Travel Guides

James Morgan features the People of the Coral Triangle, a well made documentary on the Bajau Laut, on his website, along with other multimedia projects such as the Eagle Hunters (previously featured on TTP), and fast-paced documentaries of Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo.

As he explains, the Coral Triangle refers to a triangular shaped area of the tropical marine waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste. It is there that 3,000 species of fish live, including the largest fish - the whale shark, and the coelacanth. It also provides habitat to six out of the world’s of seven marine turtle species.

The Bajau Laut are an indigenous ethnic group of the southern Philippines, who have migrated to neighboring Malaysia over the course of the past 50 years. They depend directly in the natural resources of the Coral Triangle, and are the last nomadic marine communities of the world. Mostly Muslims, some also worship local sea spirits.

Photo © Vincent Prévost-All Rights Reserved

 I occasionally receive emails from photographers such as the one from Vincent Prévost that make the work of maintaining The Travel Photographer blog feel really worthwhile.

Vincent tells me he's been a regular reader of The Travel Photographer blog for about 2 years, and that it has been a source of inspiration to him. He cites my two posts on Grenville Charles and Diego Verges, who documented tribes of West Papua,  as triggering his own photo expedition "Highlands Encounters" to this remote part of the world.


He has been teaching French in South Korea since 2002 and is also a freelance editorial photographer who fuses fine art and journalism. While most of his work is in color, he also enjoys black & white photography, and travels with compact audio equipment to add a further dimension to his visual work.

West Papua is an Indonesian province that borders the independent nation of Papua New Guinea and forms the western half of the world's second largest island. The indigenous people of West Papua are of the same ethnic origin as those in the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. Ethnically and culturally, they are also related to other Melanesian peoples of the Pacific.

Photo © Ario Wibisono-All Rights Reserved

The Boston Globe's photo blog The Big Picture is showing off some of the submissions to The National Geographic annual  photo contest. The deadline for the submissions is November 30. The Big Picture editor chose 47 images from the three categories of People, Places and Nature.

No one asked me for my opinion, but I'll give it anyway. My favorite of those shown is the one of the two Indonesian boys playing with roosters in the village of Suradita, near Serpong in West Java. The photographer is Ario Wibisono who's based in Jakarta.

Ario's caption informs us that this was not a real cockfight. I'm confused by their dress as I took them to be Balinese children, but they're not...they're Javanese.

I also liked another one (#5) also by Ario Wibisono of the musician in Tenganan Village in Bali, playing the bamboo flute to a disabled child. I spent a couple of hours with this man during my Bali: Island of Odalan Photo~Expedition ™, photographing him playing his various instruments (including a sort of didgeridoo) and recording some of the pieces he played.

Photo © Conor Ashleigh -All Rights Reserved
Futu manu means"fighting bird" in the local Tetum language of East Timor. Cockfighting is a tradition that goes back centuries in various countries, and I've witnessed it practiced in India, Mexico and Bali to name but a few.

I was glad to find Conor Ashleigh's website, and see that he has featured a photo essay on cockfighting in East Timor. There, cockfights are complementary to religious rites and ceremonies, but also feed a gambling streak amongst many men.

Conor lives in Australia and works on developing stories that comment on under-reported environmental, political and social issues. He photographed in Egypt, Gaza, South Africa, Thailand, Cambodia and Uganda, as well as working on long term projects in India, Nepal and Timor-Leste. His images have been published in New Internationalist, Sydney Morning Herald, Newcastle Herald, The Asia Foundation, Catholic Mission and Oxfam.

I also suggest you check in Conor's photo essay on The Brick Kilns of Bhaktapur in Nepal.

I'm currently working on my own photographs of cockfights in Bali, which will soon be published here on this blog.

Photo © Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Images-All Rights Reserved
The Islamic month of Ramadan started while I was in Bali, and while the majority of the island's inhabitants follow Hindu traditions, there were indications that its Muslim communities were observing it, especially in areas such as Semarapura.

Many of the newspapers' photo-blogs such as the Boston Globe's The Big Picture, the WSJ Photo Journal and the like have featured images of Ramadan observances around the world, but the one I liked the most was from The Sacremento Bee's The Frame.

In the above photograph, Indonesian women pray during the first night of Ramadan in Jakarta on August 10, 2010. The fasting month of Ramadan, which started on August 11, is the ninth month of the Muslim Hijra calendar, during which the observant abstain from eating, drinking, and smoking during daylight and, in the evening, eat small meals and conduct evening prayers.

I also read that President Obama has recently positively weighed in on the issue of erecting an Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan, but has then waffled on his stance following criticism from his detractors, from conservatives and from the illiterate xenophobes who, incidentally, do not live in Manhattan or even in New York.

Much as has been said and written about this issue, but two of the most repellent are these: the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to ending “unjust and unfair discrimination,” but which now blatantly discriminates against American Muslims, and Newt Gingrich who squawked that “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington”, making the analogy between Nazism and Islam.

President Obama should be reminded that he said this on the inauguration of his presidency:

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth."