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.

One of the most picturesque villages found in the Peak District National Park, Eyam is historically significant for the actions the villagers took to isolate themselves in the mid 1600s to prevent the spread of the plague despite the toll it took on their population.

Fleas in a shipment of cloth brought the plague to the village in 1665 with the first death happening within a week of its arrival and the disease spreading quickly to neighbouring homes, now known as the Plague Cottages.

The villagers, led by their Church ministers, enacted measures to try to restrict the spread of the disease, such as families having to bury their own dead and limiting contact with outsiders. Church services were held outdoors in Cucklett Delph, a nearby valley.

The plague killed more than 260 of the 350 people who lived in the village, with researchers unsure why some survived. Elizabeth Hancock lost her husband and six children in 8 days but did not become ill herself. The family is buried some distance from the village in a plot known as the Riley graves.

The village effectively quarantined itself, refusing any contact with people from nearby communities. Villagers developed arrangements to receive and pay for goods without meeting people from elsewhere face-to-face. Difficult to see on Google Maps, but a landmark for hikers, the Boundary Stone can be found on the footpath to Stoney Middleton. The stone has a number of holes carved in the top – villagers from Eyam would fill these with vinegar in an attempt to disinfect the coins they would leave as payment for food and medicine delivered there.

A similar arrangement took place to the north of the village at Reverend Mompesson’s well.

There is a small museum depicting the sombre history, and many landmarks have information signs for those walking around the village. Online information can be found at Wikipedia and the Eyam Plague Village site.

The following email was sent to us way back in 2005:

From: “deryk houston” <xxx@xxxxxx.com>
Date: 18 Apr 2005 02:40:26 -0000
To: <xxx@xxxxxx.com>, <xxx@xxxxxx.com>
Subject: [Google Sightseeing] Contact Form

I constructed a peace sanctuary on the foothills of the Rocky mountains in British Columbia. I used a forty-two ton bulldozer to move hundreds of tons of gravel to form the lines of a mother and child. A primitive drawing. The image is a thousand feet across. It is located near the Bennet dam in northeastern BC. on Portage mountain.

Could you help me find a photo of it from space? The project was completed two years ago. (It is actually an ongoing project but the main image is completed. The National film board of Canada did a documentary on it called “From Baghdad to Peace Country“.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Deryk Houston

Well Deryk, it may have taken 4 years, but Google did eventually add high-resolution imagery of the area to Maps and Earth, meaning that we have finally been able to find your peace sanctuary.

During further correspondence with Deryk, he sent me this image he took of the site from a light aircraft, which clearly shows the two faces, a dove, and a hand.

Until someone launches live satellite imagery, there will always be some sort of waiting period for imagery to be updated. However, perhaps the brand-new Geoeye-1 satellite will at least reduce the waiting time to a matter of months? Or maybe even days?

Deryk’s official site has more info on the Peace Sanctuary project.