Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Beautiful Travel Destinations

Some in my list to visit.. Very beautiful and must see places taken extract from Buzzfeed the link below

Beautiful Travel Destinations of 2014


Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed

1. The resiliently vibrant villages of Italy’s Cinque Terre.

The resiliently vibrant villages of Italy's Cinque Terre.
 
After flash floods ravaged the area a few years ago, the Cinque Terre is almost entirely back to normal as of 2014. Vernazza’s walking trails officially reopened in April — joining the backdrop of colorful cliffs, terraced vineyards, and mouthwatering coastal cuisine.

2. The Chemins des Vignes — a four-mile hike through vineyards and villages in Martigny, Switzerland.

The Chemins des Vignes — a four-mile hike through vineyards and villages in Martigny, Switzerland.
 
There are several ways to explore the area — including by bike, by scenic train, or by foot. Opt for the latter and you’ll wind through rows of grapes, quaint villages, and past La Batiaz, a medieval castle.

3. The multicolored lakes atop Kelimutu on Flores Island, Indonesia.

The multicolored lakes atop Kelimutu on Flores Island, Indonesia.
 
The three crater lakes surrounding Indonesia’s Kelimutu volcano actually change color: from turquoise or green, to black or red. It’s believed the shifting hues are due to chemical reactions in the water, but local legend says they reflect the moods of ancestors that have passed on.

4. The age-old salt mines in Maras, Peru.

The age-old salt mines in Maras, Peru.
The mines trace back to pre-Inca times, and local artisans still refine salt with those same methods — while tourists can walk along the edges of the salt pools and observe.

5. The Metéora monasteries perched high in Thessaly, Greece.

The Metéora monasteries perched high in Thessaly, Greece.
 
Of the nearly two dozen Greek Orthodox monasteries that were built atop the rocks starting in the 14th century, only six remain. Give yourself at least two days to tour them all — climbing up staircases and across bridges — or visit the Great Meteoron Monastery, the tallest and oldest.

6. The stargazer’s paradise of Uluru in central Australia.

The stargazer's paradise of Uluru in central Australia.
Johan Lolos / facebook.com
Johan Lolos / facebook.com
The Australian Outback is often ranked as one of the best places to take in the night sky. There’s next to no light pollution — meaning that the vast, dark skies under Ayers Rock serve as an ideal canvas for incredibly bright constellations.

7. The beachfront views that surround Thailand’s Koh Poda Island.

 
Koh Poda — the largest of a group of four islands that you can tour in the same day — sits on beautifully clear waters. To get there, visitors can take a longtail boat from Tonsai Bay in Thailand’s Krabi province.

8. The magical landscapes (and whiskey!) of Scotland’s Isle of Skye.

The magical landscapes (and whiskey!) of Scotland's Isle of Skye.
 
Scotland’s largest island has always been a popular spot for tourists, with its misty mountains, jagged sea cliffs, and Talisker Distillery. But in 2014, daily seaplane tours returned for the first time in two decades, making it even easier to explore from above.

9. The blue-hued mountain village of Chefchaouen, Morocco.

The blue-hued mountain village of Chefchaouen, Morocco.
 
From the bright, vibrant spices lining the streets (and the plates!), to the soft blue palette that’s woven throughout Chefchaouen’s buildings and main pathways, it’s one of Morocco’s most picturesque towns.

10. The awe-inspiring rock formations at Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah.

The awe-inspiring rock formations at Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah.
Bryce Canyon is best known for abundant hoodoos: tall, stunning spires of rock that jut out from the landscape and are different colors at different heights. This Utah park has more of them than anywhere else in the world.

11. The volcano-studded terrain of Camiguin, Philippines.

The volcano-studded terrain of Camiguin, Philippines.
 
This small province has more volcanos per square kilometer — seven, to be exact — than any other island in the world. Also on hand? Sandy beaches, snorkeling, hot and cold springs, and a sunken cemetery.

12. The multicultural mecca of Cape Town, South Africa.

The multicultural mecca of Cape Town, South Africa.
Flickr: martie1swart / via Gogobot
This was a huge year for Cape Town on several fronts — it took top honors on the New York Times list of Places to Go, and it was also named the 2014 World Design Capital.

13. The dramatic topography of Cappadocia, Turkey.

The dramatic topography of Cappadocia, Turkey.
 
In Cappadocia, you can descend down into an underground city like Kaymakli, spend the night in a man-made cave, or tower above in a hot air balloon over the hoodoo rock spires that dot the landscape.

14. The calm blue-green waters of Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay.

The calm blue-green waters of Vietnam's Ha Long Bay.
With its dramatic limestones that jut out from the water, Ha Long Bay has always been a popular spot to explore by boat. But this past year saw the launch of aerial tours, giving visitors a new opportunity to soar above the seascape.

15. The snowcapped winter vistas at Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada.

The snowcapped winter vistas at Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada.
 
As one of the highest-elevation lakes in the U.S., Lake Tahoe is gorgeous year-round. But with 125 inches of snow annually and more than a dozen top ski resorts, winter is arguably where it really shines. You’ll find everything from snowshoe trails to dog sledding toursto horse-drawn sleigh rides.

16. The picture-perfect waterfalls in Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia.

The picture-perfect waterfalls in Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia.
 
More than 1 million tourists visit Croatia’s largest national park each year, flocking to its dramatic waterfalls and 16 lakes.

17. The sweeping fields of baby blue eyes at Hitachi Seaside Park in Japan.

The sweeping fields of baby blue eyes at Hitachi Seaside Park in Japan.
 
Of the millions of flowers that bloom every year at the park, the baby blue eyes steal the show in the spring. Cycling and walking paths also wind through huge fields of tulips and daffodils, and the seasonal color palettes make for a beautiful (and ever-changing!) backdrop.

How Movies Embraced Hinduism

Hinduism in different Hollywood movies Saved from the following link from The Guardian

How Movies Embraced Hinduism


From Interstellar to Batman and Star Wars the venerable religion has been the driving philosophy behind many hit movies. Why?




Alec Guinness as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars … is he really a Hindu?
 Alec Guinness as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars … is he really a Hindu?

Interstellar’s box office total is $622,932,412 and counting. It is the eighth highest-grossing film of the year and has spawned an endless raft of thinkpieces testing the validity of its science and applauding the innovation of its philosophy. But it is not so new. The idea that propels the plot – there is a universal super-consciousness that transcends time and space, and in which all human life is connected – has been around for about 3,000 years. It is Vedic.
When the film’s astronaut hero (Matthew McConaughey), declares that the mysterious and all-knowing “they” who created a wormhole near Saturn through which he travels to save mankind – dissolving his sense of material reality in the process – are in fact “us”, he is simply repeating the central notion of the Upanishads, India’s oldest philosophical texts. These hold that individual human minds are merely brief reflections within a cosmic one.
McConaughey’s character doesn’t just talk the talk. He walks the walk. So, the multidimensional tesseract – that endlessly reflective prism he finds himself in as he comes to this realisation, and in which he views life from every perspective – is the film’s expression of Indra’s net, the Hindu metaphor which depicts the universe as an eternal web of existence spun by the king of the gods, each of its intersections adorned with an infinitely sided jewel, every one continually reflecting the others.




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Of course, Hollywood’s eager embrace of Buddhism, yoga and other esoteric Indian systems is not new. David Lynch is an outspoken exponent of transcendental meditation, Richard Gere follows the Dalai Lama and Julia Robertsaffirmed her Hinduism in the wake of Eat, Pray, Love – a movie that tells the tale of a modern American woman’s journey towards peace through Indian spiritual practises that grossed over $200m (£128.6m). Hinduism can get the tills ringing even when it urges parsimony.
Nolan has long been a devout subscriber to the cause. A director famed for being able to get a multimillion dollar project off the ground with only his own name as collateral, he clearly knows the value of pre-existing brands such as Hinduism. His breakthrough hit, Memento, had Guy Pearce as an amnesiac whose unreliable consciousness is the faulty lens through which we see the story of a murder, told both in chronological and reverse order. This notion of distrusting individual reality and looking beyond it for truth was extended in Nolan’s Inception, in which Leonardo DiCaprio leads a team of “psychonauts” on a heist deep within the recesses of a billionaire’s mind – a spiralling adventure of dreams within dreams in which the laws of nature increasingly bend and warp – before finding its purest expression in Interstellar.


Interstellar … spiritual journey?

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 Interstellar … spiritual journey? Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar/Legendary Pictures

“Look at the first Matrix movie,” says producer Peter Rader. “It’s a yogic movie. It says that this world is an illusion. It’s about maya – that if we can cut through the illusions and connect with something larger we can do all sorts of things. Neo achieves the abilities of the advanced yogis [Paramahansa] Yogananda described, who can defy the laws of normal reality.”
Rader’s latest movie, a documentary about Yogananda, who was among the first gurus to bring Indian mysticism to North America in the 1920s, has been a sleeper hit in the US. The film documents how influential Hindu philosophy is in American culture, with contributions from the likes of the yoga-devoted hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. “There’s a big pent-up demand,” thinks Rader. “There are a lot of closet spiritualists who are meditating, doing yoga, reading books and thinking about a bigger reality. And now they can come out and say, ‘Yes, I’m into this.’ Steve Jobs read Yogananda’s book once a year. He bequeathed a copy of it to everyone who attended his memorial. It helped inspire him to develop products like the iPad.”
But before Nolan, before the Matrix, before, even, the iPad, there was Star Wars. It was the film, with its cosmic scale and theme of a transcendental “force” that confers superhuman powers on those who can align with it, which opened up mainstream American culture to Indian esotericism more than anything else. George Lucas was influenced by the mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose work A Hero With a Thousand Faces traced the narrative arc common to all mythic heroes that Luke Skywalker would embark upon. Campbell himself lived by his Upanishadic mantra “follow your bliss”, which he derived from the Sanskrit termsat-chit-ananda.


The Matrix.

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 Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. Photograph: Warner Bros/Sportsphoto/Allstar

“The word sat means being,” said Campbell. “Chit means consciousness. Anandameans bliss or rapture. I thought, ‘I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not. I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not, but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being’.” His mantra was the paradigm for Skywalker’s own realisation of the force, the sense of peace, purpose and power gained once he allowed himself to accept and unify with it. “If you follow your bliss,” thought Campbell, “you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”
As his mastery of the force neared its peak, Skywalker comes perilously close to taking Vader’s sinister path. With this, Star Wars established the principle in Hollywood of superheroes having to overcome an inner darkness while battling an external enemy, and finding an enlightenment in the process. Nolan’s trilogy of Batman movies – in which a tortured protagonist struggles as much not to become his nemesis as to defeat it – have introduced a whole new generation to the Indian god-myths and the teachings of yoga that emphasise the priority of one’s internal journey while facing the challenges of the outside world. Next year, even younger recruits to the cause will feel the force of the new JJ Abrams’ Star Wars movie.




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“Spirituality is the open-secret,” says Rader. “A lot of people know that if we quieten down we can tap into a deeper power. And the movies that tap into that, like Star Wars and Interstellar, are hugely popular. Audiences know what the film is telling them, they have a sense that this story is working on a deeper level. It’s telling them that there’s more to life than just the ordinary. That there’s something much bigger, and they’re a part of it.”
A philosophy to which many are keen to subscribe is what makes religions successful. Movies, too.
 Star Wars: The Force Awakens is released on 18 December 2015.
 Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser trailer – eight things we learned.