The Piedra de la Fertilidad (Stone of Fertility) is a rock shaped like a penis which unsurprisingly is something of a fertility symbol for the Raramuri people of the Copper Canyon region. They believe that a man who touches it will become more virile while a woman doing the same will become pregnant.
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Jane Austen is one of my very favourite authors and I couldn’t agree more with her remark that, 'If adventures do not befall a lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad'.
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Imagine an Olympic Games Opening Ceremony; full of spectacle and colour, involving tens of thousands of performers. Add a good dollop of political propaganda and unashamed messaging. Throw in hundreds of well-drilled cute children, all eager to please. Imagine too that this ceremony takes place every single night for several months. Now you have just a small idea of the scale of the North Korean phenomenon known colloquially as the Mass Games.
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It isn’t so often that, while out on a city walk with a guide, you are asked if you are easily offended. But that was the question posed by Wilson, who gave us an excellent tour in Cuenca, Ecuador.
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Despite the invasion of modern living in many parts of their country, the Maasai cling proudly to their traditional way of life. They never cultivate land (they consider it demeaning) but instead graze cattle, which hold a god-like status in their culture. The cows provide almost everything they need to live: meat, skin, milk, dung for the walls and floor of their huts, and warm blood extracted from the neck of a live cow and mixed with milk as an iron rich food.
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After the deforestation of Rapa Nui, and the destruction of the moai, probably as a result in part at least of war between the tribes, the people needed to believe in something; if their ancestors could no longer protect them, who would? The answer was, one of their own.
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‘We could hardly conceive how these islanders, wholly unacquainted with any mechanical power, could raise such stupendous figures’
