Rosebud
08-29-2005, 11:09 AM
This contest is sponsored by Conde Nast Traveler (www.concierge.com). If you go to their website and answer the question correctly, you can win a trip. Thought it would be fun to post it here as well. Who knows where this is?
Here is this month's location (August 2005):
http://www.concierge.com/images/cnt/whereareyouhdr2.gif
http://www.concierge.com/images/cnt/big_photo.jpg
In the 1930s, a renowned American anthropologist described her visit to the island you are touring as "journeying in a dream through the landscape," where scenes "repeat over and over in astonishing and unpredictable rhythms." She might have added that there's enough chlorophyll in this panorama to oxygenate the entire archipelago-nation. No matter how you describe these terraces—chartreuse, smaragdine, estival—they're the greeniest green that you ever did see.
With myriad iridescent birds and monkeys, the province is après "Le Douanier" Rousseau. As you wander this splendid viridity, it's hard to believe that you're never far from a host of luxury resorts, restaurants, cafés, and bars. This island of three million people welcomes half as many visitors annually; they come to raft the white-water rivers and experience rich indigenous arts, chief among them painting and crafts, a complex percussive music, and a textile-printing technique that you might have practiced in your youth. Just don't take umbrage at the famous marionette performances.
Tell your friends back home the name of the nearby village that serves as your base (the region's cultural center, it lies fewer than twenty miles north of the capital) and they might think it sounds Arabic—a reasonable assumption given that most people in this country face the Kaaba to pray. But it's not. The word means "medicine" in the local tongue. In fact, the province is sui generis, the only place in this nation where the predominant religion comes from a country to the northwest (albeit practiced in a slightly different form).
Life here revolves around the rituals of rice cultivation. Villagers make obeisance to the goddess of rice and prosperity and consult high priests on irrigation planning. The American anthropologist commented further on "a great variation in…color as one small plot ripens an hour or a day behind the other." So go slow and take it all in, as she did. Even if you overdose on verdure and arrive home with a temporary case of chloropsia, your friends will be green with envy.
Where are you, anyhow?
Here is this month's location (August 2005):
http://www.concierge.com/images/cnt/whereareyouhdr2.gif
http://www.concierge.com/images/cnt/big_photo.jpg
In the 1930s, a renowned American anthropologist described her visit to the island you are touring as "journeying in a dream through the landscape," where scenes "repeat over and over in astonishing and unpredictable rhythms." She might have added that there's enough chlorophyll in this panorama to oxygenate the entire archipelago-nation. No matter how you describe these terraces—chartreuse, smaragdine, estival—they're the greeniest green that you ever did see.
With myriad iridescent birds and monkeys, the province is après "Le Douanier" Rousseau. As you wander this splendid viridity, it's hard to believe that you're never far from a host of luxury resorts, restaurants, cafés, and bars. This island of three million people welcomes half as many visitors annually; they come to raft the white-water rivers and experience rich indigenous arts, chief among them painting and crafts, a complex percussive music, and a textile-printing technique that you might have practiced in your youth. Just don't take umbrage at the famous marionette performances.
Tell your friends back home the name of the nearby village that serves as your base (the region's cultural center, it lies fewer than twenty miles north of the capital) and they might think it sounds Arabic—a reasonable assumption given that most people in this country face the Kaaba to pray. But it's not. The word means "medicine" in the local tongue. In fact, the province is sui generis, the only place in this nation where the predominant religion comes from a country to the northwest (albeit practiced in a slightly different form).
Life here revolves around the rituals of rice cultivation. Villagers make obeisance to the goddess of rice and prosperity and consult high priests on irrigation planning. The American anthropologist commented further on "a great variation in…color as one small plot ripens an hour or a day behind the other." So go slow and take it all in, as she did. Even if you overdose on verdure and arrive home with a temporary case of chloropsia, your friends will be green with envy.
Where are you, anyhow?