Machu Picchu at dawn, taken back in 2007 on my medium format film camera. This image is around the same size as the actual transparency. There were a lot more people there but most of them were standing in a line next to me taking a similar shot to me.
If you have not seen Machu Picchu, it is one of those special places you should try to see in your lifetime, especially if you are able to trek to it along the Inca trail.
On my last trip to Peru, a few years ago, I was trekking in the Andes surrounding Cusco in the south central mountains of the country. The area is awash with Inca ruins, including Machu Picchu. I hired a motorbike for the day and drove around the city, hoping to find something interesting, when I stumbled across this place. I have no idea where it was but there were no tourists there, just a few llamas.
The shot below was taken on a trek around Huaraz, north from Lima in the Andes, close to Chimbote. I was pretty high when I took this shot, around 4500m above sea level. Both shots were taken on my Noblex 612 film camera.
This weekend, I went for a walk with my family in a place called Bukit Brown Cemetery. It is a secluded, overgrown graveyard in Singapore. It is unique in that you are in the middle of a metropolis that is Singapore but be standing in the solitude of a rainforest.
Bukit Brown Cemetery is also known to the local community as Kopi Sua or Coffee Hill. It is a Chinese cemetery, established in the early 20th Century and was the biggest Chinese graveyard outside China. The cemetery was named after its first owner, George Henry Brown, who was a ship owner and arrived in Singapore from Calcutta in the 1840s. He bought the area and named it Mount Pleasant.
As I wondered around this oasis of nature and calmness, it was very distressing to see all the construction work underway, something very common in Singapore. The issue here is that Bukit Brown Cemetery is slowly but sure being sacrificed to the god of progress. Large swathes of land have already been dug up and this beautify setting will soon be replaced by suburbia, concrete and glass.
In a place like Singapore, where such places are rare and revered, it is a shame that such a tranquil and spiritual place is being ruined to make way for apartments and the MRT (underground system).
If you are keen to see this wonderful place before it disappears forever, you can find it located between Lornie Road and Mount Pleasant Road, off Sime Road and Kheam Hock Road.
For further information about Bukit Brown Cemetery, here are some links, including a site to help save it from extinction:
1) Information about the cemetery: http://bukitbrown.com/main/
2) Save the cemetery site: https://sosbukitbrown.wordpress.com/
3) Preserving the history of Bukit Brown: http://www.bukitbrown.info/
All Terrain Photography 