar.

Atop the Grand Hotel Aston, juices and cocktails are served on sun loungers around a petite swimming pool. Panoramas stretch from the airport to the newly opened city gardens underneath the hotel.

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15 Musée Beaux Arts Just imagine living here. One of Europe’s most colourful art collections is housed in a rococo palace built for ultrawealthy Ukrainian Princess Kotchoubey. Sculptures

by Rodin dominate the downstairs. Locally painted canvases sing from the first floor, including many by Raoul Dufy and Paul Signac.

16 Maison Abondonnée Contemporary art comes to live in an abandoned villa in North Nice. Left to the elements for 15 years, the belle époque surroundings now form a blank canvas for the revolving installations that take place in the drawing rooms, on the stairs and even in the bathrooms.

LOCAL KNOwLEDGE

The Magazine Shop Many have predicted the death of print, but a new Magazine shop in Media city highlights the rise of independent publishing words by conor purcell /

images by roui francisco

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Open skies / september 2013

S

et on the outskirts of Media City, across the road from a never-ending construction site, and a tangle of roads heading towards The Palm, is The Magazine Shop. Unless you are specifically looking for it, you would miss it – there is no large sign, just a small logo on glass double-doors. This is a not place you will stumble across, and for the people running this magazine store and café, that’s just fine.

May Al Calamawy, an Egyptian-Palestinian runs the store with Kamal Rasool; both are young and enthusiastic about magazines and both are typical of a new generation of Dubai residents who want to create new cultural experiences for the city.

“The publishing scene in Dubai is quite standard,” says May. You will find the mainstream titles, but there is not really a culture of magazines. People here love technology, but we want to get people to buy physical magazines, to collect them. I think this will happen – the scene will grow.”

Indeed in the past few years a number of new independent titles

home brewed / A selection of tea and coffee available

have sprung up, from the food title The Carton, to the lo-fi travel magazine We Are Here. And of course there is Brownbook – the publishers of which, Emirati twins Ahmed and Rashid Bin Shabib, are behind The Magazine Shop.

The shop itself is simple – a large, square room with nine white tables, surrounded by

counter culture / Customers on an August morning

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Open skies / september 2013

PeoPle in dubai love technology but we want them to buy Physical magazines, to collect them. i think this will haPPen wooden chairs; a coffee counter in one corner and two walls filled with magazines from around the world. Four girls sit at one table discussing an advertising pitch while a couple at the next table eat fruit salad and sip coffee, their eyes wandering the magazines that dot the walls. Each magazine gets its own wooden shelf – there is no hierarchy in the display: all the magazines are equal here.

“The way the shop is set up highlights each magazine here.

We are very simple with our style – we like the clean-cut style and

The Trick for magazines is geTTing inTo The shop in The firsT place, as The process is very selecTive

to have the magazines the main focus. Each magazine is like an art piece on its own – and so much work goes into the covers, so we like to highlight that,” says May. The trick for the magazines is getting in here in the first place.

As May says: “It’s a very selective process – Kamal researches everything that has a specific vibe, nothing too mainstream – we have a couple from this region such as The Carton and The Outpost. The more magazines you see, the more you know which magazine will want to carry. A lot of local publishers have been wanted to stock their magazines, but we are very

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Open skies / september 2013

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IT WAS APPRECIATED IN DIFC, BUT WE WANT TO BE THOUGHT OF AS A MAGAZINE SHOP, AND NOT JUST AS A COFFEE SHOP

WE ARE HERE / A lo-fi travel magazine that focuses on a different city or district each issue. Published three times a year

selective – it’s a lot of research and a lot of understanding about what makes a good magazine.”

The most popular magazines are, unsurprisingly, those from the region, but all tastes are catered for. “The Carton, We Are Here are both very popular, as is Juxtapoz, Frankie and The Gentlewoman,” says May. “Then we will have someone like an architect who comes in and wants a specific magazine about his field, which he cannot get anywhere else.”

This is the second Magazine Shop in Dubai, with the first situated in Gate Village in DIFC. That closed for the summer, and, although it was a success (and will reopen this month), was seen as more of a café than a magazine shop. “It was appreciated there, but it was not necessarily the market to read magazines, they appreciated the café – but we want to be represented as a magazine shop not a café,” says May. That said, the coffee on sale at The Magazine Shop is excellent and varied (we can recommend the Heart Starter, a mix of cold brewed coffee, ice and mik) – as is the

THE CARTON / A quarterly magazine that promotes food and culture in the Middle East

THE OUTPOST / A quarterly magazine that aims to focus on the possibilities of the Arab world

BROWNBOOK / One of the first quality cultural magazines in the region, this bi-monthly title is sold around the world

food menu. Meatball subs, cheese toasties and fruit salads are just some of the dishes on offer.

The new location, in Media City, should see a more receptive publishing crowd, particularly given the dearth of quality coffee shops in the area. “We also found there were not many cafes to really hang out so we wanted to give people a work space. We don’t have couches and it’s not a place to come and sit for hours, it’s a place for productivity,” she says.

Future plans include more magazines (of course), as well as a series of events, including a winter fair where publishers can set up stalls showcasing the local independent scene.

For now, though it’s all about the magazines – yes, those old-fashioned devices that are, despite the emergence of the tablet, still going strong.

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OPEN SKIES / SEPTEMBER 2013

The Magazine Shop, Loft Office 2, Entrance E, behind OSN Building, Dubai Media City; themagazineshop.me

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place

National Museum / Seoul A traditional roof pattern in one of the buildings that makes up the seoul National Museum – one of south Korea’s top tourist attractions. Built in 1945, the museum relocated to Yongsan district in 2005 and houses a variety of exhibits on everything from architecture and art to history and archaelogy. Regular exhibitions ensure repeat visits are worthwhile.

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COLUMN

The lure of uNDerGrouND

The London Underground is 150 years old this year – yet most Londoners take this marvel of engineering for granted Words by Christopher Beanland / Illustration by Mar Hernandéz

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hat familiar blast of air hits me as a train screams from the tunnel into the station like a harbinger from another realm. It gets your pulse racing if you stand near the platform edge. It sometimes surprises me that more people

aren’t scared of these serpentine monsters that emerge from the darkness and swallow us up whole through electric gills. At Highbury & Islington, or indeed any of the other Victoria Line stations, you don’t have to wait long for a train – there are now 33 per hour. You can jump on to almost factory-fresh rolling stock and be transported

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Open skies / SEPTEMBER 2013

across London faster than by any other means – taxi, helicopter, speed boat, anything.

Yet, on the 150th anniversary of London Underground you have to search hard to find someone who’s still thrilled by this modern marvel – this automated Tube line that carries more passengers than almost any other line in the

world. Despite the Victoria Line together – Morden and Edgware; providing a great service, we Walthamstow and Brixton; Epping Londoners, we Britons I guess, are and West Ruislip – was in some wont to moan. To grumble. It is – ways part of the system’s undoing. some people say – our way.

The Metropolitan Railway in We’ve got too used to having particular acted as a kind of property one of the world’s most extensive developer; the aim of the whole Underground systems, no-one network was to encourage suburban is old enough to remember a time development so more people before the Tube began. And soon would use the trains at stations far few people will remember a time from the centre. By encouraging before the Victoria Line, the line unsustainable and highly inefficient I use most, opened back in levels of commuting, the Tube 1968 – at a time when Britain stored up a problem that has now once again basked briefly in the become a catastrophe. Too many ‘white heat’ of technology – the passengers all going into Central time of the Post Office Tower and London in the morning and all going the VC10 jet. out again at night.

The first time London led the The reason most Londoners world, back in 1863, the Victorians hate the Tube today is believed they had an almost divine overcrowding: they’re often right to rule not just the waves packed in like sardines in a can but also the world of on the way to and technology. Nothing from work. It’s no We forget was too dramatic to way to live. But we dream of. A railway forget the joy of the joy of under the streets now the Tube, and we the tube, We seems prosaic enough, forget how it saved but in the time of HG us. The Museum forget hoW Wells, Charles Darwin shows how Tube it saved us and Jules Verne, it was stations became during the a revelation. But in the bomb shelters railway age, nothing during the Blitz World War was thought to be of Second World beyond man’s reach.

War. Though And so on Sunday it also remembers Januart 10, 1863, the the Bethnal Green first steam trains ran tragedy of March 3, under the streets from Farringdon 1943, when 173 civilians were to Paddington. crushed to death in a stampede Our collective memory is so when the air raid sirens went short and sieve-like that we easily off. The other problem today is forget not just the back-breaking the constant maintenance and work of the Irish navvies who toiled weekend closures needed to patch in the hell and the heat to construct up the ailing system. It grinds to the whole system over the next 100 a halt too often and needs huge years, but we also forget the many investment in signalling, track, leaps of faith involved in imagining and escalators. how we could join the dots in the The Underground’s beauty is city from A to B, under the ground. so easily forgotten. Commuters, At the recently-refurbished fed up and with their minds London Transport Museum in on pushing irrelevant pieces Covent Garden, the plot thickens. of paper around, scarcely stop The way the Underground brought to look at the beauty of the the disparate points of the city station architecture: the modern

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Open skies / august 2013

masterpieces by Charles Holden like Sudbury Town – described

by Pevsner as a ‘landmark’ – and Tooting Broadway. Both now listed buildings. Next time your Piccadilly Line train from Heathrow to Central London is travelling into town, look out of the windows at the remarkable deco lines of South Ealing Station, which looks more like a cruise liner from the 1930s.

Design was a huge part of the Underground’s way of life. In the 1930s, Frank Pick tried to create a unified brand for the Underground – his work survives to this day. The round logo, the coloured lines, the glamorous deco posters, the map.

That map, by Harry Beck, was famously inspired by electrical circuits and was a two finger salute to the French: they insisted the messy Paris Metro map showed the lines as they were. London’s was simplified. It’s of the greatest graphic design works in history.

Today, more people use the Underground – one billion passengers a year – than all of the rest of Britain’s rail network combined. Transport for London is using the Underground concept to remake all of the city’s previously scrappy surface lines, under the Overground banner – delivering a rapid service to people in the east and south of the city that were previously ill-served by the Tube.

Londoners need to remember how blessed we are with a system that allows us to get to work, go to a gallery or meet friends across town – cheaply, quickly and easily.

The citizens of Los Angeles or or Sao Paulo would kill for the number of lines we have. Back on the Victoria Line, I can even check my emails on the new wi-fi service as the train slides in King’s Cross, Euston or any other station on my way into town.

Christopher Beanland is a writer based in London

store

Los Muertos Motorbikes

C

Words by Sarah Khan / Images by Henrique Wilding

ape Town’s BoKaap district, with its narrow lanes packed with petite row houses curving their way up the slopes of Signal Hill could – from a distance – be mistaken for a rainbow. The charming homes exploding in Technicolour shades of lilac, turquoise, and berry pink, shimmer even more brightly on a sunny day, and in this postcard-worthy

neighbourhood, at the base of Dorp Street, lies Los Muertos Motorcycles – an industrial-style coffeehouseslash-motorcycle-workshop-slashfilmmaking outfit.

It’s an unlikely business in an unlikely location. Bo-Kaap is Cape Town’s historic Muslim area, home to the city’s vibrant Cape Malay community — descended from political exiles and slaves from Indonesia, Malaysia, and other Dutch colonies in the Far

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East. Los Muertos sits directly across the street from South Africa’s oldest mosque, the Auwal Masjid. But in a city like Cape Town, where unexpected hybrids are common — just take the region’s unique Cape Malay cuisine, a fusion of Dutch, Indonesian, Malaysian, Indian, British, and African flavours, as an example — Los Muertos Motorcycles somehow makes perfect sense.

full of beans / Los Muertos sells everything from coffee to custom motorbikes

“Essentially, Los Muertos is a creative outlet. That’s the easiest way to explain it,” says co-owner Craig Wessels. In a structure that once housed a garage, he and Steven Pitt run a multifaceted business: Los Muertos produces commercial films for South Africa’s leading ad agencies; redesigns and tricks out custom motorcycles for clients; sells motorcycle and surfing gear; and serves high-quality coffee and pastries. For Wessels and Pitt, each

component is simply a different way for them to express themselves.

“We direct TV commercials, which in itself is quite a creative process, creating content,” says Wessels. “We also express ourselves by building custom motorcycles — it’s rolling artwork or mobile art, that’s our approach to our builds. We also design some of our clothing, collaborate with other artists, illustrators, and surfboard shapers, and work with chefs to

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figure out the next lunchtime pie that we’re selling. There’s nothing there that we can’t do.”

You will see Los Muertos long before you actually come upon it, thanks to the collection of vintage motorcycles on the street clustered around a chalkboard that reads, simply: ‘Coffee. Bikes. Gear.’ Inside, there are exposed-brick walls and of retro signs, parking meters, and assorted knickknacks that Wessels has amassed over 30 years.

Rainbow nation / Bo-Kaap’s colourful houses make the area a tourist favourite

Take a closer look and you’ll see the goods sold here are state-of-theart: Biltwell helmets, Davida riding gloves, and high-quality selvage Edwin denim from Japan. “Our core business is bike-building,” says Pitt. “Guys will bring their bikes here, give us a budget, and we’ll ‘LMMC it’ and add our signature.”

The duo also buys motorcycles – old Yamahas, Hondas, and Suzukis

are their favourites – and soup them up before reselling them.

Wessels and Pitt have been friends for years, sharing a passion for motorcycles – Wessels rebuilt his first one at the age of 12 – and joined forces to open the quirkily named business in January: Wessels is the brains behind the film production wing at the heart of the business, while Pitt is the motorcycle maestro. “Steve gets it, he understands the subculture of designing motorcycles, so he was a great guy to bring in to be the face of the motorcycle business,” says Wessels. And what of the name?

‘Los Muertos’ means ‘the dead’ in Spanish. “We had a bit of a wild night in Tijuana, and the name sort of found us,” he remembers with a laugh.

A small opening next to a few cupboards in the retail space leads

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to an extensive open-plan office, home to LMMC’s film-production wing. “As a production company I wanted to be able to offer my clients a cool, comfortable environment to be in,” says Wessels. “And secondly, most production companies are closed to the public – I thought it would be great to open the company to the public, and a great way to have them come in and

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interact was to have them come in for a reason. It goes so well with what we do.”

Coffee culture is an integral part of South African life, and so it was a logical step for Wessels and Pitt to include a coffee shop in their operation. “The whole ‘café racer’ motorcycle culture developed around coffee shops in the UK, and it felt natural and normal that we would do something that would involve coffee,” says Wessels. A barista works diligently behind the long counter, serving up cappuccinos and espressos alongside locally baked pies and treats – the coffee is a special organic Arabica blend from Nicaragua, and the pastries are all sourced from Jason’s Bakery, Baguette, and Lady Cupcake, local businesses that share Los Muertos’s core values.

On any given day you’ll find an eclectic mix of customers

Tools of The Trade / At heart, the store is all about the motor bikes

perusing the racks, or sitting at one of the folding metal chairs with a newspaper, coffee, and a bobotie pie, a spin on a classic Cape Malay dish of minced beef. The patrons are varied – on the motorcycle side of things, the team’s latest client is a young, successful asset manager from Johannesburg. Since Bo-Kaap is bustling with tourists, scores of Americans and Europeans will stumble onto the shop and walk in off the street for a coffee. The free Wi-Fi also makes it appealing for people looking to have a business meeting over a bite. “There are the bikers that come in for the gear, and then they go oh, great, you do coffee and pastries. Then on the other side, people say “Oh, we

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heard there’s a new coffeeshop in the Bo-Kaap,” and they come and say, “Oh, my God, this is awesome – surfboards, bikes,” says Pitt. “It’s quite varied,” Wessels adds.

There’s a second Los Muertos outlet opening up soon in Rosebank, Johannesburg, so clearly there’s a lot in store for this concept. But Wessels and Pitt are not the type to dwell on business plans. “I don’t want to force it into anything, we’ll go with the flow,” says Wessels. “I don’t have any plans of empire-building. It’s just a place to have fun and enjoy and be creative and live our passions.”

42 Dorp Street, Bo-Kaap, 8001 Cape Town, South Africa facebook.com/LosMuertosMC

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ethiopia

adventure

science

The man on the vintage music trail across Ethiopia

How to travel like a Victorian adventurer in 2013

Stunning photographs of the cutting edge

The City of Falling Angels The reinvention of Marseille

(p116)

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africa

l i a r T l y a n i b V a b e h A t s i n O Add in

Iain Akerman braves the chaos of the Ethiopian capital to look for vinyl, and ends up finding a lot more than he bargained for 8383

Capital gains / Addis Ababa has long been one of the most temperate African capitals

B

y any standard Mercato is an utterly chaotic affair.

Its pavements are crumbling, its roads disintegrating; its ramshackle buildings slapped together with wood and corrugated iron. Not one corner of this giant, labyrinthine market could be considered pretty. It is the raw, unvarnished face of Ethiopian survival.

To walk through the early stages of Mercato’s streets is an intoxicating experience – a kaleidoscope of merchants, hawkers, pickpockets, beggars, the destitute and the crippled. Together they glide, stumble, crawl or steal their way through a teeming mass of humanity.

Buried somewhere deep within this enormous sprawl – perched to the northwest of Addis Ababa’s Piazza – is an old man selling records, although the chances of us finding him are slim. Only one of us has a vague idea of where we are, we don’t have a guide, and the police have spotted us.

Most record collectors don’t give Addis Ababa a second glance, let alone Mercato. It is so far off

the beaten track it might as well not exist. There are no vinyl record stores, no stalls selling old 45s, no collectors’ fairs. What records there are lie in private collections, in forgotten garages, or in the occasional second-hand store selling everything from Italian fascist documents to pith helmets.

Yet a handful of collectors have tried their luck over the course of the past two decades, buoyed by the increasing popularity of Ethiojazz and a deepening appreciation of traditional Ethiopian music.

Among them is musician, DJ and record producer Quantic, who travelled to Addis Ababa in 2004 with Miles Cleret, the founder of record label Soundway, and LA-based photographer B+, ostensibly to interview Mulatu Astatke, the legendary father of Ethio-jazz, and to search for records. The resulting interview was published in Wax Poetics the following year, while an hour-long DJ set composed of records discovered by Quantic on the trip was released in 2010 under the name Addis to Axum. A further mix of Ethiopian folkloric and outer-regional music

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Mercato is a kaleidoscope of merchants, beggars, hawkers, pickpockets and the destitute; a chaotic affair was released by Quantic on the website Soundcloud earlier this year.

Now feted across the world, Astatke released the bulk of his work on Amha Records, combining his love of jazz and Latin with traditional Ethiopian music to create the defining moments of Ethiopia’s musical golden age, which spanned the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, creating stars out of artists such as Alemayehu Eshete, Girma Beyene, Mahmoud Ahmed and Tilahun Gessesse.

Somewhere within the morass that is Mercato sits a man with the records of Astatke, Beyene and

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Most of vinyl is scratched and not playable, but a few make the day’s search more than worthwhile

Treasures / A man in the backstreets of Mercato with a room full of dusty vinyl

Ahmed tucked away in a dusty box, but the chances of us finding him are receding. The police are shadowing us and, with good intentions, are advising us to leave.

As we head back to the Piazza empty-handed, Addis Ababa’s commercial centre glides past in a haze of exhaust fumes. This is not an attractive city. It is potholed, frequently filthy, and often heartbreakingly poor. What remains of the city’s Italian architecture – constructed during the short-lived occupation of the 1930s – is falling into disrepair, although the modernist style of Electricity House and the Ethiopian Airlines building retains shades of its former glory. In essence, Piazza is less an area and more an intersection, with roads pinging off in various directions. A few streets are filled with smart shop fronts displaying locally made jewellery, while the smaller lanes focus on fashion, mobile phone covers and plastic tat. A nearby old workers’ area is a maze of cobblers, leather makers and other such stalls, but we head away from the side streets towards a coffee shop not far from the Piazza’s main roundabout.

The coffee shop’s clientèle are predominantly middle-aged men watching the world go by, although a handful of couples can be seen huddled together in quiet conversation. Families of beggars come and go, as do men bent low by heavy loads, while on the opposite side of the street young women flit in and out of the crowd, their occasionally

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There are records by the likes of Tilahun Gessesse and Mahmoud Ahmed, who were both stars in their day tattooed faces highlighted by the early afternoon sun.

Just up from the coffee shop is a small bookstall. Scattered here and there are old guide books and magazines featuring Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia and the central figure of worship in Rastafarianism. A couple of works by English suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, who lived and worked in Ethiopia during her later years and died there in 1960, also line the shelves.

There is also a solitary old gramophone record minus its sleeve. I ask the stall’s owner if he has any Ethiopian records. He doesn’t, but a man nearby says he does. We finish our coffee and follow him along a couple of side streets before eventually heading, literally, up a garden path.

The shed at the end of the path is small, barely two metres wide with a glass cabinet at the far end.

Books are stacked high in one corner, old maps cover a tiny table, and on top of a wardrobe lies a stack of LPs. Most are from other African countries, although there’s a scattering of ‘70s disco and pop.

The man crouches, rising again only when he was finds what he is looking for, eventually handing me a stack of Ethiopian 7” singles from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Many are deeply scratched and beyond playable, but a few make the day’s search worthwhile. The Amin, Mahmoud and Kaifa record labels are there, as are Tilahun Gessesse and Mahmoud Ahmed, both of

whom were brought back to international attention by music curator and producer Francis Falceto, who has re-released a sizeable chunk of Ethiopia’s musical heritage via the Éthiopiques series. Each 45 is about 200 birr ($10), but we negotiate a bulk deal. Astatke is conspicuous by his absence, as are Girma Beyene and the Walias Band, but we make plans to return before eventually heading back across town to the Sheraton.

Two of our taxi’s doors don’t work and the front seatbelt has

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Open skies / september 2013

disappeared, but we’re satisfied.

As author and journalist Tom Cox once wrote: “Before civilisation, so the legend goes, man hunted antelope, wildebeest and woolly mammoth. Subsequently, Island Records began to release gatefold vinyl with pink inserts, and he began to hunt that instead. Unlike meat, rare records did not help feed his family or improve his standing with womenfolk, but who was complaining?”

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The Road / Early morning on the road to Tis Isat near the Blue Nile Falls 7km from the airport, its own promotional blurb describes the property as “a sanctuary of Ethiopian grandeur, where a landscape of vibrant greens and colourful wildflowers meets the African sky.”

In truth, you’ll not appreciate the Sheraton fully until you leave Addis and head into Ethiopia’s wild and staggeringly beautiful countryside.

Later that evening we hurtle towards the centre of town in a taxi missing most of the basic requirements of comfortable travel.

A crucifix swings frantically from the rear-view mirror and on arrival at the Piazza we are forced to exit the rear passenger seats via a single workable door. Although the oc-

casional street peddler can still be seen plying his trade, several bars and clubs have sprung to life, while in the roads and alleys surrounding the Taitu Hotel a smattering of Rastas occasionally slip in and out of the darkness.

The Jazzamba Lounge is packed when we arrive. There are no seats available near the front and the rhythmic, frequently trance-like qualities of Ethio-jazz are being pumped through the club’s sound system before a young, beautiful female singer takes centre stage.

She sings in lilting Amharic to a long, mid-tempo number that, as with many traditional Ethiopian songs, gives little respite to the

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Open skies / september 2013

Everyone walks.

Everyone is lean, and there are almost no cars.

Everyone seems to have something to do singer. After two songs she is done.

The beguiling smile and wavy hair of our waitress pops in and out of focus, before disappearing altogether as bottles of Harar, Meta

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legwork / The vast majority of Ethiopia’s population gets around on foot and St George appear with increasing frequency.

Ethiopia is a country that flies in the face of much of its international reputation. It is not in the midst of a perpetual famine. It is not barren.

It is not beset by rebels and bandits, although travel to the Eritrean border, the Danakil Desert (where a number of tourists were killed last year), and within 100km of the borders with Somalia and Kenya are strongly discouraged, as is travel to the border with Sudan.

As we drive north from Addis Ababa towards Bahir Dar, through villages and towns such as Fiche, Debre Markos and Finote Selam, the simultaneously beautiful and squalid reality of rural Ethiopia

unfolds before us. The lush, fertile and stunning landscape of the Ethiopian Highlands is often implausibly green, punctuated only by giant geographic obstacles such as the Blue Nile Gorge. As we head further and further north, the rural industry of every village floods the single-lane road masquerading as one of the country’s main arteries.

Groups of laughing children run to market, donkeys carrying huge bundles of wood are carried by smiling women, and here and there boys sling rudimentary ploughs over their shoulders. Every so often men urinate in the street.

Everyone walks. Everyone is lean. There are few cars and when we stop for coffee we admire a ru-

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ral way of life that, despite its apparent inefficiency, appears to give everybody something to do. At one of the next villages much of the local population has been employed building a new bridge, among them young women and teenagers carrying heavy loads up and down precarious, mud-covered walkways.

Some shout encouragement, others simply look on.

Morning, however, reveals the full extent of Lake Tana. At 2,156 sq km, it is vast. Small isolated island monasteries punctuate the horizon and wildlife peppers the shoreline.

It is from here that the Blue Nile begins its journey towards the confluence of the White and Blue Niles in Khartoum, stuttering only to drop

Lake Tana is surrounded by small monasteries and wildlife peppers its shoreline; it’s undeniably beautiful

wandering / Dallol in the Danakil, a monk at Lake Tana and a man sailing across the lake

an estimated 45 metres en route at the Blue Nile Falls, which lies 30km away.

The evening downpours of the previous few days have lent the falls an extra sense of urgency and a misty spray engulfs much of the immediate area when we arrive.

A gaggle of youngsters shadow us, selling everything from scarves to tiny wooden whistles, and as we clamber down to the base of the falls the roar of Mother Nature becomes deafening. There are no other tourists. Not one.

As the light begins to fade we are ferried across the Blue Nile to the sound of a young man playing the masenqo, a single-stringed bowed lute that will re-emerge during the course of the coming evening. The river is the colour of mud and not blue at all, the rainy season having swept much of the countryside into the rising flow.

Checheho, one of Bahir Dar’s cultural clubs, is not dissimilar to an old Scandinavian mead hall. Its high walls and peaked roof are made of wood, while its interior is filled with low-lying tables and chairs. A fourpiece band sits on a tiny stage in the far right-hand corner of the room, and as the venue gradually fills to capacity it begins to play to a backdrop of high-energy dance.

Immediately in front of us two girls begin to sway hypnotically from side to side, their shoulders moving seductively to the music, while just beyond them a young woman’s graceful, wavelike body motion matches the band note for note.

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Fuelled by the potency of Ethiopian mead, we clap and periodically shout encouragement, carried along by the raw energy of Ethiopian music and the beauty of its women. Outside it is raining once more, but a blurry crescendo is being reached inside. All but a few are dancing, and by the time we’ve won the tuk-tuk race back to our hotel we’ve already made plans to return. Not only to track down the elusive old man in Mercato, but to embrace the wonder of Ethiopian music once more.

Iain Akerman is a writer and editor living in Dubai

adventure

How to explore

like a real victorian

adventurer Monte Reel examines the history of the travel book and discovers that Victorian-era how-to-explore guidebooks can prove useful, even when it comes to the modern shopping centre

I

n Zanzibar, late in 1856, Richard F Burton and a caravan of porters prepared to venture into the heart of Africa’s interior to search for the source of the Nile River. A ropy knot of scar tissue shined on Burton’s cheek – a souvenir from his most recent expedition, upon which he caught a spear to the face during an ambush

by Somali tribesmen.

An English diplomat on the island tried to warn Burton against pressing his luck a second time.

The diplomat told him that a wandering French naval officer recently had been taken prisoner by tribal warriors. The natives had tied the luckless pilgrim to a tree and lopped off his limbs, one by one.

The warriors, after dramatically pausing to sharpen their knives, relieved the Frenchman of his misery by slicing off his head. A true story, the diplomat insisted.

Burton wasn’t fazed. Severed limbs, rolling heads – even the grisliest of portents couldn’t deflate his spirit, not before a journey into uncharted territory. He’d spent his life cultivating a world-worn persona that confronted anything resembling naïveté with open hostility, but a blank space on a map could reduce him to giddiness. “Of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands,” he wrote in his journal before that trip inland.

“The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood.”

Africa, as it turned out, would wring much of that blood out of him. In the months ahead he would

suffer partial blindness, partial paralysis, sizzling fevers. Hallucinations crowded his brain with ghosts. A swollen tongue got in the way of eating. But the bottom line: he would survive to explore again. And years later, flipping through that worn journal from 1856, he would pass retrospective judgement on his pre-expedition enthusiasm. “Somewhat boisterous,” he concluded, “but true.”

This kind of aimless gusto for all things unexplored defined the golden age of inland travel, which roughly coincided with Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901). It’s no coincidence that these were the same years when steamships and telegraphs began to shrink the globe. Industrialisation transformed urban landscapes and fuelled the expansion of colonial empires. Railroads standardised the world’s clocks, and a new strain of hurried angst – what poet Matthew Arnold labelled “the strange disease of modern life” – began to devour souls by the millions.

Enter a new breed of adventurous explorer, which Burton perfectly exemplified. These men filled the membership rolls of the “geographical societies” that started to pop up in London, New York, Paris, Berlin and most other capitals of the industrialised world. Geographical expeditions became the antidote to an increasingly ordered, regulated and unmysterious way of life.

But what purpose would be served if the person who finally entered terra incognita couldn’t handle its unpredictable challenges?

What was the point of travel if the

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person who finally laid eyes on the previously unseen didn’t really know how to look at it?

It quickly became clear that farflung voyagers, even those as hearty as Burton, needed focus when confronting the disorienting riddles of undiscovered worlds. They needed guiding hands. They needed howto manuals.

Victorian adventurers rarely took a step into the wild without hauling a small library of how-toexplore books Victorian adventurers rarely took a step into the wild without hauling a small library of how-to-explore books with them. Among the volumes Burton carried into east Africa was a heavily annotated copy of Francis Galton’s The Art of Travel: or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries. Originally conceived as a handbook for explorers, and sponsored by England’s Royal Geographical Society, the book was required reading for any self-respecting Victorian traveller. Before rolling up his sleeves and getting down to the hard business of exploring, he could turn to page 134 to learn the best way to do exactly that:

ExpEditions / The chief officer of Richards Brigade of Amazons, sketched by Richard Burton

When you have occasion to tuck up your shirt-sleeves, recollect that the way of doing so is, not to begin by turning the cuffs not inside-out, but outside-in – the sleeves must be rolled up inwards, towards the arm, and not the reverse way. In the one case, the sleeves will remain tucked up for hours without being touched; in the other, they become loose every five minutes.

The amiably neurotic Galton left nothing to chance. His index is studded with gems like, “bones as fuel” and “savages, management of.” If Burton couldn’t find the advice he was looking for in Galton, he could always consult one of the other books in his trunk that were written with explorers in mind. The stated aim of Randolph Barnes Marcy’s The Prairie Traveller: The 1859 Handbook for Westbound Pioneers, which Burton himself edited in later editions, read like a manifesto for every handbook of this kind: “With such a book in his hand,” Marcy writes, “[the explorer] will feel himself a master spirit in the wilderness he traverses, and not the victim of every

new combination of circumstances which nature affords or fate allots, as if to try his skill and prowess.”

All of the books advertised practical intentions: If adventurers are compelled to wander the globe, why not teach them how to take note of details – be they geographical, anthropological or whatever – that might prove useful to science, industry or empire?

I stumbled upon The Art of Travel while researching a book about African exploration, and continued onto the other titles, all of which are available for free on the Internet. After reading them, I can confidently report that the scientific, industrial and political developments of intervening century have thoroughly undermined the original intentions of most of their authors. These titles won’t help powerful nations lay claim to new territories and exploitable populations. As literary genres go, this one is about as dead as they get.

But it deserves a resurrection.

It’s true that the authors are generally eccentric, habitually obsessive, and at times comically mis-

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guided. A modern reader will find plenty of hopelessly dated assumptions to indulge a sense of cultural superiority. You might chuckle when someone writes about the best place to buy a pith helmet in London. But that stuff has little to do with these books’ contemporary relevance, which goes beyond entertainment value.

While no one was looking, this neglected genre transcended its crudely utilitarian origins to occupy a higher sphere: The books are instruction manuals for the senses, lovingly compiled tip sheets on the acquired art of paying attention.

They’re not quick-and-easy reads.

Arcane language and compulsive punctuation force the reader to decelerate. But that is exactly what many of the explorers of the period identified as the most important first step of any successful expedition.

“While travelling in a strange country [I] should always prefer making my observations at a rate not quicker than five or six miles per hour,” wrote Richard Owen, the superintendent of the British Museum’s Natural History De-

RA ISE A GLASS FOR THE MAN WHO RA ISED THE BAR

*

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partments and a scientific patron for many of the period’s most far-reaching expeditions. History has judged him harshly for opposing Darwin’s ideas, but when it came to the subject of travel, his philosophy represented the vanguard of his generation’s views.

That crux of that philosophy – slow down, it’s the journey not the destination, etc – has ripened into soft travel-guide cliché. Modern writers tend to sound like humourless scolds when they preach about this stuff, but the Victorians avoid the trap of bland sanctimony because they were never content to stop at generalised advice. They always pushed it further. After advising travellers to reduce their speed, they offered hyper-specific instructions about exactly what travellers should observe, and how they should observe it.

The obvious titles illustrating this tendency are Harriet Martineau’s How to Observe: Morals and Manners, published in 1838, and What to Observe: The Traveller’s Remembrancer, written by Colonel Julian R Jackson three years later. Jackson, a secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, explains in his preface that he has “endeavored to excite a desire for useful knowledge by awakening curiosity. The intending traveller, it is hoped, will, from a perusal of the present work see what an immense field of physical and moral research lies open to his investigation…”

Everything that meets the eye tells a story, but if viewed skillfully, it also can crack open a Russian-doll wonderland of stories within stories.

When looking at a mountain peak, for example, Jackson emphasises that care must be taken to determine if it’s a “saddle-back” or a “hog’s back,” or a “sug-

ar-loaf” – because the structure might reveal the landscape’s geological composition, which in turn can explain its vegetative potential, which can in turn… and so on.

Jackson spends 30 pages advising travellers how to look at a river (is the surface of the water flat, or is it actually slightly convex? What sort of debris does it carry?). There is no such thing as an insignificant detail. After reading a few dozen pages of this stuff, his book works like a mind-altering drug. You look up from the page and notice that the world around you is popping into new dimensions. Suddenly the tree outside your window is demanding attention. You start to notice the subtle temperature differences between the air circulating around your head and the soil beneath your feet. If you’re not careful, you can get lost on runaway trains of thought.

Jackson recognises this danger, and he gently reminds his readers to stay on track, to maintain a discipline of focus. When he suggests that travellers should determine if native populations practise bee-keeping (among many other things), he cautions against jumping ahead. First, the skillful explorer must fully observe the matter at hand before moving on to related concerns: “The care of bees is seldom an exclusive occupation, and although the honey, and particularly the wax obtained, are important objects, we are here to consider merely the care bestowed on the bees themselves.”

Martineau’s How to Observe limits its attention to the proper manner of perceiving humans and their behaviour. Like Jackson, she goes to great lengths in listing what travellers should notice – their treatment of criminals, the aspirations of children, beliefs about marriage – and she’s a stickler for concrete details. But she also exhibits a respect for the distorting potential of point-of-view

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Modern travel writers tend to sound like humourless scolds when they preach about ‘slowing down’ that’s downright postmodern.

She urges the voyager to dismantle his assumptions and to always remain vigilant against “the affliction of seeing sin wherever he sees difference”. It takes a lot of practice to learn how to see the world clearly, but learning how to gauge the funhouse-mirror refractions of a foreign land is the duty of all who find themselves stumbling into disorienting territory: “A child does not catch a gold fish in water at the first trial, however good his eyes may be, and however clear the water; knowledge and method are necessary to enable him to take what is actually before his eyes and under his hand. So it is with all who fish in a strange element…”

The cameras of this era were cumbersome, delicate and hellishly tricky to use in the field. Most explorers didn’t even bother. But often they were still expected to provide their sponsoring geographical societies with visual representations of the people and lands they encountered.

Burton, our tour guide into this lost world, turned to writers like Jackson and Martineau to broaden the scope of his attentions, but he delved deeper into his makeshift bookmobile when he needed to zoom in for a tighter focus. An essential handbook was The Elements of Drawing in Three Letters to Beginners, by John Ruskin. Upon publication in 1857, it immediately found a place in the luggage of explorers in every corner of the world.

In DIsguIse / Richard Burton as Haji Abdullah on his way to Mecca Other travel handbooks, including the Royal Geographical Society’s Hints to Travellers (1854), had previously emphasised the importance of drafting and sketching, but Ruskin provided detailed, practical know-how. His book simply cannot be cracked open without intensifying a reader’s visual acuity. Without cameras to record the details for them, explorers needed to develop the eyes of an artist.

The Elements aimed to refine their vision: The victorious beauty of the rose as compared with other flowers depends wholly on the delicacy and quantity of its colour gradations, all other flowers being either less rich in gradations, not having so many folds of leaf; or less tender, being patched and veined instead of flushed.

Ruskin didn’t envision his audience as frustrated painters indulging

ambitions to hang a canvas in the Louvre. “My efforts are directed not to making a carpenter an artist, but to making him happier as a carpenter.”

Encouraging such eclecticism seems strange, not to mention vaguely irresponsible, in our age of hyper-specialisation. But the Victorians were unembarrassed about dipping from one discipline into another.

Consider Burton. He spoke more than 20 languages, wrote books on subjects ranging from bayonet technique to gold mining, was a spy and a diplomat, and was generally regarded as the most accomplished ethno-sexologist of his generation. Before disguising himself as a dervish to complete a pilgrimage to Mecca, he apprenticed himself to a blacksmith – just in case he came across some available steeds during the journey and needed to make horseshoes. He was an enthusiastic amateur in an era when the word wasn’t a slur.

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Dedicated travellers didn’t limit their aesthetic studies to the visual arts. William Gardiner’s The Music of Nature (1838) was a treasury of creative listening techniques to be applied in the field. Every sound, as heard by Gardiner, can reveal and instruct.

Using standard musical notation, he transcribed everything from the canter of a horse to the cry of a child. He charted the musical differences between the “yelp of a cur, whose foot has been trod upon” and “the whine of a dog tied up.” He encouraged readers to apply a musical ear to every sound they might encounter out in the great wide open, even the speech of the natives. He concluded that the sound of the Nordic languages are “less pleasing” than those found in milder climates, for example, because “the severity of the regions in which they are spoken keeps the mouth constantly closed, and the

act of speaking is principally performed in the throat.”

In the ragged chorus of nature, where insects provide the dominant soundtrack, we find Gardiner at his most enthusiastic. “The lively note of the cricket… consists of three notes in rhythm, always forming a triplet in the key of B,” he writes.

Remember how Jackson suggested that explorers should notice whether or not a native population keeps bees? With Gardiner, this field of inquiry bursts open with newfound potential. He informs readers that within every hive, certain bees called “fanners” ventilate the premises by the incessant motion of their wings.

“If the ear is placed on the outside of the hive,” Gardiner advises, “you may distinguish the mezzo tones that emanate from the host of fanners, who shed a mellow music from their odorous wings, which, on listening, will be found to be in the key of F.” “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar…” That’s Henry David Thoreau, gently mocking the fellows of the geographical societies in the pages of Walden. When he goes off on this subject, Thoreau sometimes sounds as if he’s responding to passages in the handbooks of Galton or Marcy. Other times he sounds as if he’s shouting directly into Burton’s ear: What does Africa – what does the West stand for? Is it not our own interior white on the chart? …If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself.”

Screw Zanzibar, in other words.

But here’s something Thoreau neglected to admit in that book: No one was more incurably addicted

to expeditionary literature and the how-to-travel books than HDT himself. Not only did he devour the travelogues of Burton and other contemporary explorers, but he energetically consumed the works of almost every author referred to above. Martineau, Owen, Ruskin, Gardiner – references to each of them appear in Thoreau’s journals.

Thoreau’s love of these books can be reconciled with his stay-athome instinct because he recognised the durable potential of the how-to-explore genre even better than its authors did. The lessons of the books could be applied to Zanzibar, but they held up equally well in the bustling hamlet of Concord, Massachusetts – or pretty much anywhere else in a world growing more tired, crowded and worn with every passing year.

“It is worth the while to see your native Village thus… as if you were a traveller passing through it,” Thoreau wrote in his journal.

There’s an idea.

Before I turned 16 and got a driver’s licence, I spent a lot of time in the Cross County Mall in Mattoon, Illinois. Within my compressed conception of the universe, the mall was roughly analogous to the Silk Road: a place that marked the eastern edge of the world, where they sold imported goods.

I could go no further on my bike.

Beyond the mall, there was nothing but an interstate and a lot of corn.

This was my ultima Thule.

My world has since expanded.

My parents still live in Mattoon, and I visit occasionally, but the mall exerts little pull on me. I spent more hours inside the mall during an average day playing video games as a preteen than I’ve spent there in the past 20 years. It’s no longer a destination for me; it’s a forlorn piece of architecture that I drive past on the way out of town. One of roughly 50,000 shopping malls crowding roadsides in America, according to the Bureau of the Census. I could

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ignore it for another 20 years, and it would still feel like the most familiar place in the world.

On a recent morning, I pulled into the mall’s parking lot with a Kindle full of downloaded guides: The Art of Travel, What to Observe, How to Observe, Hints to Travellers, Elements of Drawing, The Music of Nature and The Prairie Traveler.

I started by following Jackson’s advice to place the area in its broadest context by surveying the surrounding geography, which was ironed flat by a mile-thick glacier that rolled through about 20,000 years ago. Now the landscape imposes rigid Newtonian laws on anything that messes with its uniformity

In the ragged chorus of nature, where insects provide the soundtrack, we find Gardiner enthusiastic – if you see the mild rise of an interstate overpass (like the one within eyeshot of the parking lot), a small man-made pond of inverse dimension will be found nearby, a couple hundred yards away.

The mall is a 300,000 sq ft retail space anchored by a JCPenney at

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“What do they hold necessary to be done in this life to receive happiness in the next?” I found some clues on the t-shirt table. To Get to Heaven, You Need to Get the Hell Knocked Out of You. In my pocket notebook, under a few lines of first impressions, I wrote: “Christianity rules here, and it seems to be a combative, hardwon strain.” The author of Hints to Travellers advises that explorers label all field notations as good, very good, doubtful, etc. I confidently scribbled “v. good” in the margin.

I now think of the first page of that notebook as a necessary warmup, full of disposable insights. Few who visit could fail to note that whenever this Midwestern town doesn’t wear its faith on its sleeve, it often wears it emblazoned across its chest. But it was around this

Legend / Captain Richard Francis Burton, 1876 one end and a Sears at the other.

Faithfully observing Owen’s speed limit, I walked at a relaxed pace from the entrance of one store to the other. The journey took exactly two minutes, three seconds.

Following Galton’s advice, I was sensitive to my first impressions. Evidence of recent economic troubles screamed for immediate attention. Of 38 leasable spaces, 16 were vacant. But instead of giving off a hollow, abandoned vibe, the mall felt mildly claustrophobic. A dozen separate vendors have set up cafeteria tables in the main concourse, hawking everything from hunting knives to pewter dragons to collectible dolls. You can still find nice stuff in the remaining stores, but these tables represented a lower rung on the retail ladder, and they were clearly taking over.

In place of the landmarks of youth, like the video-game arcade and the ice-cream parlor, I saw a General Nutrition Center and something called ‘Community Blood

Services’. Before I made it to Sears I began to feel as if I were strolling through a world robbed of joy.

But I checked myself. I returned, took a seat on a grated metal bench in the middle of the concourse and reached into my backpack for my Kindle full of PDFs. Martineau was waiting to remind me to turn my attentions outward. She urged her readers to assess the “character of the Pride” of a region – figure out what inspires them to make public proclamations, and you’re on the way to cracking their moral code.

A T-shirt table in the middle of the mall attracted my eye. The first shirt I saw featured the letters GPS, with smaller letters around it. With exploration on the brain, I naturally gravitated toward it. It read, IF LOST, USE GPS – GOD’S PLAN OF SALVATION. I remembered that Jackson, in his chapter about exploring the religion of an unknown locale, advises explorers to look for hints that might answer this question:

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I really read the signs throughout the mall and I traced undisguised symbolism everywhere time, as I wandered away from the T-shirts, that the tireless focus that these books help to instill started to reveal less obvious patterns.

Jackson insists that the way a society engraves letters, for example, is “cognate and characteristic of the national mind, and are therefore, as such alone, highly worthy of the traveller’s attention.”

I ducked into the Kirlins Hallmark store and found that cursive fonts, particularly those designed to suggest the lightest of pen strokes, could be found on almost all of the sympathy cards. Bold, blocky letters – many inscribed with a caveman sort of imprecision – almost always meant the cards were

either meant to be funny, or else were for children.

These bare facts led me to really read the signs throughout the mall, and I traced undisguised symbolism everywhere. Thin-bodied letters were used to sell beauty products (you won’t find many fat, inky fonts in Bath & Body Works). RadioShack seemed to observe a zero-tolerance policy regarding serifs, which are reserved for products that appeal to classicism and tradition (see the Land’s End clothing section at Sears).

Every letter in the mall seemed to exude purpose, as if hand-chiseled by market-testers.

Suddenly the mall didn’t seem quite as simple as it had just a couple minutes before. Instead of being a vacuous purgatory that deserved pity, the mall grew in complexity with each stride. The point that the how-to-explore books collectively hammered home is this: If you sincerely investigate it, every detail hides reason, and any environment is far more sophisticated than our senses can appreciate. You have no reason to feel world-weary; even if the modern world bombards you with a million images per second, you have not seen it all. Ruskin writes:

There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. And they will at last, and soon too, find out that their grand inventions for conquering (as they think) space and time, do, in reality, conquer nothing; for space and time are, in their own essence, unconquerable, and besides did not want any sort of conquering; they wanted using.

For a while, I tried to inventory all of the smells I could detect and trace them to their sources: the dyed fabrics in Maurices clothing store; the brushed suede in Payless Shoes; the jasmine-and-san-

dalwood of the cosmetics counter in the Elder-Beerman department store. While concentrating hard to identify the characteristic smell of an electronics aisle in Sears (did I really detect the subtle tang of burning circuits?), a three-year-old boy accompanied his mother to inspect the DVD players. The kid wouldn’t shut up. “I want this one! I want this one!” Every ten seconds or so, for reasons only he can grasp, he’d shriek like a beluga whale – three high, raspy squawks. My concentration shattered into a hundred pieces. I lost the scent.

But I remembered that I was carrying an electronic voice recorder – a device that I believe the author of The Music of Nature, had he lived into our century, would carry on his person at all times. I fished it out of my pocket and covertly began recording the boy’s voice.

For the next half-hour or so, I digitally captured the discrete units of sound that collectively composed the mall’s soundtrack. The hum of the refrigerator at the Mom’s Legendary Foods. The splash of the decorative water fountain in the geographic centre of the concourse.

The squeaky wheel of one of the race-car-shaped strollers available near the main entrance. The rapid-fire percussion of a cash register.

Some things, surely, deserve to be ignored, for sanity’s sake. At times, I worried I might have been too loose with my attentions at the mall. Emerson had warned against this sort of thing, believing that indiscriminate observation could turn a person into a mere child – “the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread dog, individualising everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing…”

It’s true that the techniques outlined in these books can be abused,

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and they should be applied sparingly, medicinally. But I was discovering unexplored territories within the commonplace, and it felt as if I was beginning to correct an imbalance that had taken hold years before, when I’d pedal out to the mall to pump tokens into Galaga and Tempest, losing hours staring into a digital display. Video games train players how to react quickly to abrupt changes in the visual field, something that researchers now call “target vision”. Young gamers – the ones who don’t have to go to arcades, but can play at home token-free, for hours – are really good at it. But that skill, if overdeveloped, can erode a person’s “field vision”, which is the ability to register what’s going on before and after those abrupt changes happen. Field vision requires proactive awareness, not reactive. Without it, the bigger picture is lost.

The Victorians valued that way of looking at the world, considering it a critical skill when wandering into strange and bewildering territories. It still is. Behind a trash can near Sears, a single-serving carton of milk lay partially spilled.

After reading Galton, the image was infused with intrigue: he tells us that milk, when applied to paper and subjected to a low flame, works as invisible ink, useful to explorers in hostile territories. The carefully designed GNC storefont display, with its labels advertising protein supplements and antioxidants, read like a sociological essay.

The ragged chorus of the mall’s concourse, captured on my digital recorder, then analysed using music studio software, revealed itself as music in the key of B-flat major, and the screech of a toddler, instead of being something that annoys and distracts, rang out in a perfectly pitched D. Monte Reel is a journalist who has reported from South America and Iraq for The Washington Post

treasure

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here’s gold in them thar hills” is a phrase one might hear in a bad movie about the American Gold Rush or on an amusement park ride. Or, if one happened to be in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the recent past, six words one might have overheard around town. Because there actually is gold somewhere in them thar hills just north of the city. And not just gold. Precious gems, jewellery, and rare coins as well, somewhere between $1 and $3 million worth, all hidden in a bronze treasure chest just waiting to be found.

The road to the treasure starts with one eccentric octogenarian.

In the 1970s and 1980s Forrest Fenn made millions as an art dealer. The former United States Air Force fighter pilot, who flew a reported 328 combat missions during the Vietnam War, moved to the American southwest with no formal training, but he had a will and he made a way. Fenn used his strong eye and his stronger sense of style to build one of the most successful galleries in the city. He turned himself into an unlikely success story. “His collection may politely be called eclectic: a jumble of Indian artefacts and curios, mixed with expensive paintings and bronzes. He openly sells forgeries of Modigliani, Monet and Degas, and he gets good money for them to boot. Indignant colleagues grumble, but Fenn doesn’t snap like an alligator; he only smiles like one. “He gets most of the celebrity collectors who come to town,” People wrote in mid-1986. The gallery attracted famous faces including Jackie Onassis, President Gerald Ford, Cher, Robert Redford, Sam Shepard, Steven Spielberg and Jessica Lange.

But Fenn’s body betrayed him and he got cancer the year of the magazine story. Doctors gave him a 20 per cent chance to survive for three years. Ever the showman, he

decided to fill a 10-inch by 10-inch box with precious items including a 17th-century Spanish gold and emerald ring, two Chinese jade carvings, pre-Columbian gold animal figures, and a bracelet with 254 rubies. In total, there was over 20 troy pounds of gold, six emeralds, two sapphires, and a number of small diamonds. Many of the items have sentimental value to him, such as the string of turquoise beads that he won in a poker game.

The plan was to bury the box in the

wilderness before he succumbed to the deadly disease. Except Fenn beat cancer.

More than 20 years later, the man – nearing his 80th birthday – decided to refill a box and actually hide the treasure. Fenn won’t say exactly when but he did so in either 2009 or 2010. He challenged the world to find his treasure, including hints in his 2010 memoir, The Thrill of the Chase.

The most detail is in a six-stanza, 24-line poem:

As I have gone alone in there And with my treasures bold, I can keep my secret where, And hint of riches new and old.

Begin it where warm waters halt And take it in the canyons down, Not far, but too far to walk.

Put in below the home of Brown.

From there it’s no place for the meek, The end is ever drawing nigh; There’ll be no paddle up your creek, Just heavy loads and water high.

If you’ve been wise and found the blaze, Look quickly down, your quest to cease, But tarry scant with marvel gaze, Just take the chest and go in peace.

So why is it that I must go And leave my trove for all to seek?

The answer I already know, I’ve done it tired, and now I’m weak.

So hear me all and listen good, Your effort will be worth the cold.

If you are brave and in the wood I give you title to the gold.

Fenn quietly put the poem out there and wished people happy hunting.

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What’s perhaps more impressive than the fact that well over $1 million in treasure sits somewhere in the United States is the fact that it took so long for the wider world to start searching. The path the news travelled is, at least to some extent, an exercise in media and modern myth-making.

At first, only a few people knew about the existence of the gold because only a few people had read the memoir. The Thrill of the Chase is only available at Collected Works Bookstore & Cafe in downtown Santa Fe. And think about this: if you were one of the lucky people to learn that there might be millions close to you, would you let the secret out? Probably not.

But slowly and inevitably, the news started to leak. An interview of Fenn conducted by Lorene Mills

Beginnings / Fenn’s book and the bookstore it is sold in

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rich vista / The stunning New Mexico landscape

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What if there is no treasure, and it’s all just an elaborate hoax, planned by an eccentric millionaire? ran on PBS in May 2011. Three months later, a local television station ran a two-part story highlighting the search and the man who dreamt up the challenge. National media picked up the story as well.

The Huffington Post and the Daily Beast/Newsweek ran pieces, causing people to run to New Mexico in search of Fenn’s treasure. In May 2013, the art collector himself appeared on the Today show, telling NBC’s Janet Shamlian that the box is not in a graveyard. (A strange thing to say, but we’ll get to that a bit later.)

I asked Jolene Mauer, the communications manager with the New Mexico Tourism Department, if there was a noticeable upswing in visitors because of the coverage. “It’s hard to tell if someone came here because of Forrest Fenn, but we were super excited about the whole deal,” she said.

“It brought a whole lot of exposure to New Mexico and we noticed a big uptick in visits to the website after he was on Today.”

Dal Neitzel, one of the first serious hunters and the proprietor of the website, Thrill of the Chase: Searching for Forrest Fenn’s Treasure, shared some stats that bolster Mauer’s anecdotes. He said he had 200 hits and four or five comments a day before the Daily Beast piece.

The number surged to 1,000 a day after it came out, then jumped to 3,000 when Hemispheres published a story on the treasure. Today, however, caused traffic to explode. More than 81,000 people came to his site the day of the segment and it con-

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tinued to get between 10,000 and 13,000 hits a day for the entire month of May. He even had to disable comments because he couldn’t keep up with the flood. While Neitzel says Thrill now only receives 2,500 to 3,000 views a day, the fact is that the Fenn Treasure is out there and plenty of people are searching.

But wait, does this box of gold actually exist?

Of course, there’s a multi-million dollar question buried somewhere amid the subtext: what if Fenn, happily and obviously eccentric, is pulling one on all of us?

Wouldn’t that be the ultimate joke?

Perhaps. I emailed Fenn to ask, and while he initially agreed to respond to my questions, he never did.

Instead, I turned to Neitzel, who has become friendly with Fenn and conducted a series of interviews with the former art dealer. While his answer didn’t confirm the existence of the treasure – nothing short of finding it would – he did manage to present strong reasoning.

“I trust Forrest, and it’s logical that it exists,” he said. “His reputation and his name is one of the most important things to his name. Nothing was more devastating to Forrest than when he was being investigated by the FBI for [ties to grave robbing] that he was never charged with. He made his fortune based on his good name and his good trading.

He’s said that the most important thing he’s going to leave to his family is his name, which is his reputation and his legacy.”

Neitzel continued: “If you think about that, the last thing he’d do is set this up as a farce. He’s incredibly honest. He’s as fond as the next guy about jokes and humor, but he’s honest. Forrest Fenn would never say, ‘I walked through the door’ because you can’t walk through a door. You can walk through a doorway, but that’s how much he cares about honesty.”

And the kicker: “Also, he has plenty of money.”

Money Man / Forrest Fenn near his home in Sante Fe So far Neitzel has looked in more than 35 locations. He hasn’t found the gold, but he feels like he’s growing closer in a general sense. For one thing, he has a better idea of where not to look. “If I had know then what I know now, I never would have bothered to look in some of the places I did. I have a lot more information, based on what he’s said publicly. The first spot I looked at was in the Rio Grande Gorge, which is 800 feet deep. It was not easy to get down in there. If I was smart, I would have realised that no 75- or 80-year-old guy was going to walk down there and then walk three miles once he was down there. But at the time it didn’t occur to me. I’m not the brightest guy,” he says with a laugh. “It’s not in a hard place. It will be hard to fine, but I don’t need repelling gear, a life vest, and a hardhat. That’s not the way it’s going to be. I figured things out over time. I think I’m closer in that the spots I pick now are more likely

to be spots where it could be than they were earlier on.”

So far, no one has found the treasure, although Fenn once said he knows people have searched within 500 feet. How he knows this is unclear, but the senior citizen with a charming mischievous streak is clearly enjoying observing the search. (In his defence, wouldn’t you?)

As one might imagine, something of a cottage industry has sprung up around the hunt for the treasure. The city of Santa

A cottage industry has sprung up around the hunt for the treasure.

Sante fe itself is benefitting from more tourists 112

Open skies / september 2013

Fe is benefiting from some level of increased tourism as are multiple hunters like Neitzel, who is gaining some notoriety for his expertise. (It must be said, however, that the former maritime salvage worker isn’t merely taking advantage of a convenient situation. He lives a two and a half day drive from New Mexico.)

Some, perhaps, have questionable intentions and are looking to get rich quick. NMTreasure.com for example, charges $29.95 for a video of clues and “our closest calculation of where we think the treasure currently sits, however that is a large area, approximately five square miles.” A caveat on the site reads: “If you agree to accept our clues and you find the treasure in that five square mile area, the condition is you will share with nmtreasure.com 10 per cent of the value of the chest and contents. nmtreasure.com will retain 50 per cent of copyright value of this

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What Fenn wants is all sorts of people, children especially, spending time outside, enjoying nature rural hope / Thousands have scoured the local wilderness

story.” I’ll leave the legal opinions to the experts, but buyer beware.

Here’s a recipe for potential disaster: one part difficult, rocky, foreboding territory; one part hidden treasure; one part positive, but clueless person looking for a life-changing amount of gold.

“There’s a little bit of a concern. Let’s say you have a treasure hunter who doesn’t have a lot of experience.

They could get hurt,” Mauer, the Tourism Department communications manager, says.

It nearly happened in March 2013, when a woman spent a night on Ancho Canyon Trail in Bandelier National Monument after

getting lost. Dog teams, technical rescue experts, and three aircraft eventually located the 34-year-old Texas woman, who spent a cold night sheltered by a rock and retraced her steps the next morning.

She was walking back to her car when authourities discovered her.

Another issue is the places where people are looking. Remember that clue Fenn gave about not being in a graveyard? Part of the reason for the disclosure was because someone dug in one. (It’s also not smart given Fenn’s difficulty in the past with accusations of grave robbing. While they turned out to be false, would he really hide it in

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a cemetery? That is not the type of irony Fenn is after.) There have also been issues with people digging in national forests, which is not permitted without a permit.

As always, knowledge is power, even when it comes to treasure hunting. What Fenn wants – more than the excitement of watching the hunt – is for people to get out, look for the box of gold, and fall in love with nature. He is on the record saying that he hopes all sorts of people, especially children, spend time in the great outdoors wandering around, looking for gold. It sounds rather magical, doesn’t it? Like a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon come to life in the picturesque setting of New Mexico. On some level, the money doesn’t matter, at least for the man who put it out there. He might rather the treasure never be found, that hordes of families search and bond and experience the world.

So cool. But also, there’s life-changing money in them thar hills. That’s something to seek. “I would love to find it. I’m not a rich guy. I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t the case. There are a lot of guys on the blog who say they would re-hide it, but I’m not sure I’d be in that position,” Neizel says, laughing at the absurdity of it all. “I’d like to think that I would hide some of it to continue this thing for the next group, but not having to worry about money for the rest of my life would be okay with me.”

“But on the other hand, I’m having a great time looking for it.”

Noah Davis is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York

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DAMMAM

The CiTy of falling angels

how marseille goT iTs groove baCk

117

S

ome places you put off visiting because you know your expectations are too high. Marseille, the salt-baked harbour at the bottom of France, has been like that for me: a city of shady deals, mapped in maritime adventure stories and tough detective fiction. It is also a place well-loved by a couple of people I know, and that often serves as a disincentive, too; a bit like a novel that never makes its way up the pile on the bedside table because people keep telling you how good it is.

The time has come to make Marseille a priority. This summer has seen it at the centre of a series of startling art events and grand openings as it revelled in its position as this year’s European Capital of Culture.

For a sense of what is on offer, imagine sitting, like me, in the rectangular Old Port. I am surrounded

There haS been a STaggering $10 billion inveSTed in The ciTy, due To conTinue for The nexT decade. iT iS Shaking off iTS repuTaTion and embracing The fuTure

by cafés and bars, some with their shutters closed even in springtime against the flooding light of the “burning Marseille sun” that Alexandre Dumas described in The Count of Monte Cristo. To the rear is the stylishly poised Miramar restaurant and on one side the jauntier hotel Belle-Vue, with its tiny, busy balcony restaurant poking out on the first floor. Between the fishing boats and white yachts bobs the quaint tourist restaurant Le Marseillois, afloat on a piratical wooden galleon. So far, so very Vieux Port.

But across the quay, where the tourists line up for sea trips out to the Château d’If island prison where Dumas’s hero, Edmond Dantès, was locked up, there is a sleek new arrival. Above the crowd is a vast sheet of steel on shiny 6m stilts. It is a modernist shelter from the sun, or from the unlikely rain –

Screen ShotS / The city’s reputation had been shaped by films such as The French Connection II, from 1975

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Open skies / september 2013

Provence claims 300 sunny days a year. Designed by Foster and Partners, Ombrière mirrors the sky and the water and so sometimes sneakily disappears from view like the camouflage car in the Bond film. It has quickly won praise, despite the debt it may owe to the Sanaa-designed pavilion that once stood outside London’s Serpentine Gallery.

This modernist structure was just the curtain-raiser. In June the 190m Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean, or MuCEM, opened in the harbour, where it juts out from an aged Foreign Legion fort. Ten years in the planning, the block-like building by Algerian-born architect Rudy Ricciotti is the first national gallery outside Paris.

The J1 building – hub for the year of culture – is packed with shipping containers that make up an intense little exhibition about the varied history of the Mediterranean peoples.

Big projects loom up around each corner. One flank of the StCharles train station is to be developed as public space, while a

NatioNal pride / The Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean opened in June new home for the Regional Contemporary Art Fund has been designed by Kengo Kuma. On top of Le Corbusier’s brutalist Cité Radieuse in a southern suburb is a contemporary art centre.

A new business zone facing the port is dominated by Zaha Hadid’s 140m-tall tower, noted for its central black stripe and an apparent kink at the base. It is part of a staggering $10 billion investment in the area due to go on for the rest of the decade, bringing homes, offices and public facilities.

Turning my back on the ambitious, it was easier to focus on the charm of the old Panier district. Its slim streets were once the maze where criminals could shake off police. Now they are smattered with artists’ showrooms and craft workshops. I followed the Nuit de l’Instant (Night of the Instant) mys-

The panier disTricT was once The maze where criminals shook off The police, buT iTs now smaTTered wiTh arTisT’s showrooms, crafT workshops and vinTage sTores

tery trail that ran earlier this month and found myself first in a tiny studio lined with neon oil paintings and then in a disused bar watching a bleak silent film about Italians to the recorded improvised music of that polymath Vincent Gallo.

Walking down the rue de la Caisserie, where Napoleon lived, you can buy artisan glassware, ceramics or vintage clothes. Or you can sit and eat in a square. I got a better sense of the mix of the city from a lunch in the boulevard Dugommier.

An old bar, Le Comptoir Dugommier is a workaday and yet cosmopolitan bistro. My salad came

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Open skies / september 2013

garnished with whelks. Dipping in and out of the urban mood seemed wise, particularly since Marseille can be intimidating when the sun sets, so I stayed a few nights in Cassis, the seaside town next door, in one of the chambre d’hôtes that function like top-notch B&Bs. A new Eurostar weekly service trialling from next month will go direct from St Pancras in London to Aix-en-Provence. I stopped to look around there, if only to marvel at the quality of life. The Musée Granet hosted an exhibition of the paintings of Cézanne, while a sister show at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille celebrated Van Gogh and Bonnard.

A series of regional open-air concerts, took place from June to August. The oddest and biggest event was TransHumance, and it is one that reflects the fact that Marseille shares its title of Capital of Culture with surrounding Provence: horses were be led from Morocco, Italy and France to meet up, along with cattle and sheep, in Provence “as part of a major cul-

According to AlexAndre dumAs’ book, the count of monte cristo, the locAls believe thAt if only pAris hAd more life, it would be the second mArseille tural and artistic gathering” before reaching Marseille. “It is both real and dreamlike, human and animal, planned and spontaneous,” the organisers promised, adding confidently: “It will be all this at once.”

The circling mountains are to have their moment of glory, too, as a new grande randonée, or ramblers’ route, has been launched for the cultural festivities. I sampled this while staying in the village of Gémenos and walked up to the source of a crystal stream. It is a route favoured by coachloads of old-timers from Marseille and Aix who stop for picnics and a game of boules.

Few places live up to their buzz, but Marseille does. It had nothing of the melancholy, lost grandeur that I remember from a trip to

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Open skies / september 2013

Cadiz. Its seamy side once saw it dubbed Rio sur Mer, but I felt it was more like Paris in the sun.

Although, according to Dumas’s book, the natives believe that if only Paris had more life it “would be a second Marseille.”

Vanessa Thorpe is a writer based in the United Kingdom

BIG INDUSTRY Alastair Philip Wiper’s photography illustrates the scale of Europe’s scientific push

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Open skies / september 2013

Radio Anechoic Chamber at the Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen

123

Open skies / september 2013

Rocket test at Copenhagen Suborbitals, Denmark 124

Open skies / september 2013

ground control 125

Open skies / september 2013

Scientific equipment at CERN, Switzerland 126

Open skies / september 2013

data

127

Open skies / september 2013

128

Open skies / september 2013

reactor

Part of the Large Hadron Collider being maintained at CERN, Switzerland

129 129

Open skies / september 2013

130

Open skies / september 2013

FLOW

The RJ Mitchell Wind Tunnel at The University of Southampton, England

131 131

Open skies / september 2013

Simulate

Resonating Chamber at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Copenhagen 132 1 32

Open skies / september 2013

133 133

Open skies / september 2013

BRIEFING 137 & 140

138

146

NEW DESTINATIONS

BIG ANNIVERSARY

ROUTE MAP

New routes announced to Kiev, and Sialkot in Pakistan

Emirates celebates the fifth anniversary of its A380 service

Discover the world as connected by Emirates

Dubai Music Week Music legend Quincy Jones launches a new week-long festival with will.i.am and Timbaland at Dubai World Trade Centre

(137)

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NEWS

Fly emirates to kiev

Quincy Jones launches Dubai music Week lEgEndary music producEr,

Quincy Jones, is to host a groundbreaking music festival in Dubai from September 24 to 29.

Dubai Music Week will be held at Dubai World Trade Centre, and begins with a first-of-its-kind music industry tradeshow, bringing together leading artists, labels and producers from around the world.

Emirates is official partner for the festival, organised by Jones’s Global Gumbo Group and DXB Live.

Dubai Music Week will see a

rich variety of events, including a world exclusive Quincy Jones seminar series, which will see more than 20 influential speakers from the international music community talk about all aspects of music. will.i.am, one of the founding members of The Black Eyed Peas, will headline the event, along with Timbaland.

Budding musicians will also have a chance to become involved with a series of talent initiatives, while mingling with their idols.

Perfect timing Don’t miss your next Emirates flight.

Make sure you get to your boarding gate on time.

Boarding starts 45 minutes before your flight and gates close 20 minutes before departure. If you report late we will not be able to accept you for travel.

Thank you for your cooperation.

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Open skies / september 2013

EmiratEs will soon offer daily flights to and from Kiev. Starting in mid-January 2014, the new route will link the Ukrainian capital with Dubai, allowing the country’s 45 million inhabitants to connect with the world through Emirates’ Dubai hub.

In what marks the 35th European route for Emirates, business and leisure travellers will be able to enjoy the airline’s award-winning in-flight service and entertainment. The daily Airbus A340-500 aircraft will also offer passengers a choice of luxury cabins, with First Class, Business Class and Economy Class available on each flight.

EmiratEs cElEbratEs a380 annivErsary

EmiratEs is cElEbrating

the five-year anniversary of the launch of its prestigious Airbus A380 service with the announcement of new A380 routes, and the launch of a new Google Street View of the iconic double-decker.

Over the last five years, Emirates’ A380s have made more than 20,000 round-trip flights, carrying more than 18 million passengers to their destinations.

The current Airbus A380 fleet of 37 is served by more than 7,000 highly trained Emirates crew, and the airline has a further 53 aircraft on order.

The double-decker aircraft currently flies to 21 destinations in the Emirates flight network and is soon to fly to new destinations around the globe.

Due to the popularity of the airline’s Dubai to Barcelona route, the current Boeing 777-300 service will be upgraded to the A380 from February next year, bringing more passengers from the Spanish city the opportunity to experience Emirates’ outstanding in-flight service.

Customers to Mauritius will soon also be able to enjoy the benefits of the luxury Airbus, with daily flights to Europe and

138

Open skies / september 2013

the Americas through the Dubai hub starting from December 16.

The Dubai to Brisbane route will be upgraded to the A380 from October 1, with Los Angeles being serviced by the A380 from December 2 and Zurich from January 1.

As as part of the anniversary celebrations, Emirates has teamed up with Google Street View to allow 360-degree views of the First Class Private Suites, Business Class cabin, Onboard Lounges, Shower Spas, cockpit and more. This signals a world first for a street view of an Airbus A380 aircraft.

Be one of the first to see it on emirates.com/ourfleet

EMIRATES’ ENVIRONMENT REPORT RELEASED EmiratEs’ third annual

Environment Report is released this September. The report highlights a variety of group wide environmental initiatives, including recycling, catering and flight operation improvement projects, as well as featuring a comprehensive explanation of Emirates’ new fuel efficiency metric: Operational Fuel Efficiency Factor (OFEF).

The report, where the most

important metrics are assured by international auditors PwC, compares three years’ worth of Emirates data and benchmarks against others in the aviation industry. The data and analysis span operations both in the air and on the ground and give a snapshot of the Emirates Group Scope one, two and three emissions.

The report can be downloaded from emirates.com/environment

EMIRATES fIfTh PAkISTAN ROuTE TO OffER TRADE OPPORTuNITIES

EmiratEs is to launch a service

to export hub Sialkot on November 5. The new route will be Emirates’ fifth in Pakistan.

The four weekly Airbus A330200 flights will offer 54 Business Class and 183 Economy Class seats.

Sialkot is the capital of the Siaklot District, located in the

northeast of the Punjab province, 125km north of Lahore. The city, along with Gujrat and Gujranwala, makes up the region known as the “Export Triangle” of Pakistan, which is well-known for exporting sports goods and clothing, gloves, surgical instruments, cutlery, ceramics and

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Open skies / september 2013

leather garments, whilst imports focus on the importing of the raw materials required for the manufacture of these products. In light of Sialkot’s potential for trade, the new Emirates service will have the capacity to carry 17 tonnes of cargo.

• • • • • • • •

Contract Drafting & Review Business Setup , Offshore & Free Zone Companies Corporate & Commercial Legal Services Litigation & Arbitration Debt Collection Banking, Insurance & Maritime Cases Real Estate, Construction & Labor Cases Trademarks, Patents & Copyrights

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• • • • • • • •

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WITH AFFILIATE OFFICES IN SAUDI ARABIA, QATAR, BAHRAIN, KUWAIT AND OMAN

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COMFORT

Wellness in the air

to help you arrive at your destination feeling relaxed and refreshed, emirates has developed this collection of helpful travel tips. regardless of whether you need to rejuvenate for your holiday or be effective at achieving your goals on a business trip, these simple tips will help you to enjoy your journey and time on board with emirates today.

smart traveller

Before Your JourneY Consult your doctor before travelling if you have any medical concerns about making a long journey, or

drink plenty of water

if you suffer from a respiratory or

rehYDrAte With WAter or Juices frequentlY.

cardiovascular condition.

Drink teA AnD coffee in moDerAtion.

Plan for the destination – will you need any vaccinations or special medications?

Get a good night’s rest before

travel lightly

the flight.

cArrY onlY the essentiAl items thAt You

Eat lightly and sensibly.

Will neeD During Your flight.

At the Airport Allow yourself plenty of time for check-in.

wear glasses

Avoid carrying heavy bags through

cABin Air is Drier thAn normAl, therefore

the airport and onto the flight

sWAp Your contAct lenses for glAsses.

as this can place the body under considerable stress.

Once through to departures try and relax as much as possible.

use skin moisturiser

During the flight

ApplY A gooD quAlitY moisturiser to ensure Your skin Doesn’t DrY out.

Chewing and swallowing will help equalise your ear pressure during ascent and descent.

Babies and young passengers may

keep moving

suffer more acutely with popping

exercise Your loWer legs AnD cAlf

ears, therefore consider providing

muscles. this encourAges BlooD floW.

a dummy.

Get as comfortable as possible when resting and turn frequently.

Avoid sleeping for long periods in

make yourself comfortable

the same position.

loosen clothing, remove JAcket AnD AvoiD

When You Arrive

AnYthing pressing AgAinst Your BoDY.

Try some light exercise, or read if you can’t sleep after arrival.

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Open skies / september 2013

142

VISA & STATS

Guide

ELECTRONIC SYSTEM FOR TRAVEL AUTHORISATION (ESTA)

TO US CUSTOMS & IMMIGRATION FORMS Whether you’re travelling to, or through, the United States today, this simple guide to completing the customs and immigration forms will help ensure that your journey is as hassle free as possible.

CUSTOMS DECLARATION FORM

If you are an international traveller wishing to enter the United States under the Visa Waiver Programme, You must apply for electronic authorisation (ESTA) up to 72 hours prior to your departure.

ESTA FACTS:

Children and infants require an individual ESTA. The online ESTA system will inform you whether your application has been authorised, not authorised or if authorisation is pending.

A successful ESTA application is valid for two years. However, this may be revoked or will expire along with your passport.

APPLY ONLINE AT WWW.CBP.GOV/ESTA NATIONALITIES ELIGIBLE FOR THE VISA WAIVER*:

Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brunei, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Malta, Monaco, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom**

All passengers arriving into the US need to complete a CUSTOMS DECLARATION FORM. If you are travelling as a family this should be completed by one member only.

The form must be completed in English, in capital letters, and must be signed where indicated.

144

* SUBJECT TO CHANGE ** ONLY BRITISH CITIZENS QUALIFY UNDER THE VISA WAIVER PROGRAMME.

OPEN SKIES / SEPTEMBER 2013

Evolving away from French-style restaurants, Villa Romana St. Tropez-Dubai utilizes unique theatrical-focused service as enhancement to your dining experience.

Our authentic Villa Romana St. Tropez cuisine will please even the most demanding palate accompanied by a great selection of international beverages.

A world class team is ready to take you on the Villa Romana adventure, where dining is an Exotic, Elegant and Refreshing experience.

Located on the shores of the Habtoor Grand Beach Resort and Spa.

Doors open from 6pm - 1am

ROUTE MAP

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OPEN SKIES / SEPTEMBER 2013

147

OPEN SKIES / SEPTEMBER 2013

Europe

+1hrs

+2hrs

St. Petersburg

Stockholm

+4hrs

Gothenburg Glasgow

Moscow

Copenhagen

Newcastle Dublin

M a n ch e ste r Birmingham GMT 0 hrs London

Amsterdam

+3hrs

Hamburg Warsaw

Dusseldorf

(Heathrow & Gatwick)

Liege Frankfurt

Kiev

Prague

Paris Zurich Geneva

Lyon

To New York City

Milan

Munich

Vienna

Venice

Nice

Lisbon

GMT +1hrs

+1hrs

148

+2hrs

OPEN SKIES / SEPTEMBER 2013

ai

Istanbul

Madrid

ub

Barcelona

Rome

D To

+2hrs

Zaragoza 0 hrs

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Open skies / september 2013

FLEET

The Fleet

Our fleet cOntains 206 planes Made up Of 195 passenger planes and 11 cargO planes

Boeing 777-300eR Number of Aircraft: 90 Capacity: 354-442 Range: 14,594km Length: 73.9m Wingspan: 64.8m

Boeing 777-300 Number of Aircraft: 12 Capacity: 364 Range: 11,029km Length: 73.9m Wingspan: 60.9m

Boeing 777-200LR Number of Aircraft: 10 Capacity: 266 Range: 17,446km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 64.8m

Boeing 777-200 Number of Aircraft: 9 Capacity: 274-346 Range: 9,649km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 60.9m

Boeing 777F Number of Aircraft: 9 Range: 9,260km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 64.8m

For more inFormation: www.emirates.com/ourFleet

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Open skies / september 2013

Airbus A380-800 Number of Aircraft: 37 Capacity: 489-5 17 Range: 15,000km Length: 72.7m Wingspan: 79.8m

Airbus A340-500 Number of Aircraft: 10 Capacity: 258 Range: 16,050km Length: 67.9m Wingspan: 63.4m

Airbus A340-300 Number of Aircraft: 4 Capacity: 267 Range: 13,350km Length: 63.6m Wingspan: 60.3m

Airbus A330-200 Number of Aircraft: 23 Capacity: 237-278 Range: 12,200km Length: 58.8m Wingspan: 60.3m

boeing 747-400erF Number of Aircraft: 2 Range:9,204km Length: 70.6m Wingspan: 64.4m

aircraft numbers as of 30/09/2013

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Open skies / september 2013

ext month tech obsessive and former Stuff.tv Editor, Paddy Smith, delves into the Internet Of Things (IoT) to discover how before we know it everything will be connected and daily life will be changed forever. We fly to Germany to find out how a small cinema in Frankfurt is supporting independent film, while a little further north Glasgow chef Darin Campbell visits his favourite places to eat. London-based saxophist Pete Wareham, a founding member of jazz supergroup Melt Yourself Down, runs through the music that has inspired him most and we pay a visit to CafĂŠ Royal, a London hotel with more than 100 years of history. We explore the best hotels, restaurants, clubs and galleries in the Rio de Janeiro, a destination we will never tire of visiting, despite the jetlag. See you next month.

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