New for June: the sun's come out. UK readers who have suffered our recent rainy deluges will understand. The arrival of the sunshine is particularly good news for me as my car has sprung a leak. Strangely enough, it's only the floor that is soggy - the roof, sides and seats have all stayed dry. But the floor is so bad that I've been forced to drive round with my trouser legs rolled up. The sunshine - and tomorrow's scheduled trip to the garage - will sort things out, I hope.
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| And the winner is... |
The winner of the newletter draw this month is Estrella Sanz, who will be receiving a signed copy of one of my books very shortly. The travel-writing competiton had no takers again... it's a funny thing, one month I get loads of entries, and the next month you all fall quiet. So this month...get typing! The winner gets the Bradt guide of their choice. And who can argue with that? Click here for info on how to enter.
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| PollyEvansPhotography.com |
This month, my to-do list was so long that it ran off the paper and onto the floor. So I thought, I know, I won't do any of it. I'll set up a new website to showcase my photography instead. And so I did. It's at www.pollyevansphotography.com. There are only limited pics up there for now, but more will be coming. I might even manage to upload some photos of....
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| ...Mating Marsh Frogs |
 They're at it like crazy at the London Wetland Centre, and the noise they make is incredible. I've been down there taking pictures of them blowing up their cheeks in the misguided belief that it makes them look pretty.
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| Travel Photographer of the Year |
The Travel Photographer of the Year 2008 competition launched just a couple of weeks ago. It's open to all - amateurs and pros, old and young, fat and thin, bald and hairy. The standard is high and the prizes are fantastic. The closing date is 9 September 2008; see www.tpoty.com for details. If your pics aren't good enough yet, think about enrolling on one of TPOTY's photography courses, run by founder Chris Coe (www.photoiconic.com). I have been on his courses twice (actually I repeated the same course, it was that good and my standard so low that I considered myself a remedial student) and they made a massive difference to my photography.
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Greenland
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In the last week of May, I went to Greenland. I spent three days in the capital, Nuuk, which is a quaint little  town of colourful weatherboard houses, known for its dicey weather (it rained almost all the time I was there). It does however attract an arty crowd, and has a wonderful cultural centre as well as art galleries and a museum - where the famous Greenlandic mummies reside.  The six women and two children are reckoned to date from about 1475: nobody's quite sure how they died.They were discovered in 1972 and exhumed in 1978 so that they might be preserved for posterity.
From Nuuk I went to Kangerlussuaq, where Greenland's only international airport is. From Kangerlussuaq one can drive in a couple of hours to the ice cap, which covers 85% of the country, and is larger than the areas of the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain and Portugal combined. Scientists are continually drilling for ice samples that might cast some light onto the issue of climate change - the ice gives clues as to the climate in the time it was made, so by taking samples the scientists can can map out the changes in our planet's temperature over the milliennia. The deepest they've drilled in Greenland so far is just over three kilometres - and the ice at the bottom is 250,000 years old. (In Antarctica, they're down to ice that dates back a million years.) The scientists in Greenland are just starting a new project which analyses the ice of the Eemian era, which ended about 115,000 years ago, when climate change patterns were very similar to those we are experiencing today. See www.neem.ku.dk for more information.
 And my visit to the ice cap turned into a wildlife safari as well: we saw six or seven musk ox, a couple of reindeer, and two Arctic foxes.
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