Здесь в…

Hamilton Hot Air Balloon Show, 2012

Aeronautics-lovers gather in Hamilton once a year, they are professionals and those who are just keen on aeronautics. The event’s name is “Balloons over Waikato”. The word  “Waikato” may be not clear to you, actually it is the Maori name of the place. Last year there was a strong wind during the event, and the balloons were carried away in the direction of the river. As chance would have it, we were late, and were stuck in the morning traffic hold-up in Hamilton (!).

This time it turned out much better. We left early, came in time and viewed the whole show from balloonists’ (a really beautiful word) briefing until the very moment when the balloons’ got beyond the horizon.

To continue with what has been said please view five dozens of pictures with comments below. They are interesting, you will like them. 

Before dawn, around five-thirty in the morning, the show participants gathered on an artificially illuminated glade. 

Some brought gas apparatuses in trailers, others used carriages to deliver them to the place of the event.

The signs with the balloons’ photos posted about and the table on the information display showed to the participants their arrangement on the glade and the priorities established.

This is a logo of the annual festival “Balloons over Waikato”.

After a short briefing, and analyzing of the weather report and a wind rose, it was commanded to unload the balloon gondolas.

As one of the organizers have noted, the New Zealand festival is one of few places in the world where one can freely observe the launching process of hot air balloons. It has been emphasized that there is no such possibility in the USA. Perhaps it is an important information.

All gas apparatuses are to be tested before the launch. A masculine activity.

In the center of the glade there was set a radio cabin to broadcast the show.

That guy proposed to burn gas “on-camera” and was really pleased with the result.

The day was breaking and people both old and young started gathering on the glade.

As for this “brutal Gandolf” I planned to keep it for one of the posts on any of the following themes: “Russia is shit”, “There is no God”, “Mortgage for louts”.

Gondolas are being transported about the ground.

Spectators started to spread checkered blankets for picnics across the grass.

That’s how a hot air balloon looks when folded.

It was dawning. The first to take the air were professionals: the companies providing tourist services. Three quarters of an hour cost 300 NZD. 

The inscription on the orange trailer is “An egg a day is now OK”. The fact is New Zealanders watch the cholesterol level. Doctors recommend to eat not more than a dozen of eggs a week. Perhaps there even exist some low cholesterol eggs which are “harmless”. A ready advertising hot air balloon looks this way.

After the sun rose the television screw from Morning News  came.

Hot air balloon show is a family holiday.

Hot air balloons, even being semi-inflated, are really huge structures and an awfully ineffective  transportation.

For the balloon cupola not to be moved by an accidental wind gust and the flame not to burn a hole into the balloon’s shell, one of the crew members usually holds the balloon by the rope tied to the top of it.

I liked that a single man was able to hold that huge construction with wonderful ease.

One by one the balloons took a vertical position.

The moment, when an enormous balloon stops being a shriveled cover and starts gaining the shape, can be compared in effectiveness with the moment of taking-off.

As I have already mentioned the spectators were allowed to observe the process in the immediate vicinity with the air vehicles. 

The balloon with a nice inscription “hamilton” was the first to take the air.

This is one of my favorite photos in this report.

It is very important to watch the shell’s thin material not to be melted by the flame.

The person in the orange vest on the left is holding a fan to inflate the balloon’s shell which is still “lifeless”.

It seems to me that “web-marketing” in the Ultrait company brings in good return. More than thirty balloons participated in the show in 2012. Every year the organizers promise more participants, higher flights and more powerful balloons.

 

The very moment when a balloon is to be hold because it has already risen but has not tear-shaped yet.

A Kiwi guy with a mustache is watching the process of hot-air-balloons’ launching.

 

Pilots, one by one, take the air in their aircrafts.

The shape of the balloon on the left is a kiwi-shape (it’s with its back to you). The balloon on the right, as you see, is a kangaroo. And for some reason it is in mittens. The loudspeaker’s voice said that it was the first launch of that huge balloon, and that such balloons were very hard to make.

There is enough room in the sky. We didn’t have even the slightest feeling that the balloons could collide. But half a year ago, in January 2011, while landing, a balloon hooked a power line, caught fire and crashed down. 11 people were killed in that awful tragedy. No one survived.

If we don’t dramatize the event it’s spectacular.

 

A small-sized balloon of a single pilot was the last to take the air. There, in the right hand corner, you can see a kiwi-balloon facing the camera.

Over a period of one hour all the balloons left the take-off area and vanished into thin air. Especially skilled balloonists promised to get back by means of their balloonist’s intuition.

I hope you’ve liked my photo report and believe it to be interesting enough to share it with your friends. Thanks.

Комментарии

 

Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s Last Creation in the Art Backwoods of New Zealand

Here in Kawakawa, judging by the vastness of multi-colored foofaraw and trees that grow on roofs, people are quietly going mad. The small (the population is slightly over 1000) roadside town north of North Island is decorated with every color of the rainbow. A long time ago there was a coal mine nearby, but since then the resource has run out, and now people make a living mainly from farming and feeding travelers. There are quite a few authentic New Zealand cafes with pretty good coffee and croissants in the town. Many people stop by to eat, since the settlement is located approximately halfway to Auckland.

Kawakawa is also called “Train Town” since trains occasionally pass by on the road that passes through it. Nowadays tourists are given rides on the eighty-kilometer section of the old railroad. Family/children’s entertainment.

Of course, the most popular site of Kawakawa is the public restroom built by the Austrian architect and painter Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who is famous for his unique style. His canvas buildings are called “ecological,” “organic,” “biomorphic,” “natural.”

Friedensreich left his footprints all over the planet. Other than New Zealand, where the artist spent the last 25 years of his life, his architectural projects can be found in Germany, Austria, Japan, the USA, Switzerland and Israel (photos on Google Images). I’ve heard that many people deliberately fly to New Zealand to look at his final project, which he finished one year before his death: a public restroom in Kawakawa.

This is what the entrance to the restroom looks like. A tree grows through a hole in the roof. (The photos of the restroom aren’t mine, I got them here.)

Everything inside is made from ceramic tiles which are laid together using solvent, there are no right angles. It’s as if the floor is moving.

Light gets into the building through a stained-glass window made of empty glass bottles.

More photos of artistic restrooms can be found on Google Images.

Across from the restrooms there is a museum, the entire wall there is covered with near-Maori drawings. The symbols probably mean something.

The bus station for “Clark” school buses in the outer part of the city.

A red sign on a pub where people love the New Zealand beer “Lion Red.” Here people can and like to drink.

You can see the train which was mentioned in the beginning of the post passing through the city in the background.

A farmer’s four-wheel off-road truck that is parked in front of a bar with arcade games.

Second-hand goods are sold in the empty first-floor rooms of the provincial theater of the town Kawakawa. Here and there you can encounter a familiar from Napier Art deco style.

In a Chinese restaurant, a little girl waited for her parent to make fish and chips, the favorite dish in New Zealand.

Because of the amount of pedestrians by the Friedensreich Hundertwasser public restrooms, the traffic significantly slows down.

The ceramic shark which many recognize from the illustrations to the recent post about adulthood. The small sculpture park made in the same inimitable “biomorphic” style in the downtown was closed for the holidays. On regular days, I suspect, children would really like it there.

Kawakawa pleased me with its originality, which was unexpectedly encountered among regular New Zealand farming landscapes.

Комментарии

 

Industrial China – A Factory Country, 2008

Here in China, factories, plants and hundreds of millions of people work with a vengeance for our satisfaction. Sitting in comfortable chairs, in comfortable clothes, at comfortable desks with a modern notebook, the West rarely bugs the East about the worsening quality of the planet’s condition. Having successfully achieved progressive communism after many decades of sacrifices and a struggle with an invisible enemy, China is currently busy with its own development and isn’t too interested in the issues of the environment.

For some reason I have a feeling that there will come a time when the problem will solve itself: gigantic atmosphere-cleaning plants will be built and will restore the balance to the planet’s unstabilized ecosystem. Before you know it, all over the world these structures will stand next to every factory. At a reasonable price, of course. Why not? It’s a good idea, a profitable one. And the compassionate white community with high moral values and the habit of worrying about reasons that are, so to speak, “just there,” will be happy, and investors will have a place to put their money.

But for now, the developed part of China looks like one giant factory. Each square meter is utilized to maximum efficiency for the production of something useful. On the way to Shanghai you can see how some sort of rootlets is grown between the train tracks. Possibly the same ones that are later served in eateries. The area that feeds the twenty-million Shanghai, which is nowadays called no differently than “New York on steroids,” is three times as large as Shanghai itself.

The southern, Cantonese districts to which the hyper-economy of Hong Kong and the adjacent Shenzhen and Guangzhou is accessible work 24 hours a day. The landscapes resemble scenes from Japanese cyberpunk shows: a forest of pipes that extends to the horizon, the sky is sliced up with wires, the surface of the ground with roads. According to various sources, up to seventy percent of all the world’s clothes is produced in this place. The locals say that there is a real clothes fever in the labor villages: because of the selling of real and not-so-much Calvins and Kleins, there is as much money as mud there, people are indulged in entertainment, and the law, while workers, manufacturers and the mafia rest, humbly stands out of the way. The most pronounced hedonists in Macao are the Cantonese.

The photographs you have just seen were taken on the way from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, and from Macao to Nanking on the way to the Vietnam border. I will talk about Shenzhen, the mirror city of Siangan, and about Macao, which has surpassed Las Vegas in gatherings at playhouses a long time ago.

Bonus: Satellite photos of the central part of China.

In their measures, a four-million settlement is only slightly bigger than a city-type village. In the images, it is clearly visible how cities produce smoke. In addition to this, you shouldn’t forget that this is where everything that we use, from toothbrushes to iPhones, is made here.

Комментарии