kmusser

Time for a new virtual journey and it's back to Africa, landing at 17.85° S, 19.19° E. Welcome to the Bushveld!

Physical geography:
Bushveld more commonly refers to a region of South Africa, but it also applies to this section of the Okavango river basin, though I've also seen it referred to as the Kalahari Sandveld. Our point is in a patch of wooded savanna, a little valley formed by the intermittent Mpuku river, just a few hundred feet to the west, which flows (sometimes) 2.5 miles north into the Okavango. The ground here is sandy, the forest dominated by teak trees which do just fine in the sand. Climatically this is a transition area, with drier savanna and eventually the Kalahari desert to the south, more humid savanna and denser forests to the north. The climate right here is relatively pleasant, with temperatures in the 60's and 70's (°F), sometimes getting up to the lower 90's. It is very dry with essentially no rain at all May-Sept., but does rain some the other months averaging 5.8 inches a year (similar to the American Southwest).

It's pretty flat here, and on the edge of the Okavango flood plain, well above sea level at around 3,500 feet. You do get hills as you get further away from the river and to the southwest of our point you get a bizarre natural landscape of straight line ridges and valleys that are ancient sand dunes that have been stabilized by vegetation. Beyond that is about 170 miles away is the Etosha pan, an enormous salt pan known for its charismatic African wildlife. Going the other way we can follow the Okavango which does not flow to the Ocean, but goes east into the interior of Africa and about 200 miles downstream opens up into a huge inland delta which is also known for its high concentration of wildlife. Some of that wildlife can probably be found near our point as well, especially antelope, hyena, leopard, wildebeest, maybe even elephants and lions. Over in the river you can find hippos and crocodiles.

While out point is in the woods, we are not in deep wilderness here, the area is settled, with the nearest fields less than a mile away. This shot is about 100 miles east of our point, but the foreground is the same terrain and that main road passes within a mile of our point.



There are numerous natural hazards including flooding, drought, and wild fires that inflict the area. Human made problems include land degradation due to over farming or over grazing. Disease is also a problem with malaria being particularly rampant.

Human geography:
We are in the Musese constituency of the Kavango West region of Namibia. Our point is very close to the northern border of Namibia with the Okavango being the boundary with neighboring Angola. While Namibia as a whole is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the planet, this little strip of land along the Okavango, which gets more rain than the rest of the country, has a pattern that we've seen in a couple of our points now, not many urbans areas, but fairly densely populated agricultural use. The area surrounding our point is the village of Mayenzere, which I was not expecting to find any info on, it has no Wikipedia page, it's not even on Google maps, but I found this awesome video which is about the best introduction I could have imagined: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9P2WWY-Ai8 That school is about 2 miles from our point.

The area is extremely poor, most involved in farming, not for sale, but just for their own consumption. The fields are mostly pastures for cattle or goats. There is some cropland too with the main crop being mahangu, what we call pearl millet, as it can handle the sandy soil and dry climate. There is also some sorghum and maize grown as well. Most of the fields are communal and the forests as well. There is also fishing available in the Okavango. The forest our point is on is not protected but presumably used by the locals to harvest forest products. Numerous tracks can be seen crisscrossing it on the satellite imagery.

There is a dirt/sand road just 600 feet to the west, that runs north-south along the Mpuku river connecting the handful of farms and settlements further south to the main strip of settlement along the Okavango. The main road for that strip, the B10/C45, is paved and it's just a 1/2 mile north of our point. That road connects a string of small communities that line the Okavango valley. 40 miles to the west is the town of Nkurenkuru, only 618 people, but it's the capital and largest town of Kavango West. It has the distinction of being a Finnish missionary station since 1929, that mission created a small satellite mission called Rupara just 5 miles west of our point.

Going east along the main road and into the neighboring region of Kavango East you'll reach Rundu about 35 miles away (a 40 minute drive). Rundu is much larger at just over 60,000 people as of the last census (2011). That might not sound like a lot, but it's the 2nd largest city in Namibia and you'll find most of your modern conveniences here. That includes an airport with commercial service to Namibia's capital of Windhoek, railroad connections, a modern hospital, universities, and a shopping mall. Rundu is still extremely poor though, with significant sprawling shantytowns that surround the city center. It is growing quickly having doubled in population since 2000 and it may have over 90,000 people today.

This entire area is pretty isolated from the rest of the world, there is just a single road connecting Rundu to Windhoek and that's a 7 hour drive. It's 10 hours to get to the coast. There also are not many connections to neighboring Angola, there is a bridge at Rundu, but that part of Angola is also sparsely populated and it would be a 9 hour drive to the nearest major Angolan city.

The people living near our point are the Kavango people who speak their own language. There are around 200,000 Kavango living almost entirely in the Kavango East and West regions where they are the majority, though they're only 9% of the population of Namibia. They are related to the Owambo people who are the largest ethnic group in Namibia and live mostly in the north central portion of the country. They are mostly Lutheran, thanks to those Finnish missionaries. Rundu has become a multicultural city and Afrikaans is used as a lingua franca, though the government has also been pushing English, but it's unclear to me how widely that's been adopted in this area. You might also hear Portuguese as a lot of Rundu's recent influx has been refugees from Angola.

I couldn't find much on the early history of the area. The first people living here were probably the San (Bushman) who were gradually pushed into the desert areas by various Bantu peoples. The Owambo people moved in from the northeast in the 1500's and gradually moved further west and south. They were followed by the Kavango in the 1700's who settled along the Okavango river and founded a string of 6 kingdoms. The one our point would've been in is Mbunza. Today the Kavango people divide themselves into 6 tribes that correspond directly to those 6 kingdoms. Europeans didn't really reach this area until the 1880's.

Portuguese started in Angola much earlier motivated by wanting slaves for Brazil and steadily pushed further and further inland. The Germans didn't start getting interested in Namibia until the late-1800's, declaring a protectorate over the area in 1884 and Portugal and Germany established the border between their colonies in 1886. Portugal was harsh is dealing with the locals and the Owambo and Kavango peoples mostly fled to be on the German side of the border. The Germans in contrast were not especially interested in the northern region of their colony and left the traditional tribal structures intact. This was not true throughout Namibia, they were mostly interested in the central and southern regions where the diamonds are and their genocide of the Herero people was particularly brutal and may have been inspiration for the Holocaust.

Germany lost its colonies when it lost WWI, what is now Namibia was occupied by South Africa during the war and kept it as a League of Nations and then UN mandate afterwards. South Africa did not have the same hands offs relationship that the Germans did, assassinating the last Owambo king in 1917. Rundu was founded in 1936 to be an administrative center for the northeast area of the colony. Some traditions survived South African rule, such as the communal land rights, but South Africa also began to implement it's apartheid policies in preparation for full annexation. The UN did not take kindly to these plans and began to have an increasing adversarial with South Africa. The locals didn't take kindly to it either, with protests beginning in the 50's and armed resistance in the 60's. South Africa doubled down on implementing apartheid, the Kavango area was named one of the "homelands", Kavangoland, in theory independent, but in practice not so much.

Meanwhile, across the border in Angola, there was also a fight for independence which began in the 50's and was won in 1975. The winning alliance immediately fell apart beginning the Angola civil war. The U.S. and Soviet Union took sides and it became one of the most infamous and deadly of the Cold War proxy wars including the deployment of Cuban forces to the region. The independence movement in Namibia (led by SWAPO) sided with the Soviets while South Africa sided with the U.S. allowing South Africa to frame its repression of Namibia as fighting communists and included South African ground forces moving into Angola. Meanwhile in the Namibian conflict the other southern African nations all supported SWAPO as an anti-colonialism war. Our point being near the border would've been in the thick of it, the border was ignored by all sides - their being few roads in the region would mean the roads were often targets. The two wars became hopelessly entangled and mines would be deployed freely.

The Namibian conflict ended up taking 23 years. There never were any decisive military engagements, South African eventually bowed to diplomatic pressure. A U.S. brokered agreement led to both Cuba and South Africa withdrawing forces in Angola and the independence of Namibia in 1990. Once agreed to, Namibia's actual transition to independence went relatively smoothly. Angola's civil war would continue until the military leader of the communist side was killed in 2002. In that period between peace being established in Namibia and the war continuing in Angola, many Angola refugees fled to the Numidian side of the border, mostly ending up in Rundu. Our area was a SWAPO hotbed, once independence was won SWAPO became the ruling party. It's leader, Sam Nujoma, an Owambo and president until 2007, pursued a policy of reconciliation to unite the country and has received numerous peace awards.

Today the Kavango people are still in recovery from the war. The economy is limited, as mentioned it's mostly subsistence agriculture, the isolation of the region means that markets are limited, and the recently population pressure probably isn't helping. Still it's not all bad, infrastructure is in place and continues to be built, there are schools and health facilities. Despite the poverty the literacy rate here is 95%. The Kavango have a reputation as one of the friendliest people in Africa and have largely been welcoming of the refugees. There is tourism potential for the region, there are several National Parks featuring Africa's charismatic wildlife, the nearest, Mangetti National Park, being about 50 miles away and Rundu having the nearest tourist facilities. In between our point and Rundu is the Mbunza Living Museum, a safari lodge, and a couple of river lodges.
The Kavango are also known for their wood carving abilities with carvings being sold to tourists. As you might have gathered from that video, singing and dancing are big. A few more tidbits. Numerous non-government organizations also appear to be active in the region helping make up the lack of resources.

I'll leave you with a map of the Okavango Basin, our region is in the center-left of the map. Also if you want to dive further, I found this Atlas of Namibia super useful.

I need a distraction. Time for a new virtual journey, and it's back to civilization, well, comparatively speaking anyway. We are at 37.37° N, 107.83° E. Welcome to the Ordos Desert.

Physical geography:
The Ordos desert is separated from the larger Gobi desert by the Yellow River (or more properly, the Huang He) and is contained by a giant loop the river makes (called curiously enough, the Ordos loop). Our point is sandy soils with some sort of grass or shrub covering and probably looks very much like the picture below, minus the power lines. There are some what looks like low rolling hills here, that are vegetated sand dunes, elevation is around 4,600 feet above sea level. Climate is semi-arid and temperate with temperatures in the 70-80° F range in summer and 10-20° F in winter and precipitation is only 10 inches a year, usually in the form of the occasional summer thunderstorm. I couldn't find out too much about the ecology, but would assume you'd have the usual desert critters. Rainfall is so seldom there is no real hydrology to speak of, but we are part of the Yellow river basin. The environment here is not particularly harsh, but the lack of water and sandy soil means it's difficult to grow anything. In ancient times this area was prime grazing land, but overgrazing over the years led to desertification which has been aggravated more recently by climate change.



Human geography:
We are in the People's Republic of China or more specifically the Otog Front Banner (district-level, think county) of Ordos City (prefecture-level, a sub-division between state and county, and don't be fooled by "city" in the name, it is mostly rural and until recently it was the Ikezhao League) of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (province-level, think state). The use of Banner and League terminology as sub-divisions are holdovers from when this area was not part of China proper. Lets start in the beginning.

There have been people living here since ancient times, the earliest archaeological finds date to some 35,000 years ago and belong to the Hetao people about whom not much is known. Recorded history of the region really starts with the Xiongnu (or Hsuing-nu) who were a nomadic people that founded an empire that lasted about 400 years, roughly 200 BCE to 200 AD. The Ordos region was often a area of conflict between them and the Qin and Han Chinese dynasties of the time and changed hands several times. The earliest Great Wall of China was built during this time and ran about 30 miles south of our point with the Ordos being on the Xiongnu side. One of the Xiongnu successor states, the Xia, are notable for building the largest pre-modern city the Ordos has seen, Tongwancheng, in the 400's, about 60 miles southeast of our point. It was conquered by the Chinese Wei dynasty in 430. Its ruins are a popular tourist attraction today.



The area was loosely held by a series of Chinese dynasties until the Tang dynasty in 881. The Tangut people had gradually been moving into the area throughout the 600's and 700's, they were a Tibetan-related people fleeing the Tibetan Empire. In 881 the Tang emperor rewarded a Tangut general with the Ordos area in thanks for aiding him against a rebellion. That formed the core of what would become the Western Xia or Tangut empire that would expand to the west and take control of the silk road. This empire lasted until 1227 when it was conquered by the Mongols.

There is a reason you've never heard of the Tanguts. Temüjin (aka Genghis Khan) had unified the Mongols in 1206 and the Tanguts were one of his first targets and they submitted to his rule in 1210. 9 years later when Temüjin embarked on his invasion of Persia the Tanguts refused to contribute any men. When Temüjin returned from his western campaign he proceeding with a new one to punish the Tanguts for their betrayal, invading in 1225 and systemically destroying every city as went. While he was successful in eradicating the Tanguts from history it was also his undoing as he died in taking the final Tangut city of Yinchuan - about 85 miles west of our point.

The history of the area has been linked to Temüjin ever since, he liked the area so much that he vowed he would be buried here. He is not in fact buried here (his burial site is unknown), but after his death the movable palaces that he used became movable mausoleums containing venerated items associated with Temüjin. The name "Ordos" itself is a reference to said mausoleum and the tribe here that came to be known as Ordos Mongols saw themselves as caretakers of Temüjin's legacy. The mausoleum would get a permanent building in 1864 and today remains both a place of worship and veneration for Mongols and a tourist attraction for the rest of the world. It's located about 120 miles northeast of our point.

Temüjin's son, Kublai Khan, would go on to conquer China and found the Yuan dynasty. When the Ming dynasty kicked the Mongols out in 1368 the Yuan continued to rule Mongolia, which then meant everything north of the Great Wall, which would include Ordos. The next 300 years the area was home to the Ordos Mongols. Mongolia doing those years was rarely a unified entity, warfare between the tribes was common, but I won't go into that other than to say that the Ordos were their own tribe, one among many participating in the constant shifting of alliances.

That would end with the Manchu conquest in 1635 that also figured prominently in a couple of our previous points. The Manchus conquered the Mongol tribes before going on to conquer China and forming the Qing dynasty. During the Qing dynasty they maintained separate administrations for "China proper" which continued to use the Ming bureaucracy and the Manchu and Mongol territories which organized areas into "Banners". Banners originally referred to how the Manchu military was structured, with each Banner corresponding to an army. After their conquest each was assigned a territory and the Banners were grouped into Leagues. Through most of the Qing period travel between the two areas was restricted, but they began allowing Han Chinese to settle in the Mongol areas in the late 1800's.


When the Qing collapsed in 1911 there was brief attempt by Mongol leaders to join the newly independent Mongolia, but local warlords took control and Inner Mongolia was eventually forced into the equally new Republic of China. The RoC reorganized the area into provinces, although it's unclear to me how much control the RoC actually had over the area as they were soon consumed by the events of WWII. WWII appears to have been a very confused time for Inner Mongolia with pro-RoC, pro-Mongolia, pro-Communist, and pro-Japanese military units all operating more or less independently. The Japanese did set up a Mongolian puppet state that included Ordos, but it was short lived.

How Inner Mongolia emerged after the war seems to largely due to a man named Ulanhu. He was a communist organizer in the 20's and with WWII he organized military resistance against the Japanese. In the civil war that followed he became one of the premier generals under Mao Zedong and brought Inner Mongolia into the People's Republic of China in 1947 and becoming its Chairman. He was purged during the Cultural Revolution, but survived and was later restored thanks to the personal support of Zhou Enlai. The current Chairperson of Inner Mongolia is his granddaughter, Bu Xiaolin.

Today the area remains very rural, thinly populated (14 people per sq. mile) by a mix of Han Chinese and Mongol peoples (Mongols being 31% of the population of the Banner). The Mongols are well integrated into modern China and do not suffer the same degree of persecution that other ethnic minorities in China do, probably at least in part because Communist China sees Mongol history as an integral part of its own history.

There aren't any people at all right at our point, though there are what look like 4x4 tracks criss-crossing the area. Nearest habitation is about a mile away and looks like a livestock operation of some sort, mostly like sheep. Agriculture, mostly ranching, is the main economic activity. Sheep kept for both wool and mutton being the most popular animal, but cattle, pigs, goats, and horses are kept as well. Further south there are some isolated farms despite the unsuitability, mostly likely wheat and requiring heavy irrigation, the green of them shows up sharply against the desert in the imagery.

Going a little farther afield about 65 miles to the west is a coal mine, mining is relatively near to the area starting a boom around 2000 and making this one of the more prosperous areas of China when looking at a per capita basis. That boom fueled the oddity that is Kangbashi. Ordos City not only doesn't have a city called Ordos, it didn't have any large cities at all, so in 2003 the Chinese began building one from scratch. The boom however was not nearly that much of a boom, originally designed for a million that was soon scaled down to 300,000, and by 2010 it only had around 30,000 people leading the press to call it a ghost town. It has since started to fill out though and today has about 200,000. While that is the capital of the prefecture, it is not the closest city to our point, being about 135 miles away to the northeast.

The nearest town of any size is a small village called Maladi about 10 miles away, and then it's about 20 miles to Aolezhaoqi, the town of 26,000 that is the biggest in Otog Front Banner. The nearest big city is Yinchuan, the former capital of the Tanguts, now a sprawling city of 1.5 million in the neighboring Ningxia Hui Region, 80 miles to the west and in the fertile valley of the Yellow River - what I'm sure feels like a different world from our windswept desert. It's different culturally as well being a center of the Hui people, China's Islam minority. Here is where we'd fly into if we were visiting our point.

Image looking across the Yellow River from the Ordos side

Speaking of culture, throughout Inner Mongolia is a mix of Han Chinese and Mongolian culture, inter-marriage is common and it looks like the culture really is a blend of the two rather then there being two separate cultures alongside each other. The language spoken is mostly Mandarin, but Mongolian is spoken as well and most official signs will have both. While the Mongols here have long given up their nomadic ways, that past is still venerated in art and music. And in religion, in fact surveys indicate many of the area Han incorporate elements of traditional Mongolian beliefs alongside the usual mix of traditional Chinese religions. Buddhism among the Mongols evolved into its own particular version derived from Tibetan Buddhism rather than that practiced elsewhere in China, and the Han in the area are more likely to practice this Mongolian Buddhism rather than Chinese Buddhism. Also centered in Ordos is the growing cult of Genghis Khan worship, a neo-shamanistic movement. Traditional fire-worshiping ceremony held annually in Otog Front Banner.

I'll leave you with this cool turn of the century map in which our whole area is just "sandy waste".

Time for a new virtual journey, this time I got 55.20° N, 118.91° E - my randomizer seems to be stuck in Siberia, it's almost as if that's a really large area. Still this point is remarkably similar to point #7, so I'm going to roll again rather than repeat that. Instead let's visit 11.72° N, 105.63° E.

Physical geography:
And we're in somebodies rice paddy. We're also on the shore of a river I think is called the Stœ̆ng Kâmchay Méa, though I'm not 100% on that, whatever the river is eventually runs into the Vàm Cỏ Đông River which runs parallel to the much larger Mekong and empties into the South China Sea right alongside it. It is very flat here, we're about 200 miles from the ocean but only 60 feet above sea level, part of the wide coastal flats that accompany the Mekong to the sea. I believe the entire area floods regularly, both from rainfall and the intentional floods for rice cultivation.

It is both hot and wet here *cue Robin Williams Vietnam joke*, with temps in the 80's/low 90's year round. Rainfall is about 60 inches a year with the rainy season being May through November with a short dry season where it doesn't really cool off, but does dry out for 3 months before raining again.

Pre-cultivation this area could've been either jungle or open wetlands, but that was a long time ago, probably some 4,000 years ago. Since then it's been rice, rice as far as the eye can see. A short bit of drone footage of what this landscape looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJo44rJY77o (though I think our spot has fewer trees than that).

Not much else to report on the physical geography front as this is a thoroughly human landscape, so we'll move on.



Human geography:
We are in the Kanhchriech District of the Prey Veng Province of Cambodia (or Kampuchea, which is the name of the country in Khmer). This is a densely populated, rural, agricultural, and mostly poor area, but not particularly isolated like the Afghanistan point was. The fields themselves are small, a few hundred feet across, for better control of the flooding. The small town were the owners of these fields live is less than a mile away - a single dirt road crowded with houses on both sides - wait, what is this? We have StreetView here!

This town is Phumĭ Trâpeăng Trach and I was not able to find out any information about it, but judging from the number of houses there are probably a couple thousand people living here. It has a single larger building, which I'm pretty sure is a temple. The houses being on stilts would confirm the frequent flooding. The larger town of Kanhchriech is only 5 miles away, 20 minutes on these roads. Kanchriech still has dirt roads and the houses look pretty similar, but it's probably 15,000 or so people and does have most of your modern conveniences as well as the area's schools. The province capital of Prey Veng is about 30 miles and an hour drive away and looks more like a modern city, though it's still only 30,000 people. That's a little misleading though because of how dense the rural area is, Prey Veng may be the largest city, but the province has over a million people in it - almost every road looks kind of like that StreetView image with continuous housing scattered along it and the areas in between all covered with rice fields.

We're about 70 miles or 3 hours from Cambodia's capital city of Phnom Penh which is a sprawling metropolis and would also be the nearest commercial airport. We also aren't far from the Vietnam border, only about 15 miles. Ho Chi Minh CIty, an even bigger sprawling metropolis, is about 4 hours away in the opposite direction from Phnom Penh. The Vàm Cỏ Đông and Mekong rivers also pass through Vietnam on their way to the sea, the Mekong is navigable by 8,000 ton ships up to Phnom Penh.

Economic activity is almost exclusively rice farming, folks will get two seasons of rice in every year. I can't tell what variety is being grown here, Cambodia does grow a bunch of them. This area is not big agriculture though, this is mostly families feeding themselves and selling any extra domestically. The plots would be owned by individuals and families and maybe small co-ops and the planting and harvesting likely being done entirely by hand. A bit about Cambodian rice. What rice was being exported was mainly going to Europe until they recently started imposing tariffs on it, now it's mostly going to China who doesn't pay as well (source). At the moment all exports are halted thanks to Covid. There likely is fishing in the river here too, also for local consumption.

The population here is 99% Khmer and they've been living here more or less forever, they speak the Khmer language which has its own script and is older than most of the neighboring languages in Southeast Asia. The 1% that are not Khmer are mostly Vietnamese, we're close enough to the border that there is some crossover. Most Khmer follow the Theravada school of Buddhism with some elements of pre-Buddhist indigenous beliefs such as ancestor and spirit worship mixed in. Notably they have elves!



The Khmer originated from somewhere in southern China and moved into Southeast Asia around 2,000 BCE and brought their rice with the. The Khmer enter recorded history with the kingdom of Funan which was centered on the area near our point and controlled much of what is now Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand for about 500 years from the 1st to 6th centuries AD. No direct records of theirs survived, but Chinese historians wrote about them and there are numerous archaeological sites of their ruins.

The Khmer reached their height of power with the Khmer Empire, that ruled most of the Southeast Asia mainland from the 9th to 15th centuries. During this period the center of Khmer culture moved west away from our area to Angkor which became a huge city and remains famous to this day for the architectural wonder of its temples. It was towards the end of this period that the Khmer underwent a gradual conversion from Hinduism to Buddhism. Our region became a border area contested with the Vietnamese that moved into Southeast Asia during this time.

The empire fell in the 1400's with the western portion being conquered by the Thai and what remained broke into smaller states. What Khmer states were left would often be subservient to either Thai or Viet kingdoms, our area falling to the latter. A Khmer kingdom centered on the Mekong delta and including our area did survive into the modern era even as it continued losing land to Vietnam, losing the area around what's now Ho Chi Minh City and its best ports in the 1690's. Vietnam began treating what is now Cambodia like a colony, declaring a protectorate over it in 1807. The Khmer king turned to France for protection from the Vietnamese and signed a protectorate agreement in 1862.

France let the Cambodian monarchy continue, but quickly stripped it of authority and made it a part of French Indochina. There were attempts to impose the French language and customs on the country, but they did not stick. During WWII the Japanese occupied the country without resistance and were seen as liberators. Towards the end of the war, at Japanese prompting the king, Norodom Sihanouk, declared independence. I can't believe there isn't a movie about this guy, especially considering his fascination with film, Sihanouk would remain king/prime minister/head of state/president until 2004 surviving 8 or 9 regime changes. After the war French colonial authorities returned, but Sihanouk continued diplomatic efforts to gradually win more autonomy for Cambodia until they agreed to recognize full independence in 1953.

Cambodia's descent into madness began with the Vietnam War, Sihanouk tried to the keep the country neutral in their neighbors war, but it was to be to no avail. North Vietnamese forces set up bases in the wilderness areas near the border and the U.S. began a massive bombing campaign in an attempt to destroy them and our point would definitely be in the area bombed. A pro-U.S. coup that removed Sihanouk from power in 1970 opened the door for the Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Rouge began as an anti-Sihanouk communist insurgency but didn't have much success until the coup gave them a new enemy. Sihanouk and North Vietnam both allied with the Khmer Rouge in order to take the country back beginning a 5 year civil war. Once in power the Khmer Rouge turned on both of them, placing the king in house arrest, and began one of the most brutal regimes known to human history. I'm not going to go into the horrors of the Khmer Rouge except to say the area around our point would not have been exempt and those that survived lived through a 3 year nightmare.

Anti-Vietnamese sentiment was a cornerstone of the Khmer Rouge and they killed any Vietnamese they got a hold of. By 1978 the newly unified Vietnam had enough and invaded, defeating the Khmer Rouge in a month and installing their own puppet government. Our area would be one of the first captured and could begin the slow process of recovery. The Khmer Rouge would continue a guerrilla campaign through the 80's, but they were on the opposite side of the country. They also continued to be recognized as the legitimate government of Cambodia until a U.N. brokered peace process in the early 90's led to the restoration of Sihanouk's monarchy in 1993.

In theory today Cambodia is a constitutional monarchy, but in practice it is a dictatorship ruled by Hun Sen who has been prime minister since 1985. Hun Sen is former Khmer Rouge who defected to Vietnam and formed part of their puppet state and has kept his position ever since. While he has been accused of all sorts of human rights abuses and corruption, he has brought stability to the country and reconstruction efforts have been able to proceed and our locals have been able to return to their rice farming in relative peace.

Weird personal connection, the wife of one of my more distant cousins was involved in setting up and then working for the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, primarily as a victims advocate and served as advisor to Hun Sen's government. She would be retired now, but I believe she and her family still live in Cambodia. She has a book on the difficulty of bringing any Khmer Rouge members to justice.

I'll continue closing with a river map, our point being in that little pocket of Cambodia not in the Mekong basin in between Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City.

Taking a break from the news, time to take a little virtual journey to: 32.53° N, 65.49° E.

Physical geography:
This point brings us to central Asia on the slopes of a mountain called Tōr Ghwênḏ around 5,000 feet above sea level. It's part of a range of mountains forming the edge of the Helmand River valley, which themselves are part of the larger Hindu Kush range. The Helmand is somewhat similar to the Nile, a narrow ribbon of lushness through an otherwise barren desert environment. Though in this case a mountainous desert. The ribbon of green along the river is about a mile wide, surrounded by a roughly 10 mile wide, 20 mile long, mostly barren plain, and then the mountains. There are a bunch of usually dry streambeds running between the mountains and the Helmand.

It is hot and dry here, though not to the extremes of some of our past points, more steppe-like than true desert due to the elevation. Yearly rainfall is about 8 inches, mostly in the winter. Temps are in the 80's in the summer, sometimes going in the 100's, and in the 40's in the winter, occasionally dipping below freezing. There does not appear to be anything at all growing here, just sand and rock, though it's possible there is some grass. I wasn't able to find out much about the local wildlife, though I'd assume you'd get the usual little desert critters.

The primary environmental threat to the area is drought, it being highly dependent on the single source of water, and there are been some nasty ones in recent years, 2001-2003 and again in 2018-1019 causing serious food supply issues.



Human geography:
As you may have guessed we are in Afghanistan, specifically the Deh Rahwood district of the Uruzgan province in the middle of the country, giving us our first point in an active war zone. There's not much data for this part of the world so a lot of what follows is conjecture. Our point is only 2 miles to the dirt road that connects this valley to the rest of the world, 4 miles to the nearest settlement at Zar Tala, and 5 to the string of settlements along the Helmand. Those have a pattern we don't really see in the U.S., a densely populated rural area. Usually you think densely populated means cities, but here there's no hub, none of the commercial activity associated with towns, just lots of little farms packed together, mostly growing wheat and opium poppies. Zar Tala is a little off the river and utilizes irrigation from buried channels that capture what little rainfall the area gets and grows orchards of almonds and apricots. The area does have livestock as well, but that has taken a big hit from the recent droughts. The district capital of Deh Rahwood is the largest of those towns along the Helmand, also only about 5 miles away, population probably in the tens of thousands, but lacking paved roads or electricity. The provincial capital of Tarinkot is 20 miles to the east, but might as well be a million miles away as there is a roadless Taliban-infested mountain range in between. This valley's one road leads to the south for a 70 mile, 3 hour, journey to Kandahar the nearest major city. Kandahar is also the market for the agriculture grown here, most of the locals never leave, merchants from Kandahar make the journey, buy or barter what they're interested in and make the trek back. (summary of Uruzgan economy).

The people here are Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and more or less synonymous with the ethnic group historically called Afghans, and have been here for basically all of recorded history. They have a tribal organization, and there are hundreds of different, largely independent, tribes, but it was not clear which tribes lived in this particular valley. I'm assuming they primarily speak Pashto (aka Afghani) which is the native language of the Pashtuns and the most common language in Kandahar. That is not the dominant language of Afghanistan which is Dari (Persian), but we're close to the heart of Pashtun country and very isolated while Dari is more common among the country's elite. The religion is universally Sunni Islam and the local mosque is likely the primary institution in Deh Rahwood.

Afghanistan has a long history of being conquered by other peoples who don't stay once they realize how inhospitable it is, dating back to Alexander the Great who founded the city that what would become Kandahar with the area usually being ruled by Indian or Persian dynasties. The Arabs conquered the area in the 7th century and while they didn't stay their religion did with Islam replacing the earlier Zoroastrian and Buddhist beliefs. The Mongols conquered the area in the 1200's and ruled for about 100 years before it went back to being traded between Persian and Indian empires.

The Afghans won their independence in 1747 and Kandahar became the center of the Afghan Empire which ruled modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan forming the predecessor to modern Afghanistan. It collapsed into smaller states in civil war during the 1820's. The British soon became interested, they conquered most of India and were worried about containing Russia. Their first invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 was a complete disaster, one of the few outright defeats of a colonial power. They didn't try again until 1878 which saw a very bloody war ending with a decisive British victory at Kandahar and Afghanistan agreed to became a protectorate, but the British troops did not stay due to constant rebellions. Afghanistan won its independence again in 1919 fighting yet another war against the British, the British held the advantage militarily, but were exhausted from WWI and also involved in the Russian Civil War and settled for retaining what is now Pakistan, establishing the modern Afghan-Pakistan border that runs through the middle of Pashtun territory.

The region would again be engulfed in war during the 80's and the Soviet-Afghan War and the succession of civil wars following that continue to this day. The Soviet war was complicated, to put it mildly, but one of the inspirations of the Mujahideen resistance was that they saw the Soviet style reforms as an attack on Islam. The Pashtun tribes formed the core of the Mujahideen and when the Soviets took the cities, our rural middle of nowhere valley became a stronghold. Deh Rahwood has one famous person from it, Mohammed Omar. Omar fought against the Soviets and after the pro-Soviet regime fell defeated rival Mujahideen leaders and formed the Taliban, taking Kandahar in 1996 and Kabul in 1996. He ruled Afghanistan until deposed by the U.S. led coalition invasion in 2001 for harboring Osama Bin Laden, and after that continued to lead the insurgency against the new Afghan government until his death in 2013. Our valley continued to be a Taliban stronghold and was one of the areas the Taliban retreated to when driven out of power in order to regroup. The Afghan government took Kandahar in 2003, but the countryside of southern Afghanistan hasn't seen peace since the 70's.

For the area in the immediate vicinity of our point, I believe coalition forces bombed the area in 2002-2003 and then later established a ground presence with a base for the Dutch military in Deh Rahwood from 2006-2010. As an indicator of how isolated this valley is, when the Dutch first arrived the locals had feared the Soviets were returning. The Dutch were able to take control of the valley, but the Taliban continue to operate in the mountains. The Taliban conducted mass executions near Deh Rahwood in 2008 that turned many of the locals against them and after that they sided with the Coalition forces. The Dutch also conducted numerous infrastructure projects in the area (detailed report on the Dutch mission).

I can't tell if the Taliban have moved back in since the Dutch have left, the province as a whole has rival governors appointed, but not sure either of them has much authority here, the Dutch reported no functioning local government and what authority there is seems to be in the hands of local tribes. There have still been reports of fighting as recently as last year.

I'll leave you with a map I made of the Helmand drainage basin, with our point being near where the Helmand starts going through the mountains.

Time for a new random point: 39.92° N, 119.91° E.

My actual next point (#8) was 59° S, 105° E which was another Antarctica point, about 50 miles south of Vostok and an environment essentially the same as point #4, only a little more likely to be visited by Russians, so rather than repeat that we'll go on to somewhere more interesting.

Physical geography:
1,000 miles, almost due south, from our Siberian point, and we're in another world. This is technically an ocean point, but it's in the harbor of the world's largest coal port, so I think it'll be interesting. Located 3 miles off the coast in the Bohai Sea, itself a bay of the Yellow Sea, which is part of the Pacific Ocean. The coast here is a thin strip of flat land connecting the North China Plain that is the heart of China to the Manchurian plan to the northeast. The Yan mountains that separate them come to within 5 miles of the coast. The ecology here is now thoroughly urban, I'm sure that once upon a time there was a string of fishing villages here, but now the Bohai Sea no longer supports a fishery thanks to pollution. There are numerous rivers running between the mountains and the coast, the closest to our point being the Shihe River. The climate climate here is cold and dry in the winters with winds coming out of Siberia and getting into 20s, and hot and humid in the summer with monsoons coming off the ocean and bringing temperatures into the 80s.



Human geography:
Today this area is part of Qinhuangdao, a metropolis of 3 million people and the largest port city in the Hebei province of China. The section nearest our point is Shanhaiguan or Shanhai Pass, the name of the pass between the mountains and the ocean here. Before the unification of China this area was part of the Yan State, the last section of China to be conquered by Qin Shi Huang before he declared himself an emperor in 221 BC. Qin Shi Huang was obsessed with becoming immortal and his quest started in Qinhuangdao, he gave the city its name and outfitted an expedition here under the direction of his alchemist XuFu that would lead to the other side of the Bohai Sea. XuFu would abscond with the fleet never to return and Qin Shi Huang died young of mercury poisoning.

Because of the strategic importance of Shanhai Pass, this area was often fought over in China's many civil wars. In 1381 the Ming Dynasty built the Great Wall across the pass and built the walled city of Shanhaiguan to garrison its eastern end where it met the ocean. Where the Wall enters the sea is called the "Old Dragon Head" due to its appearance. I mentioned in our last point the Manchu conquest of China, it was right here that the critical battle in that conquest took place. In 1644 Ming general Wu Sangui was on what looked to be the losing side of a civil war, he retreated from Beijing to Shanhaiguan. He agreed let a Manchu army through the Great Wall if they'd help his side, they agreed to help if he'd swear allegiance to them instead of the Ming. He did and they crushed the Ming army that had been pursuing him and from there were unopposed in taking Beijing and founding the Qing Dynasty. Battle of Shanhai Pass.



Industrialization came to the area in the 1890's when China's first rail line running from Beijing towards Manchuria reached Shanhaiguan in 1893. In 1989 China established both an industrial port and the Beidaihe summer beach resort that was open to foreigners in Qinhuangdao. The 1890's also saw increasing interest in China from Colonial powers and anti-foreigner resentment exploded into the Boxer rebellion in 1899. British forces occupied Shanhaiguan to take control of the railway and to prevent the Russians from expanding their sphere of influence beyond Manchuria. The British would keep control of the railway until 1902.

In 1933, in events leading up to WWII, Shanhaiguan again saw battle as Japanese forces seized control of the Great Wall entrance, defeating the Chinese and forcing China to recognize their puppet state of Manchukuo and create a demilitarized buffer area inside the Great Wall leaving China proper without good defensive positions. The area would be occupied by Japan as a part of that buffer zone through till the end of the war in 1945. After the Japanese surrender the area was quickly occupied by communist forces and became part of the People's Republic of China. The communists kept the beach resort at Qinhuangdao, turning it into a summer retreat for senior party members, it became China's equivalent to Camp David.

The people here are almost entirely Han Chinese, though there is still a Manchu minority (3%). The language is Mandarin, the religion the typical Chinese mix of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and folk religion. Overall the culture is what has become viewed as the standard Chinese culture centered on Beijing.

China has continued to encourage industrial development in the area, in 1978 they declared Qinhuangdao one of their "open cities" open to foreign investment. The port is the worlds largest coal shipping port, shipping 244 million tons per year with plans for expanding. In addition the city is big in the glass, aluminum, auto industries, and manufacturing in general. The land closest to our point appears to be a major ship building plant/dry dock engaged in a large land reclamation project extending out into the Bay. The rail line is still here now served by the bullet train which will get you to/from Beijing, 200 miles away, in just 2 hours. The area is also a big tourist destination attracted to the beach resorts, the Great Wall (Shanhaiguan is a World Heritage Site), or as a base for visiting parks in the nearby Yan mountains. Qinhuangdao also hosted some of the 2008 summer Olympics football matches.


1908 map, our point would be along the eastern edge of the map just off the coast.


Modern shipping map for the Bohai Sea

Mainetraffic.com shows the cargo ship Angele N almost on our point at anchor right now. Looks like another busy day for Qinhuangdao with over 60 commercial vessels sitting in the harbor.

It's been a very long time since I did a post about a geography problem, so here we go. Here at work I was asked to assist a project wanting to highlight how much work our agency does in urban areas. Sounds great, urban agriculture is a thing, and our agency supports it, so lets highlight it. So, how much do we do in urban areas? Well that depends on what exactly an urban area is. Urban is one of those "I know it when I see it" things that doesn't have a commonly agreed upon definition. We could go with the city limits of our largest cities, but that would leave out the surburbs which I think most people would consider part of the urban area.

Many government reports use the Census Bureau's Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA), which count any county where at least 25% of the population commutes in to a central city that is large enough. The trouble with MSAs is that they use whole counties as their building blocks and in reality most counties are a mix of urban and rural so as a result you get a very broad definition that includes wide swaths of what people would normally think of as rural. Our first cut was using MSAs, but we found it was indeed too broad, most of what it was capturing was not stuff that would be considered urban agriculture. Fortunately we have another source to help us out, the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) which is a satellite imagery classification scheme that sorts land use patterns visible in the imagery into various categories.



So let's take a look, we have the MSA which is too broad, the city limits which is too narrow. We can see on the Land Cover background in general what we'd like to capture - we want the pink-reddish stuff. But the problem with the NLCD is there is no actual boundary there, we could use it to eyeball a particular farm and say whether it's urban or not, but we want a criteria that we can apply nationwide.



The U.S. Census Bureau to the rescue, they have developed what they call "urbanized areas" which they define as "a continuously built-up area with a population of 50,000 or more." Mapping the one for Clevelend it looks pretty promising and so we run some reports using that boundary. Seeing the results our team decides that it is still too broad, it's mostly capturing farms along the edge of the boundary, not really "urban" enough for what we want to be reporting.



So maybe we can use the NLCD directly. We can still use that Census urbanized area boundary to limit our area of interest. Then on the NLCD we can highlight the "Developed, Medium intensity" and "Developed, High Intensity" areas, which generally translates to commercial, industrial, and multi-unit residential areas that are the core of "urban." So do we have any agriculture on those areas? A little, but it turns out that we've gone too narrow again, since even urban farms usually come up as either the "Culivated Crops" or "Hay/Pasture" in the NLCD. What we really want are farms that are right next to those medium-high intensity developed areas.



Fortunately we can do buffers, which are perfect for this job. Here I've drawn a 500 meter buffer around those most developed areas, and we're still using the Census urbanized area as an outer boundary to keep us as urban as possible. We can and did play around with exactly how wide you want to make that buffer, but this is what our team ended out going with and it turns out for the Cleveland area we had 201 projects in that buffer in the last 5 years. Bringing up Google maps satellite imagery we check out some of them to make sure we're capturing what we want to be capturing and it looks good. I can't show you the farm locations because our customer information is private, but I can show the resulting national map.



Not too bad.

It's a long weekend, so I'll do a bonus random point: 75.79° S, 97.21° W. More ice!

Physical geography:
Two Antarctica points in a row, what are the odds? About 1 in 10 actually, Antarctica is a big place, bigger than Europe or the United States. We've gone to the opposite side of the continent though, south of South America, and landing on the Pine Island Glacier, about 80 miles from its outlet into the Amundsen Sea. The glacier is not especially large by Antarctica standards, but it is very fast moving, giving it the distinction of dumping more ice into the ocean than any other individual glacier - 46 gigatonnes (46,000,000,000 tonnes) of ice per year! And thanks to climate change it has been accelerating, with a measured increase of 74% between 1974 and 2007. Part of this glaciers speed may be that it is being heated from below, there was a nearby volcanic eruption 2,200 years ago in the mostly, but not quite buried Hudson Mountains along the north side of the glacier and scientists have found that the volcanic heat source is still there underneath. A giant trench has opened up in recent years running down the center of the glacier, the Wikipedia page is definitely worth reading and includes some video. The ice is about 5,000 thick here, and it's still going to be all ice and snow on the surface. Temperatures are -10° F in summer, -30° in winter, not near the extremes in East Antarctica, but still cold enough you're not likely to see much life here.


Human geography:
We're in an unclaimed portion of Antarctica and by some measures it is even more remote than our previous point. It's a whopping 870 miles to the nearest permanent research station, U.K.'s Rothera station on the Antarctic Peninsula. The U.S. has had temporary camps studying the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would be a little closer at about 350 miles away, but thanks to it being at the forefront of climate change research we know the area near our point have definitely been visited, mostly by American and British research teams. The first documented visitor was Charles Bentley in 1961 on a research trip measuring ice thickness. His expedition was overland, numerous visits have been made since by air, landing on the glacier. Various teams have installed automated GPS stations, a weather station, and a navigation beacon on or near the glacier. Icebreakers can also reach the glacier outlet by sea. With the need for climate change research I suspect visits to keep an eye on the glacier will continue.

Awesome map of Antarctica.

Ok, finally have time to visit a new random point on the Earth: 23.75° S, 23.73° E. Looks like it is back to Africa!

Physical geography:
We are in the Kalahari Desert, which is really more semi-arid savanna than desert. While it is very sandy and dry, there are trees here and probably wildlife a plenty, including many of the charismatic animals people think of when you think African wildlife: elephants and giraffes, lions and cheetahs! It probably looks something like:



It's also as flat as can be, not a hill in sight. It is hot here, but not like the brutal, long lasting heat of the Sahara, it's usually 80s (F) in the summer and 70s in the winter and can get chilly at night, possibly even reaching freezing. Annual rainfall is similar to southern California with definite wet and dry seasons but with dry being the winter (June-August). The savanna here looks undisturbed and healthy, it's about 10 miles to the nearest signs of people.

Human geography:
Politically we are in the Kweneng District of Botswana, which is mostly rural. We're about 10 miles to the nearest road, which is the paved A12, the major road crossing the district. About 20 miles to the nearest town of Dutlwe of about 1,000 people. About 120 miles to nearest real city, Molepolole, and 150 miles to the nearest commercial airport. Our point would be within the ancestral homeland of the San people (aka Bushman), a traditionally semi-nomadic people and there are a few that still practice a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that might roam the area.

Most of the people living nearby today are going to be of the Bakwena or Tswana ethnic group that make up the majority of Botswana. The Bakwena are a Bantu people that established themselves in the area in the middle ages and they were still there as an independent chiefdom through most of the 1800s when Europeans began visiting the area. When the Dutch and English established colonized South Africa the Bakwena maintained mostly peaceful relations and a prosperous ivory trade with the Europeans though there were some battles when Boers attempted to settle on Tswana land. In 1885 the British established a protectorate over the land and it became Bechuanaland, the British were worried about German interest in the area, the local chiefs accepted as they wanted protection from the Boers. The Tsawana chiefs maintained nominal independence and successfully resisted being incorporated into South Africa. The British never moved into the area in significant numbers and granted Botswana independence in 1964 and one of the Tswana chiefs was elected its first president in a peaceful transition. Since then the country has enjoyed much better political and economic stability than most of its neighbors.

The language spoken near our point is most likely Tswana, though if you're there as a tourist most folks know English as well. The locals are mostly Christian with the Bakwena having been converted way back in 1834 by none other than David Livingstone.

While there are some cattle ranches in the area, if there's anyone at our point they are going to be hunters or tourists. We are just outside the Khutse Game Reserve, one of Botswana's National Parks, and the terrain is pretty similar, friendly both to wildlife and to off-road driving, perhaps a bit sandier than in the park. There are definitely some off-road tracks visible in the satellite imagery nearby. Nearest campground with any amenities is about 20 miles away so it would be just you and the critters.



For a humorous look at this area watch the film The Gods Must Be Crazy.

So I've had this idea for awhile now, in an attempt to learn a little more about our planet, pick a random latitude/longitude coordinate and then learn what I can about that place.

So, giving it a try and I get 16.86° N, 9.6° E.

Physical geography:
That would be smack in the middle of the Sahara Desert, or more specifically the Ténéré Desert. Some surprisingly good satellite imagery for the middle of nowhere. Mostly sand dunes, some rocky areas, probably hardly any vegetation to speak of - I suspect this spot looks pretty much like your stock Sahara Desert photos. It is very hot (high today was 100) and very dry (maybe an inch of rain a year). If you're lucky you might see an Addax.

Human geography:
There is a good chance that no human has ever been to this spot. The nearest named feature is a sand dune formation called Gadoufaoua, which is Toureg for "the place where camels fear to go", so I'm thinking not very hospitable. It's about 50 miles to the nearest signs of civilizations, some isolated farms in the foothills of the Aïr Mountains and another 20 to the closest town, Tabelot. Still we like to divide up the Earth, so we're in the country of Niger, Agadez Region, Tchiozerine Department, Tabelot commune - and one of the most sparsely populated areas of Africa. Nearest real city is Agadez, about 100 miles to the west, which would also be the closest airport, and paved roads for that matter. Off-roading through the desert appears common so it might be possible to drive here as long as you don't get stuck in the sand. Travel by camel is also an option.

If anyone is to be found here they are probably of the Tuareg people, which is a culture about as different as my own as it is possible to be. The Tuareg are one of the major ethnic groups of the Sahara and traditionally controlled the trans-Sahara trade routes. One of the few caravan routes that is still run regularly lies about 50 miles north of our point (Agadez to Bilma). The Tuareg were independent until conquered by the French in the earlier 1900's and they are now split among several countries that were carved out of French West Africa. The speak their own language, which has its own alphabet, though now converted to also use Latin and Arabic alphabets as well. For the most part they are Sunni Muslims, though with quite a few pre-Islamic beliefs still being kept. Michael Palin visited the area for his travel show and you get a peek at the culture through his blog about it.

On the far side of the caravan route lies the Aïr and Ténéré National Natural Reserve which looks like it features very similar terrain though with a little more life. There could be tourist potential in the area with both the nature reserve and Agadez being UNESCO world heritage sites, but I think fighting between Tuareg rebels and the Niger government have scared them away - the State Dept. still advises against it, though it appears the last active fighting was about 10 years ago.

I think that's about all there is to say about this spot given the lack of people, or life, or water, or anything other than sand, but looking at it did send me down a rabbit hole of reading about the Tuareg.