Despite Indonesia having more Muslims than any other nation in the world, making up 87% of its total population, the government’s pseudo-religious tolerance¹ is seen within several religious buildings, all standing within a few city blocks of Indonesia’s central seat of power and the highest court in the land.

With over 200 million Muslims in a country whose “religious freedom” is mere decades old it is not difficult to see the significance of these Muslim, Hindu, and Christian influenced buildings.

What you don’t expect to see in the heart of Indonesia is a 100 year old Catholic cathedral. Yet, there it is.

The Central Catholic Cathedral (Gereja Katedral) is the seat of the Archbishop of Jakarta. The current building is a rebuild of the original that was burnt down in the mid-1800s. On Christmas Eve, 2004, the church was the target of a blast bomb attack.

What you do expect to see in a highly populated Muslim country is a mosque. Just a 150 meters from the great doors of the Cathedral are the great halls of the largest mosque in Southeast Asia.

What is significant about The Independence Mosque (Istiqlal Mosque), besides its size, is that its designer was not a Muslim at all. In fact, he was a Christian architect that won the job as part of a contest held by the government in the 1960s. The mosque would take 17 years to build.

Just one block away from The Independence, the same Christian architect, Frederich Silaban, designed another one of Jakarta’s treasured monuments, the National Monument (Monumen Nasional or MONAS); this time taking his influences primarily from the Hindu religion.

Taking 14 years to build, the National Monment is a 137m tall tower that supposedly symbolises the fight for Indonesia’s independence. Visitors generally stand for hours in long lines while they wait to ride up the old, rickety 11-passenger elevator up the deliberately phallic-looking shaft to the central viewing platform. The design of the monument supposedly “combines elements of the male and female physiology”, symbolising fertility in the Hindu-Javanese tradition.

All three of these religiously influenced buildings demonstrate, to a certain extent, Indonesia’s religious tolerance. For if we just cross the street from the National Monument, we will come upon the Presidential Palace (Istana Merdeka) and the Supreme Court of Justice (Mahkama Agung); arguably the nation’s most important political buildings.

The Presidential Palace / The Supreme Court of Justice

From the viewing platform of the National Monument tourists can photograph all of the buildings discussed here within a single panoramic frame. The President’s home, the Supreme Court, the largest mosque in SE Asia, and the central Catholic cathedral all from an Hindu-influenced monument. An impressive vista for sure.

Thanks to Perry Ismangil.

This year’s Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts drew 177,000 party people to deepest Somerset, reaffirming Glastonbury’s position as the largest greenfield music and performing arts festival in the world.

Some went for the music. Some went for the mud. A few might even have gone for Bruce Springsteen - but no doubt a good (if slightly damp) time was had by all.

Despite its name, the festival is not actually held in Glastonbury, but at Worthy Farm in the village of Pilton, some six miles to the east.¹ Google’s aerial photos clearly weren’t taken at the end of June, as they reveal a remarkably unsullied rural scene - the site is still a working dairy farm. The famous Pyramid Stage is missing, but the foundations (and surrounding dried mud) can clearly be seen, as can the electricity pylons that cross the site.

Of the second stage (known, with a great deal of imagination, as the Other Stage), there is no sign at all - it is situated here, in a peaceful-looking field. (If you squint a bit, perhaps you can just make out a vague dark semicircular area.)

Near the southern edge of the site, you can see the stone circle, a favourite hippy hangout that was built for the festival by a druid, no less.

“Glasto” will be 40 years old next year, but it remains a brief annual blip of madness in the Worthy Farm routine. Once the music is over, the stages dismantled, the last hungover revellers departed and the vast quantities of rubbish cleaned up, Pilton’s cows can once again live in peace - until next time.

It’s interesting to compare this map of this year’s festival site to the aerial photos, so you can see what happened where.

Thanks to Barry.

As we’re sure you’ll have heard by now, Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, has died in Los Angeles.

We first posted Neverland Ranch to the site back in April 2005, but at the time Jackson was in the news for very different reasons.

This is the theme park at Neverland – a property which Jackson built here in 1988 at a cost of $17 million. Neverland Ranch was Jackson’s permanent residency from 1988 until 2005, when the main house was eventually closed as a cost-cutting measure in the wake of the star’s declining fortunes.

Despite having been out of the property since 2005, it wasn’t until November 2008 that Jackson finally transferred the title deed to the Sycamore Valley Ranch Company, and in April 2009 a widely reported exhibition of Neverland’s contents opened in advance of all the items going to auction.

In truth however, the Sycamore Valley Ranch Company is a venture that Jackson himself set up¹ – and the auction was actually cancelled at the last minute. Meaning that at the time of his death, Michael Jackson still owned at least some proportion of Neverland Ranch itself, as well as all of its contents.

So maybe this isn’t the last we’ll see of Neverland – perhaps one day it will be reborn to become the Graceland of the pop-era.

Goodbye MJ, thank you for the music.

After the Pyramids of Giza, Egypt’s next most visited historical site is the Karnak temple complex just outside Luxor.

Karnak was constructed over a period of 1300 years by approximately 30 different pharaohs, and eventually grew to become a collection of 25 temples. Known in ancient times as Ipet-isut, ‘The most select of places’, it is the largest ancient religious site in the world.

At the south west of the complex is the Precinct of Mut, an enclosed area which is not open to tourists, as it’s currently being restored. It contains the temples of Ramesses III, Khonspekhrod, and of course Mut herself, as well as a large crescent-shaped lake.

Leading north east from the Precinct of Mut is a 400m long avenue of ram-headed sphinxes, which leads directly to the Precinct of Amun-Re.

At 250,000 sq m, the Precinct of Amun-Re is by far the largest area at Karnak, and is the only area that is open to the general public. Amun-Re is dedicated to the Egyptian God Amun, who was the focus of the most complex theology in Ancient Egypt, and the huge scale of the complex here stands as testament to that.

The Ninth Pylon, and The Sacred Lake of the Precinct of Amun-Re

The main attraction here however is actually the entrance to the Temple of Amun, The Great Hypostyle Hall. Fortunately for us, the roof no longer exists, which means we can see the famous 16 rows of 134 columns.

122 of the columns are 10 metres tall, and the remaining 12 are a gargantuan 21 metres tall, each with a diameter of over three meters! (Ground-level photo)

Inscriptions of the names of the Pharaohs, as well as reliefs depicting an expansive history, can also be found recorded on the walls of this ancient fossil of humankind’s past.

For more information, be sure to check out the Karnak page at Wikipedia, which has links to a wealth of information about each of the sights we’ve seen today.

Welcome to the second annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!

Even by Saharan standards, the Ténéré region of northern Niger is pretty desolate: a vast sea of sand, broken only by the occasional rocky outcrop, where barely an inch of rain falls each year. So it’s something of a surprise to see a huge picture of a DC-10 among the dunes.

The story behind this striking image is a tragic one: it is a memorial to UTA Flight 772, which was blown up by a suitcase bomb in the skies above this spot in 1989, killing 170 people¹. An investigation concluded that Libyan terrorists were to blame for the explosion, which occurred 46 minutes after the aircraft took off from N’Djamena International Airport in Chad, en route to Paris. (The flight had originated from Brazzaville, the capital city of Congo.)

The memorial was created in 2007, to mark the 18th anniversary of the disaster, by Les Familles de l’Attentat du DC-10 d’UTA, an association of the victims’ families. Financed by a compensation fund paid to the victims by the Libyan government, it was constructed by 100 people working largely by hand under the desert sun.

The life-size silhouette of the aircraft lies inside a circle more than 200ft in diameter, created using dark stones set into the sand. Surrounding this circle are 170 broken mirrors, representing those who died, and arrows marking the points of the compass. At the northern point, part of the right wing of the DC-10 has been erected as a monument, with a plaque commemorating the victims.

The association’s website (in French) includes a moving video of the crash site - still littered with perfectly preserved debris - and numerous photographs of the construction of the memorial. (These are large PDF files, but are well worth downloading as they give an idea of the stark beauty of the region as well as the impressive size of the memorial.)

Thanks to Tom Van Steen.