Tonight, August 16th, the annual Gozan no Okuribi (roughly "The Five Mountainous Send-Off Fires") festival was celebrated in Kyoto, Japan. Five giant bonfires were lit on five mountainsides surrounding the city, signifying the moment when the spirits of deceased family members, who are said to visit this world around this time, are believed to be return back to the spirit world — thus the name Okuribi (送り火, roughly "send-off fire").



Every year on each of the five mountainsides, stone hearths are purposefully built for the festival's bonfires. Three of the hearths are shaped in the form of giant Japanese text characters that signify greatness, and the Buddhist dharma, whilst another two are built in the shape of a boat, and a shrine gate. Additionally, lit lanterns are floated into a pond in Arashiyama, just before the ritual mountainside fires are lit.



Specific families have the hereditary duty of organizing all the logistics of the bonfires, and they spend many hours annually providing volunteer labour to maintain this tradition.

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It's really amazing how much the angle of depression (a technical term meaning the angle formed between a horizontal line and the line of sight when an observer looks downward at an object) effects our perception of depth. Here are two images of Miramar Palace (the orange building), built in 1893 at San Sebastián in Basque country, on the orders of Queen María Cristina of Austria, who used to spend her summers there. The white building behind it (with the black, conical roofed towers) is the diocesan seminary of San Sebastián (Elizbarrutiko Seminarioa), reconstructed in 1939. (Click on an image to view full size.)



In the first image, which is taken up close, the angle of depression is sharper, and the result is that the seminary appears to be almost directly behind Miramar Palace. In reality however, there is a distance of about a kilometre between the two landmarks, and there are plenty of buildings in between them. The second image approaches Miramar Palace from the same bearing (or azimuth), but from further away, and thereby the angle of depression is much gentler. This not only bestows a panoramic view, but allows us to judge the distance between the two architectural landmarks much better.

Iguazú Falls lies on the border between Argentina and Brazil, within the Iguazu River. The falls consist of around 275 individual waterfalls. Iguazú Falls is nearly three times wider than Niagara Falls.

Kasbahs (also spelled qasbah, qasba, qasaba, or casbah), particularly in Morocco, are fortified citadels or palaces often constructed using rammed earth techniques. Rammed earth, a traditional building method, involves compacting a mixture of earth, water, and a binder (like straw) into forms to create strong, durable walls out of what is essentially sun-dried mud. The kasbahs of Morocco, especially in the Drâa-Tafilalet region, situated within the Atlas mountains, such as the ones pictured here, showcase this ancient architectural style, with walls often reaching several meters thick. Some of the kasbahs shown here are in ruins, whilst others have been faithfully restored back to their original glory (probably to attract tourist revenue).



The Drâa-Tafilalet region is renowned for its picturesque oases that cover nearly 90% of its area, and that traditionally has sustained its resilient, indigenous population and rich cultural heritage. Unfortunately, in parts of the region, such as in the villages of Tafilalet, the indigenous inhabitants are abandoning their quaint traditional rammed earth homes, because of drought, desertification, climate change and social marginalisation, and are migrating to the cities. (https: //inthesetimes.com/article/morocco-oasis-es-sfalat-tafilalet-abandoned-village-climate-change-ghost-town).

Traditional turf roofed farmhouses in Iceland (just a few miles northeast from Faroe Islands, which we visited in last week's post, and which also has these traditional turf roofed farmhouses — please see zafoid.com/post/view/12000). Such houses have amazing insulation qualities, and to boot they look cute, reminiscent of Hobbit houses, are they not? 🏡 😀

The North Atlantic island village of Saksun, on Faroe Islands (part of the Kingdom of Denmark). The views are simply breathtaking, but on Faroe Islands it rains or snows 210 days a year, on average.

Sunset over New Zealand from across the ocean © Guy Shelley from Monash University.

This scenery was not formed overnight — Nature took its sweet time to create these marvels. These images from the Arches National Park in Utah, USA, show the end result of almost 300 million years of erosion, uplift, and weathering. Over time, layers of sandstone cracked, moved, and wore away, revealing almost 2,000 natural arches, composed mostly of Entrada and Navajo sandstone. These natural arches were formed from the salt beds left behind by long gone oceans from the past. This park was designated as a national monument in 1929, and elevated to national park status in 1971.

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In the Atacama Desert region of northern Chile, the skies are exceptionally clear and dry for more than 300 days of the year. These conditions have attracted the world's scientific community to develop highly interesting astronomical projects in the Atacama Desert, as seen here in the images below.