Escalando el monte Fuji en Japón

El Monte Fuji (Fujisan) es con 3776 metros la montaña más alta de Japón. No es de extrañar que el volcán de forma casi perfecta ha sido adorado como una montaña sagrada y ha sido muy popular entre artistas y la gente común. El monte Fuji es un volcán inactivo, que entró en erupción la ultima vez en 1708. Se encuentra en el límite entre las Prefecturas de Yamanashi y Shizuoka y se puede ver desde Tokio y Yokohama en días claros. La forma más fácil para ver el Monte Fuji es desde el tren en un viaje a lo largo de la línea Tokaido entre Tokio y Osaka. Si se toma el Shinkansen desde Tokio en el sentido de Nagoya , Kioto y Osaka, la mejor vista del Monte Fuji se puede disfrutar desde los alrededores de la estación de Shin-Fuji en el lado derecho del tren, unos 40 a 45 minutos después de salir de Tokio. 

Sin embargo las nubes y la escasa visibilidad a menudo bloquean la vista del Monte Fuji y se puede considerar afortunado si tiene una vista clara de la montaña. La visibilidad tiende a ser mejor durante las estaciones más frías del año que en verano, y por la mañana temprano y tarde por la noche. Si quiere disfrutar el Monte Fuji a un ritmo más pausado en un agradable entorno natural, se debe dirigir a la región de los Cinco Lago del Fuji (Fujigoko) en el norte de la montaña, o a Hakone , una zona cercana con complejos termales. El Monte Fuji está abierto oficialmente para su escalada en Julio y Agosto y dispone de varias rutas para su subida

la Gran Barrera de Coral

Con 2000 kilómetros de largo y conformada por 3000 sistemas de arrecifes individuales y cientos de islas, la Gran Barrera de Coral de Australia tiene una belleza asombrosa. En 1981 se le declaró patrimonio de la humanidad y es una de las maravillas del mundo natural. Este programa ofrece una guía definitiva a los secretos del arrecife – cómo se creó, cómo funciona, las complejas relaciones entre sus habitantes y cómo el cambio del clima y otros factores pueden modificar su futuro. Con el uso de lo último en técnicas fílmicas y visuales, la serie capta la magia del arrecife como nunca se había visto

 Una de las principales atracciones naturales en Australia es la enorme y hermosa Gran Barrera de Coral. Si vas para Australia no dejes de hacer alguna excursión para conocerla porque es realmente uno de los sitios mas hermosos del mundo. Es, primero, muy extenso ya que ocupa unos 2600 km de largo y puede verse incluso desde el espacio exterior. Segundo, es una zona de gran diversidad biológica, sus aguas son transparentes, tibias y con gran visibilidad y por eso es que es uno de los paraísos del submarinismo

Drawing on the horse

English champion rider Gillian Higgins has devised a novel way to teach horse anatomy to veterinary students, riders and caretakers – she takes up to four hours to paint the animal’s skeletal and muscular systems on live horses, using water-based hypoallergenic paints. Horse anatomy is pretty tricky, considering students have to understand how the 205 bones and 700 muscles in its body make this beautiful animal work like a well-oiled machine. But instead of boring them with sketches and complicated diagrams, Gillian Higgins uses her artistic skills to paint the anatomical systems on actual horses.

 “Painting the skeleton and musculature on the side of the horse really helps to bring the subject to life, she told the Daily Mail. “You can discover how to get the best out of your horse by seeing exactly what happens as it moves.” The English horse-ring champion and sports remedial therapist got the idea for “Horses Inside Out” back in 2006 after completing a degree in equine business management. She understood why many riders and trainers were struggling to learn all those bones and muscles with incredibly long names, and started thinking about a way to better make them understand how the horse works .

Stadium Braga, Portugal

Braga Municipal Stadium is a football stadium built especially as one of the hosts of Euro 2004. Of the seven new stadia built for the occasion Portugal, the Braga has been identified as the most spectacular, and was named by UEFA as one of the most interesting works in the landscape of sports structures .

The architect in charge was Eduardo Souto de Moura, who twenty years before then built in the rural outskirts of Braga her first book, Carandá market. With the stadium, has returned to this city, midway between Oporto and the border with Galicia, to realize his project of greater physical and symbolic dimension.

The pot or box of candy from the traditional fields of football, with high emotional temperature, is here replaced by a dry and monumental stage for sports broadcasts, media recognizing the nature of contemporary football. The work is often considered one of the most original and beautiful stadiums in the world. The huge rock that was removed during construction contributed greatly to the final cost of 83.1 million Euros, more than any other of the ten new stadiums built for Euro 2004, except for the Estádio da Luz in Lisbon and the Stadium do Dragão in Oporto.

With this project, innovative in its formal aspects and constructive elections, the architect won the 2005 47th FAD Architecture Prize.

Currently, equipment is rented by the SC Braga, who used it as their playground. Temporarily for the duration of your lease, the club changed its name, being known as the Estadio AXA. 

Chinese Boy Has Been Living and Sleeping with a Python for 13 Years

A family from Dongguan, China, has recently made headlines after it became known that their 13-year-old son’s best friend is a 15-foot Burmese python. The predator even looks after the boy when his parents are away. 

Most grownups would turn away and run for their lives at the sight of a 220lb python, but 13-year-old Azhe Liu can’t get enough of his slithering friend. Ever since he was just a few months old, the two have been sharing the same bed, and today they are simply inseparable. Six years before Azhe was born, his father, Chen Liu, found a snake egg, brought it home and hatched it out. When the boy came, the python already weighed 20 kilograms, but having a snake around the house didn’t seem to bother the family. ”I’d always thought them the most beautiful creatures and I was interested to see what would happen when my son came along,” Chen says. 

”After a while we were certain the snake wouldn’t hurt him and we began to leave them together alone. They really are inseparable.” Azhe and his Burmese python started sharing the same bed, and when he was just 9 months old, he was left alone with it, as the parents left to work. They would play and cuddle all day long, and during the hot summer months, the snake’s cold body acted as a natural air-conditioner.

Galleta Meadows

Galleta Meadows is a unique sculpture park of the Anza Borrego Desert, filled with dozens of metal creatures that supposedly inhabited the area millions of years ago.

The Anza Borrego Desert isn’t the most hospitable place on the North American continent, and it’s definitely not where you’d expect to find an outdoor art exhibit like Galleta Meadows. Owned by multimillionaire Dennis Avery (as in Avery office supplies), this unusual tourist attraction is a desert creature park open to anyone brave enough to face the desert and the unbearable heat that comes with it.

The story of Galleta Meadows began in the 90′s, when Avery decided to invest some of his fortune in a vast territory in Borrego Springs. Ho got it for an “uncontestable price” but had no idea of how he was going to use it, so he put no barbwire around it and no “Private Property” signs. Later, he built a winter residence, followed by a tourist resort, a country club and a golf course, but he needed something unique to attract tourist to his newly opened facilities.

Having learned that the surrounding area had great archeological value, containing fossil vestiges from Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Miocene, Avery decided to bet on prehistoric creatures to lure tourists. He commissioned Mexican artist Ricardo Arroyo Breceda to create metal sculptures of dinosaurs and other creatures that might have lived in the area, and scatter them across Galleta Meadows. Fast forward to present day, the metal menagerie envisioned by Dennis Avery and crafted by Breceda features all kinds of animals, from mammoths, to saber-toothed tigers, wild horses, turtles and even dinosaurs.

The sculptures of Galleta Meadows are made of scrap metal and wire, which Ricardo Breceda welds together and pounds into shape using hammers and sledgehammers. Some of them, like the elephants and Gomphotherium are up to 4 meters tall .

China’s Dead Sea

Inspired by the real Dead Sea in the Middle East, the Chinese resort build around an underground salt-water lake in Daying County covers an area of 30,000 square meters and is able to accommodate up to 10,000 swimmers at one time. It’s pretty big even for Chinese standards, but apparently not big enough. 

According to the Chinese press, over 15,000 people, most of them equipped with large swim rings, descended upon this popular summer retreat last Sunday making it look like a giant bowl of human cereal. I’m not even sure the term “swimming pool” even applies to this place on such occasions, considering it’s nearly impossible to move without hitting somebody, let alone flap your hands and feet to swim. The good thing about this place is the high salinity of the water which makes “swimmers” float freely, so there’s no real risk of going under.

Dubai Tuner Gives Back Seat Driving a Whole New Meaning

Seen from the outside, the 2008 Nissan Patrol modified by Ali, of Kingdom Customs Garage, in Dubai, looks completely normal, but open the front door and you’ll notice a few details are missing. And by details I mean the steering wheel, pedals, shift stick…

You probably haven’t seen anything like this before, I certainly haven’t. Probably sick of sitting behind the wheel while his friends had all the fun in the back, Ali, a tuner from Dubai moved the driver’s seat to the back of his 2008 Nissan Patrol. 

The steering wheel now sits behind the front seats, along with the pedals, dashboard gauges, manual transmission and even the rear-view mirror. All that’s left in the front is the dashboard and a series of LED screens for the passengers to pass the time while the driver does his thing in the back. Looking at the photos below, you’re probably thinking this is either photoshopped or a just a show-off tuning job, but this thing is actually drivable, as Ali himself demonstrates in the video at the bottom of this page.

The Amazing Falkirk Wheel Of Scotland

It opened in 2002 and is connecting the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal. It has such an elegant structure which works in a way that the boat is first placed inside on one of the ring gears; then it rotates 180 degrees to lift up the boat. It has two ring gears, so there is always one empty ready to take in new boats.

 It has an overall diameter of 35 metres (115 ft) and its design is inspired by a Celtic double-headed axe. It works on the Archimedes principle of displacement which means that the volume of the boat sailing into the ring will be a proportional mass of water so the final combination balances the original total volume, no wonder it’s a great landmark and something Scotland is proud of. 

San Zhi-Haunted Homes Of Taipei

San Zhai looks like an abandoned housing complex from Taipei, Taiwan. The rounded domes of the houses are an architectural delight and fantastically futuristic. The houses were built in the early 1980’s and targeted at rich Taipei residents of that time. The homes were built far from the city and served as homes for vacation or rehabilitation.

Strangely, the housing complex construction was abandoned midway. Some say that the construction was abandoned as the developer had run out of money and resources. But there is another weird reason for the abandonment, locals say that, the place is haunted and evil spirits caused a series of fatal accidents at the construction site. Thus the developer decided to halt all plans of construction. 

The houses are cantilevered, looking like modular pod houses. The architecture of the houses resembles an Archigram; more or less it looks like an UFO. These space age houses look pretty awesome but they also give you a creepy feeling. Some may look like tattered space ship. The San Zhai homes are very modern for the present times.