When you run a blog, you can get a lot of “junk mail.” Mostly it’s people (or software) cruising for links. Their site of choice is part of the form you fill out when you post a comment, and if you accept their comment, the search engines find a link to their site on your site, and it makes them look good. The comments tend to be bland and complimentary, such as “I found your post really helpful for my homework. You must put a lot of work into it.” or, “Your posts are very insightful and clearly represent a lot of deep thought. I really appreciate reading what you have to say.”

Bleah. This site doesn’t have too much deep thought, though I do think it’s a fairly interesting read, and I do put some time into it, both from research and my own experiences.

Normally I toss this stuff immediately into the trash folder. I’m not interested in supporting forex traders or their scams.

But my last post, below, garnered one of these from someone who runs their own travel blog, about Bantayan Island in the Philippines, and the site looks pretty interesting, especially if you’re considering a visit to the Philippines. (Ahem, your Serenity agent can fix you up with a vacation there.) So here’s a photo of the beach:

Sugar Beach in Santa Fe. Click to enlarge.

Looks like a pretty nice place, and the blog seems to be pretty active. Go take a look. http://www.bantayan-island.net/

There. I’ve done someone a good deed. Maybe I’ll go plug this site on that site!

And Sumatra is such a beautiful country, too. Land of green countryside, lovely beaches, exotic people, extinct volcanoes—oops. Maybe not so extinct. To everyone’s surprise, Mt. Sinabung erupted yesterday. Two minutes past midnight. One person dies of a heart attack, another suffocated in the smoke. Everybody else evacuated the slopes, which had been pretty friendly since the year Tycho Brahe & Johannes Kepler met for the first time (that was 1600, in case you didn’t know). 410 years is a long time for a volcano not to erupt, then change its mind.

Doesn't look too violent, but you don't want to be in that smoke

Thousands have evacuated, and agencies are bring in rice and face masks. Unless you’re a relief worker, you should probably not get in the way.

I’ll pick a nice volcano for the next post.

China likes American Dollars, so the place is getting easier to visit. When you get there, you have lots of choices to choose from. Here’s one I recommend.

In the center of China, back in the 300′s AD, the back wall of a cave high in a mountain collapsed, leaving an arch. They call it the gate of heaven (Don’t google ‘gate of heaven’—you’ll get a lot of church buildings. Google “tianmenshah’ instead.). It’s hard to find a good picture of it—if you step back to get the surrounding mountain, it looks small. If you get close to see how big it is, you can’t see the mountain. It has a road leading up to it. You can take a bus, or ride a cable car. But everybody has to walk the steps at the very top. The view, I’m told, is worth it. Here’s a shot from a distance:

It's that little white spot near the top.

Not very good, but that’s okay. Because here’s a link to a powerpoint presentation with some pretty impressive pictures. It’s definitely worth the look. At the end of the presentation is another link to a youtube video of airplanes flying through it.

My thanks to a friend in my motorcycle club for sending me this link. I think he wants to ride his bike up the road.

This country has some of the most beautiful, wild places on the planet, and it has a horrible history, and it hosts the location of an extremely dangerous event that hasn’t happened yet. Rwanda, central Africa. Pronounced roo-wanda.

The country experienced some horrible genocide back in the mid 90′s, but that’s over now, and the tourist industry is justifiably growing by leaps and bounds. For the adventuresome.

Normal adventurers

This is the place to go to see gorillas, hippos (the largest hippo-oriented national park in the world), volcanoes (see a couple posts back about a trip to a volcano in nearby Congo), jungle, elephants, and more. Not to mention local culture and art.

Typical art, typical smile.

Almost ready to call your Serenity agent, right? Maybe not a bad idea, but there’s this one lake you might want to stay away from. Lake Kivu.

Looks innocent, doesn't it?

This lake is dangerous. Here’s a quote from a limnologist (lake scientist)

Lake Kivu is a meromictic lake with a relatively shallow euphotic layer (~18m) usually smaller than its oxic mixolimnion (20-60 m), and with a weak thermal gradient in the mixolimnion.

There’s more where that came from, but what’s going on is that this lake has a lot of dissolved carbon dioxide and methane in it, and tons and tons of these gasses are trapped down at the bottom of the lake. Something might make all that gas escape, all at once. The valley would fill with unbreathable gas, and everybody would suffocate. Maybe in their sleep. You might have heard of another lake that experienced a limnic eruption, killing a couple thousand people. This lake is 2,000 times larger and the area is more densely populated. ‘Nuff said.

On the optimistic side, scientists are working at extracting the methane peacefully and converting it into electricity. It could supply power to the region for a century. I’d rather have that happen.

Have you ever been to Rwanda? We’d like to hear about it.

This is going to sound corny, but a bunch of scientists went on a vacation to study the effects of the vacation on their brains. They wanted to study what would happen to their brains if they disconnected themselves from everything electronic—cell phones, the internet, computers, everything. One even forgot to put on his watch. Here they are. They look like normal humans, don’t they?

My thanks to Chang W. Lee of The New York Times for the photo

Guess what? They relaxed. They found out that with fewer distractions, their ability to concentrate improved.

Time seemed to slow down for them. They experienced what they called “the third day syndrome” when the exact time didn’t seem to matter any more. Hence forgetting to put on the watch.

They talked about how they were thinking and feeling. One thing they mentioned was a study done in Michigan that showed that taking a walk in the woods improves your ability to learn. (I already knew this—another book I read recently said that it’s because of chemicals given off by the trees and fungi.)

They decided that their senses were changing—getting sharper. They were noticing more things around them; they were becoming connected to their surroundings.

Apparently the experience improved their ability to be creative. Several came up with new approaches to projects they were working on.

They all ended up in slightly better shape, and I’ll bet they were closer friends when the trip was over.

So there you have it—scientific proof that you benefit from taking a vacation. Go do it. Now, before something distracts you.