Asia

It’s Island Week 3 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. It'll probably last about a week. Here in the Mentawai Islands of West Sumatra, Indonesia there is a tiny, seemingly unnamed, almost totally-forested island. The…

The Oil Rocks, 50km off the coast of Azerbaijan, is effectively a small city that has been constructed from interconnected oil platforms and residential areas, all sitting atop rocks, piles of sand and landfill. Back in 1949, the Oil Rocks…

Today sees the finals of the first ever Olympic Bicycle Moto Cross competition which takes place here at the Laoshan Bicycle Motocros Venue in Beijing. BMX racing is brand new to these Olympics, and races take just over 30 seconds…

This bizarre tower is the Perfect Liberty Peace Tower in Tondabayashi, Japan, and from up here it looks like it might be constructed entirely from cotton-wool. Completed in 1970 this incredibly oddly-shaped tower stands at 180 m, and was actually…

This incredibly shiny building is the Shwedagon Pagoda, also known as the "Golden Pagoda" (for obvious reasons) and it is the most frequented religious site in Burma (officially the Union of Myanmar), as Buddhists believe it contains relics of the…

This is the huge Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, which used to be the winter residence of the Dalai Lama (the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetan people), until the current 14th Dalai Lama fled in 1959 following a…