Where's Doug?

An unusual destination for us, just 40 minutes north of our apartment, but we are having our kitchen redone and thought it would be good to get out of the apartment while some of the work is going on. So I rented a house on the Wisconsin River. It's been very pleasant sitting, reading and watching the river slide by.

The weather has been a little cool and wet, an excuse for doing less hiking than I had thought.

I've done some cooking, but also visited a few local Supper Clubs. These are traditional Wisconsin restaurants, often in the country, with a menu focusing on steaks and seafood.

Just down the street from us is The Hooker's Resort, a pretty basic place, a bar side serving mainly sandwiches, and a restaurant side where you grill your own steaks. Not bad, but not interesting either, but I'm pretty sure that's not the prime focus of supper clubs.

We are not far from the Wisconsin Dells, the major tourist destination in central Wisconsin. We visited two supper clubs there. Both have upscale versions of the traditional menus. But the building and the resulting experience are very different.

Ishnala is the most famous Wisconsin Supper Club, over 70 years old and a classic traditional place. Dark wood interior, log cabin construction, trees growing up through the building, looks out over the lake. Its age shows in the dark interior and in the completely inaccessible design, lots of stairs, and narrow passages around the trees. It's possible to get to the front door in a wheelchair, but it's not obvious how to do that. Once inside the door, there are lots of stairs.

Daylene's is new, really new. We were there on the second night after opening. It's a modern design lots more space, wheelchair accessible. very open to the lake shore. The menu is a little more modern that Ishnala's while keeping with the supperclub theme.

The food was more interesting at Daylene's, and the open modern design was very appealing.

We agreed on our conclusion. Going to the famous traditional Ishnala was good to do once, but we have no interest in doing it again. Daylene's, on the other hand, I will definitely return to again.

I read beforehand about the issues with China blocking many websites. It was recommended to get a VPN before you go.

There are a lot of issues and misinformation with this.

A. Many VPNs are blocked in China, including ones usually recommended in articles. You have to buy and install the VPN BEFORE you arrive in China. VPN apps that are blocked will usually give you instructions to modify the OS on your phone or computer. As usual, I found their instructions were for an earlier version of the operating system, and it was difficult to work my way through them. I ended up not using a VPN.

B. The rules for blocked sites are very irregular. But in particular, many more sites are blocked on hotel Wifi than on cell service. I found that I was often turning off wifi to use cell service.

C. Cell service and wifi speeds vary a lot. Cellular signals vary in weird ways. You might get a great signal out in the middle of the desert and one bar in the center city.

We arrived in Kashgar. In the last 20 years, the old town of Kashgar has been replaced with a large modern city. The actual Old Town has been converted into a tourist town, full of shops selling tourist goods and with very few residents.

There is a large statue of Mao overlooking the central plaza.

Our guide explained that while Mao was viewed negatively some years ago, his reputation has not improved. The worst of the Cultural Revolution is now blamed on the Gang of Four, and Mao is again the great liberator.

Kashgar is still predominately Uyghur and Muslim. The Muslim religeon is still tollerated, but within the liits of Chinese civil society. So many major mosques are now historical, cultural sites. Religeon is not allowed to challenge the government rules and laws.

We visited a historical mausoleum. Clearly, it was built on the principles of those in Central Asia, but at a much lower level of design.

Frankly, it looks like they bought the tiles at a discount, as there is a wide variety in the design and quality.

We took a walk through the Old Town and it really has been converteed into a large tourist shopping mall. The buildings are still interesting, but there is no culture left.

The next day we went out to Shipton's Arch an extremely tall hatural arch in the mountains outside of town.

It used to be a difficult access, but we learned that they replaced the ladders with stairs and added a cable car. We all decided to take the cable car and skip the 400+ steps. Imagine our surprise to find that the cable car covered the fairly flat road portion and took us to the base of the steps.

Today was a long driving day in the bus; 12 hours, a few at stops but most of the day on the road. Our goal was the "small" town of Makit. That's small in Chinese terms, about 400,000 people.

Most of the drive was along the Taklamakan Desert. Flat, grey/tan soil with mountains on the north and south horizons.

We stopped at the Kezi'er Buddhist caves, located in a river valley, so there was some greenery around. These are the least known of the Buddhist Cave sites we visited.

The caves are pretty small. and no photos allowed inside. Here are a few reproductions of the murals from the small museum on site.

These are very early Buddhist Caves along the Silk Road, and the images have more of an Indian style.

In Makit, we visited the local museum, not very interesting, and a local museum of painting by the local farming community. Not bad for naive art, but not really noteworthy.

Locals performed some local music and dancing.

We ended the day visiting a tourist operation on the edge of the sand desert. We had our choice of riding camels, riding in a dune buggy, or walking through the dunes.

We continue traveling west along the old Silk Road routes. Today, we travel on a combination of trains and modern 4-lane highways.

We take an overnight train to Turpan, a nearby Uyghur city. From there, we visited several minor sites.

The first was the ruins of the ancient city of Jiaohe. The city was built on an island in the middle of a minor river. The island has steep cliffs up to 30 meters hign on all sides and so never built any city walls. Founded in about 100 BC it was at various times the capitol of local tribes, seat of local Chinese governments and throughout a major stop on the Silk Road. It was abandoned after being conquered by the Mongols.

The city has an unusual construction. The local soil is very dry and hard mud, not quite a stone. In this dry climate, it is very stable and is the foundation for building material throughout the area. In Jiaohe, they did not build upwards using the material for mud bricks, but rather cut cave homes into vertical surfaces or down into the ground.

The ruins of the town are a maze of these structures.

Turpan is famous for it's grapes and raisins. Most famous varieties are very long ones, name Mares Nipples, and Fragrant Concubine. These raisins were a famous staple for travelers on the Silk Road and in that tradition I bought a couple of bags to take home.

The raisins are dried in brick structures or on the ground. The ones dried on the ground get much darker in the sun than the ones dried in the shelters. On the bluffs above the river at Jiaohe were numerous brick raisin drying shelters.

At a tourist area in town was a simulated drying shelter. We were told that in the hot, dry climate here, the grapes can dry to raisins in just days.

Since the Uyghurs are Muslim, there are mosques in the area. But since the communist Chinese are against religions, the large mosques are now "cultural centers."

The Sugong Mosque is a good example, built in a mix of Central Asian styles.

I have seen all of these elements in Central Asian Mosques, but the particular combination was new to me.

Switching religions, we traveled to the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves, another group of Buddhist Cave Temples. (The Thousand Buddhas was a common mural style for the ceilings of these caves, and so many of these complexes get the Thousand Buddhas in their name.)

The interiors of the caves have suffered grievously over the centuries. The later Muslim population believed in a religious requirement to deface the portraits and gouged ou the faces on the easily reachable images.

Foreign explorers from Europe and Japan discovered other images that had been buried under blown-in sand and chiseled out large sections, taking them to their home countries' museums.

An internet search reveals some of the stolen images.

There was an elderly gentleman playing a beautiful stringed instrument in front of the caves.

After I made a small contribution, he insisted I sit alongside him, and he handed me a tambourine. (I was of no use in attempting to play along.)

Next up was the Subash Buddhist Ruins, also referenced as Subash Temple. It was presented to us as the ruins of a monastery, and I was surprised at the scale of the ruins. It turns out that it was also a substantial town. Today, it consists of the remains of mud brick walls in the middle of a desert with mountains in the distance.

With lots of time on the bus, I played with the very dull sky in this photo and thought this version looked appropriate for this desert.

The Magao Caves are one of the premier sites for Buddhist Cave Temples. Located in a long cliff face south of the ancient Silk Road city of Dunhuang, there are over 500 caves, many of them painted and with statues. The construction of the caves began about 366 CE when a Buddhist monk named Le Zun had a vision of 1,000 Buddhas bathed in golden light. The earliest remaining decorated caves were built between 419 and 439 CE. As the site grew and grew in reputation, many noble and wealthy families would have a cave temple built. You can see portraits of members of the families on the walls of some of the temples.

Today, it is the most important and largest tourist site in the region. As a result, the area around the walls has been highly developed to handle large crowds. We are lucky to have been there in the off-season. If the facilities are utilized to a great extent at the peak, I think it would be very unpleasant.

They have built a large multimedia building at the site entrance with two projection halls: one showing a general view of the history and the site on a traditional screen, and one showing the interior of a dozen or so caves on a wrap-around "immersion" screen.

You take a transfer bus to the cave complex. The area is paved with fences to control traffic, modern stairs, and balconies for access to the caves. A ticket to the caves gets you entrance to between 8 and 10 caves, with a guide.

The guide for our group spoke English very well and was well educated on the caves, the history of the individual caves, and the interpretation of the images shown in the caves.

You are not allowed to take photos inside the cave, so I have limited photos from the internet available to show the interiors.

As you can see, the murals and statues are truly amazing.

The caves were occupied and developed until the 1400's. That means there are 1,000 years of caves, which cover several Chinese Dynasties, and occupation by other groups, most notably the Tibetans, with a resulting variety of styles and images.

This is the site that got me interested in this trip to Western China, and it didn't disappoint. The planning of the visit did disappoint a bit, though. I found out as we were leaving that there is a museum as part of the complex that we were not going to visit. If I had know I would have arranged to stay behind to see the museum and let the rest of the group continue on with the day's tour. But by the time I realized it, I didn't have time to figure out how I was going to handle the transportation on my own back to the hotel afterwards.

I had already insisted on a visit to the regional museum the next morning. So I figured that would have to do.

Instead I went along to the Yumen Pass Tourist Site. It consists of deteriorated mud brick sections of the old Great Wall extension and fortifications. It was and hour and a half drive to the area, another houlr and a half on shuttle busses around the site and then a third hour and a half back.

Section of wall.

Old wood pile.

Old warehouse,

Old Gatehouse

It was not worth the time, in my opinion. But it's a group trip, and you don't always get to choose.

That night we visited the Dunhuang Night Market. The Chinese love these night markets, with an array of stalls selling souvenirs, and foods. Locals definitely come for the food stalls. But they are a little hard to manage in a group.

They are colorfully decorated and lit, and so are a pleasant place to spend an evening and spend some money.

We took an overnight train to our next stop Jiayuguan. We have now moved out of the mountains and into the desert, with mountains to the north.

After an very early check-in at our hotel and some breakfast we headed out to the Wei-Jin dynasties tombs. These are brick tombs from between 220 - 420 AD.

There is a long stair down into each tomb.

The tombs are multi-chambered and well-constructed of fired brick.

I had to get this image off the internet are photography is not now allowed. In the photo you can see that some bricks have images on them. These are drawings of various parts of the life of the occupants. Here are some photos of bricks and replicas in the local museum.

These are valuable not only for their artistic merit but for their portrayal of life 1,600+ years ago.

There are over a thousand tombs identified, but very few have been excavated, and only two are open to the public.

Then we went to the "Overhanging Wall," The westernmost section of the Ming era Great Wall. Our first stop was at the fort.

It was so heavily "restored" that it looked more like a replica and had little feeling of history to convey.

Then it was out to the Overhanging section of the wall, so named because it's on a steep slope. This was also reconstructed in 1987 using fired brick. It feels more authentic than the fort, but it probably isn't.

When we got to the lookout at the top, we came back on a paved trail down the mountain.

I noticed that at the extension of the wall beyond that point was just a low mound of dirt. So this section of the wall is an entirely new construction. The original was almost certainly unfired mud brick and wider than the reconstruction,

The Chinese are developing extensive tourist facilities at all these sites, with large parking lots, shops, paved paths, etc. The result is a loss of authenticity, in my opinion.

We headed back into Lanzhou to catch an overnight train to Jiayuguan and to check out the local sights while we wait for the train.

Our first stop was the Gansu Provincial Museum, which has a large exhibit of items from the Silk Road. Of course, most of them come from tombs.

The whole bronze calvary came from the tomb of a general.

There were glazed ceramic figures.

And much more. But the star of the exhibit is the bronze flying horse, which has become the symbol of the city.

I stopped in the museum coffee shop, but didn't see the lattes with designs printed on top. The couple that also sat at the table were very pleased with their flying horses.

We went down to the shore of the Yellow River, which flows through town. Our first stop was the Iron Bridge, the first one across the river in the early 1900's. It's now a pedestrian bridge, a good idea, as it is a very light design.

Looking at the bridge, it's clear they strengthened it some time ago. The arched top chord is clearly not original.

There are still New Year exhibits up.

We stopped at a place offering traditional rafting excursions on the river. Very Traditional! The rafts are made from inflated sheep skins and tied to a wooden frame.

They are certainly colorful, but I'm not sure how maneuverable.

After dinner, we stopped in a local snack shop for provisions for the 9-hour train trip. No one bought the variously flavored packaged chicken feet snacks!

I was busy enough getting on the train and such that I took no photos. The overnight train is much older than the high-speed trains. but still adequate. We had three cabins for the 12 of us, four bunks per cabin.

In the morning, we were traveling through the Gobi Desert.

The Labrang Monastery is the north side of Xia He, so a shortndistance frm our hotel.

Labrang is the largest monastery outside of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. It houses about 1,200 monks.

Being at the edge of the Tibetan region, Labrang and the town of Xia He have been the site of conflicts between the Tibetans and both Han Chinese and Hui Muslim forces. Hui forces attacked the monastery several times in the early 1900's, killing thousands of monks and townspeople.

The monastery suffered during the Cultural Revolution, with the monastery shut down and the monks sent to villages to work. The monastery reopened in 1980, and many monks returned, but the government restricts the population to 1,500 monks.

In the fall of 2025 the government raided the monastery and surrounding villages searching for and seazing images of the Dalai Lama. All communications with the outside world were cut off at that time.

Many of the local population walk the four kilometer of the monastery on a daily basis. A long wall of Praywe wheels forms the starting point of the route.

This model shows the layout and extent of the monastery and the adjoining mountains.

There are a number of temple buildings throughout the site.

Contrary to the rules at Buddhist monasteries in other places, we were allowed to enter with shoes on, but were not allowed to take any photos inside.

The Chinese government does not allow the training of boys at Buddhist Monasteries. So there is no school, but there are several colleges for young adult men.

We visited the hall of butter sculptures of important religeous figures. The sculptures were amazing works.

Everything is carved from Yak Butter, colored with natural dyes, even the flowers.

They carve new ones for every New Year. These were new enough that the smell of the yak mutter was still pretty strong. Our guide admitted that hot weather in the summers now can cause problems for the butter sculptures.

The guide gave a good overview of Buddhism and the monastery, which was important as several of the group had little knowledge of the religion.

After an overnight in Lanzhou we boarded a bus to drive upstream along the Yellow River to a location where we took a boat to the BingLing Cave Temple.

Along the way, we drove through a region of deep loess deposits. Loess is a wind-deposited soil that has the rare quality of being stable with vertical walls, but eroding quickly with slopes. The area is also very dry. This region is inhabited by the Hui, a Muslim ethnic group. They have been very poor, but the government is investing money in infrastructure, housing, and education, and getting industrial companies to invest in the area. The result is a combination of a poor landscape and new major construction.

As we drove along, we saw many mosques, all in a very ornate traditional Chinese style. But I was never able to get a good photo of one.

The river is dammed to create a large lake, which has backed up the water around the temple. So a boat is the most practical way to get there. Since it was still a little cool, we were glad to have an enclosed boat.

There are impressive stone formations around the temple site.

There are small caves carved into the walls with Buddhist images

But the large seated Buddha is the big draw here.

They have built beautiful walkways and bridges for the site. Together with the surrounding mountains, it's a delightful area.

From here we headed south to XiaHe, a town mainly populated by Tibetans, and part of the general Tibetan areas of China. XiaHe is at 9,500 ft. so it was colder and snowyer here.

This morning we visited the main attraction in Xi'an, Emperor Chin's Terra Cotta Warriors. This is a location with a big change in the last 20 years; not so much physically, but in the crowds.

It is a huge attraction for the Chinese, and they are there in droves! Huge crowds, and it's the off-season. I really doubt that you could see anything in the height of the tourist season in the summer.

If we were patient, we could get close enough to the railings to see the excavation pits. But it took some persistence.

There are three open pits: two of them hold ranks of soldiers, the third one holds the command center, officers, and their chariots.

There was a fourth pit, but it was empty. It's known that the emperor died before the tomb complex was complete, and that his son was not popular, and not particularly interested in continuing to spend large amounts on his father's massive tomb complex. So it's assumed they just stopped before the last group was complete.

Here is a view of the first pit.

It was truly a massive effort to create thousands of lifesize clay figures and fire them. The trenches the soldiers are in were covered with wooden beams, matting and then soil. After the emperor's death the trenches were looted by the public, mainlt because the soldiers were holding real bronze weapons. The trenches were then set on fire causing the roofs to collapse, crushing the clay soldiers.

As a result, the statues were all found broken, and years have been spent restoring them.

The third trench had a mixture of infantry, cavalry, and archers, but less has been excavated, so it is easier to see the collapse of the roof timbers.

Here's a photo of the crowd in the building of the third pit. There is a statue on the right hand side and people are crowding to take photos, so no one can get by.

What's somewhat amusing the building next door is the museum, which has many statues in good condition, and no crowds.

The statues were originally painted, but the centuries and the fire destroyed most of the paint. But enough bits remain to allow the archeologists to recreate the original schemes.

Here are some heads with remains of the paint.

My favorite items were the bronze chariot and carriage, but they are apparently in a traveling exhibition at present.

In conclusion, I am very glad we went 20+ years ago. No crowds and almost everything was already on display.

In the afternoon, we caught a high-speed train to Lanzhou, for the next stage of the adventure, this time to a more remote and less visited area.

The train stations are modern, clean, and very roomy. I neglected to get a photo of the main waiting room. We have several more train trips on this tour, so I will make up for it then.

Along the way, we suddenly noticed it was snowing! That was a surprise! I'm glad I decided to go with the warmer puffy jacket this trip

It's our first day of the tour of the Chinese Silk Road. Our first stop was the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda.

It was built in 652 AD to house Buddhist documents and relics brought back to China by the monk Xuanzang on his 17-year journey to India to research the roots of Buddhism. At the emperor's request, he stayed at the temple to teach for another 15 years.

The Pagoda is the centerpiece of the Daci'en Temple. With more typical Chinese-style buildings.

I loved the sign at the base of the carved slab on the stairway.

There are small temples around the site with statues of the various Buddhas.

We only had a half-hour of free time at the temple to explore the grounds and climb the stupa. I elected to skip the climb and explore the grounds. There were beautiful plants like the Chinese Redbuds.

And the beautiful yellow Winter Jasmine

We were here in 2004. The big changes are all the new buildings surrounding the temple and that the air is much clearer now.

Our next stop was the city walls. They are complete and make a 14 km square around the old city. They are the largest preserved complete city walls in China. The existing walls were built in the Ming Dynasty.

There were 4 main gates at the 4 compass points. Today, there are many more penetrations of the walls for modern roadways.

There are guard towers at each of the gates and smaller towers spaced at arrow shot range in between.

Chinese New Year was a month ago and the decorations on the wall were still up. They are pretty spctacular and focus on the Year of the Horse theme.

There were a few camels in the mix.

They look like inflatable sculptures, but are cloth over wire frames.

The colors were exuberant.

We were told we were lucky to see them, and in fact, as we left the next morning, they were all gone!

Our last stop for the day was the Great Mosque, a truly unique structure. It was built at the emperor's instruction and so in a traditional Chinese style.

The prayer hall inside the main building has a traditional Islamic layout, including the divisions on the carpet to align worshipers. '

The minaret is even a pagoda.

There are three courtyards between the entry gate and the prayer hall, which gives the mosque a pleasant and peaceful atmosphere.

It was originally built in 742 AD, but most of the current structure dates to 1392, which is still amazingly old for a largely wooden building.

The mosque and Muslim Quarter were not far from the hotel, so I walked back. The streets are lined with shops, very much like in Morocco.

Dried Persimmons.

Some foods were not familiar.

I figured out these colorful, strange items on sticks are battered and fried cuttlefish, but I have no idea how that is done. You can see raw cuttlefish on sticks at the lower right.

There are some very specific items to the muslim community like these flatbreads just like the ones in central Asia.

We ended the day at a dinner theater that featured dumplings and an extravagant historical-themed costume performance. I'm afraid it was wasted on me. We are getting large meals for both lunch and dinner, and so I had little appetite for the array of (cold) dumplings. The pagent was well done, but it is really not my thing and went on too long for me, so I understand I dozed off at times.

I’ve just arrived in Xi’an China. I’m here for a two week tour of the Silk Road cities between here and Kashgar at the far western edge of China.

I’m still figuring out what parts of the internet are going to work here. China blocks a lot of common sites.

I’ve determined that my [email protected] is blocked, as are text messages, Facebook, Google, Google and Apple Maps, most VPN services, etc.

My [email protected] does work though, and Tumblr, (Wheresdoug.com)

The saltwater basins in Atacama are famous for flamingos. So trips here often go to lagoons noted for flamingos. We went to Laguna Chaxa, which is apparently the most accessible. But at least that day it a very poor population of flamingos. I believe I counted a total of seven.

The others were too far away for a good photo. It was a little over an hour each way to drive there, plus an hour walking there, so three hours for seven flamingos, probably not worth it.

I had requested an early morning outing for sunrise and morning light. It was on the itinerary, but that was before the trip got rescheduled. I eventually figured out that the current company providing the guide was not using the itinerary, and considered a 9 AM start reasonable. But by the time we drove somewhere, it would be 10 AM and mid-day light which flattens everything. I asked and that was correct, so after some discussion, and my calling the company that booked it and their called their boss, we decided that we would leave at 6 AM the next day and drive to the location on the original itinerary,

We did, it was not a great place, and maybe the original itinerary envisioned going to a different place in the park, who knows?

I did get some sunrise photos.

We were done and back at the hotel by 10 AM. They then said that it was the end of our touring, less than the original itinerery, but actually I was OK with that.

The last stop on this trip is the Atacama desert in northern Chile. It is at 9,000 feet plus elevation, and one of the driest places on earth.

The main location for visitors is the town of San Pablo de Atacama, but the airport is in the larger town of Calama, about an hour away. Calama is a mining town. The main ore is copper, but gold, silver, and iron, as well as nonmetallic minerals, including important deposits of boron, lithium, sodium nitrate, and potassium salts, are also mined.

The advertising displays in the Calama airport are mainly for large industrial equipment and mining services.

The mineral salts are visible on the ground in many areas. It often looks like a light snowfall. The salts in the ground are dissolved by the rare rainfall and are drawn to the surface, where the moisture evaporites out.

As you might expect, lithium mining is both an industry and a major source of conflict in the area. Lithium mining uses a lot of water, which is naturally in short supply. The communities in the desert are opposed to the mining, which reduces the water available for human life.

But I did not visit the mining areas. I focused on the area around San Pablo.

One of the first areas I visited was the Valle de Arcoírís, which means Rainbow Valley. The rocks here were not that colorful to me, as I am red colorblind. We also visited during the middle of the day, which tends to wash out the colors. (I did increase the color and contrast in the photos as otherwise they only looked like shade of brown and grey to me.)

The next stop was at the Yerbas Buenas Petroglyphs. The petrogryphs are hard to see, as there is not much contrast between the rock surface and the carved areas. (The desert varnish on the sandstone rocks of the American Southwest and western Mongolia, etc. make for much higher visibility.) These are the best ones.

That last one is apparently a two-headed llama, even though the right-hand head looks more like a crocodile.

The next day we went to the Valle del Luna. This valley has a variety of landscapes that NASA found useful in preparing to land on the moon.

We entered through an area of rocky outcroppings mixed with sand dunes.

The mineral salts here are especially prevalent. The ground is often covered with salt deposits, looking like snow.

Sometimes the "snow" melts and forms places that look like ice.

We stopped at an area of a small mine, where the rocks high in the mineral salts were quarried. The salts seep out of cracks in the rock and form surface deposits.

The moisture tends to dribble down the rock face before it evaporites leaving striations.

We went back up to an overlook on the hight above the rock formations.

With that we headed back in to San Pedro for the evening. For dinner I had a shrimp ceviche, which included sweet potatoes, dried corn, onions and other vegetables, a good dinner.

It was time to leave Rapa Nui and fly back to Santiago. But the flight was four hours late leaving, so we arrived in Santiago at 1:30 in the morning. It was starting to feel like late flights were a theme of this trip.

Once in mainland Chile, we drove to Valparaiso on the coast. Traditionally, Chile's major port and as a result a major business hub. Improved transportation to Santiago and business changes have left Valparaiso losing some of its edge, but it's still a big weekend destination for residents of Santiago.

We visited a local historical museum, which had a good collection of Rapa Nui artifacts. The museums in Santiago and on Rapa Nui have both been closed for several years, so much of this material has been out of view.

One helpful exhibit showed how the size of Moai had grown over time.

As you can see the last one was simply too big to move and never left the quarry.

Pablo Neruda was Chile's Nobel Prize-winning author and poet. We visited his unique house, high above the port, with views across the city. Like my father, he was a collector, haunting antique shops for interesting items, with no worries about how they would all go together.

After that we walked down through the old parts of town. The old town had fallen into disrepair, but with help from the city, it is becoming popular again. It has a lot of local culture and is, in my opinion, the most interesting part of town.

This morning we drove out to Ahu Tongariki for sunruse. It's a great place for it as the sun rises over the longest line of moai on the island.

We got there well ahead of sunrise, so I took my tripod and worked on night photography with the iPhone. They've changed how it works. The iPhone now automatically sets an exposure time of up to 30 seconds, depending on the light level and how steady the phone is.

I also tried painting the moai with light from a flashlight on those long exposures.

I could shoot the stars pretty well.

The light painting is difficult to ge right.

But it was cool when I used less light, but a car on the hill to the right raked the moai.

The glow on the horizon changed it considerably.

As the clouds moved away, the glow got bigger.

New clouds on the horizon were another change.

Then the sun came up and I could hand hold the phone. The moai gave a difraction grating effect.

The it was a beautiful morning,

It was a lot of fun working on the night shots, and trying to balalnce the sunrise with some exposure on the moai.