Pomona and Book Anniversary

Hello subscribers!

First the book anniversary: today is the first anniversary of the launch of my book Atlas of Dark Destinations, which last year I marked with a much more optimistic post. The new post I uploaded today is less enthusiastic, in light of the disappointing sales figures. I still haven’t earned anything from it on top of the advance I was given by the publishers, as explained in this new Blog post.

But Christmas is approaching. Maybe some of you would consider buying copies of the book as presents for suitable travel-inclined recipients? Or if you don’t yet have it, maybe get a copy for yourself. As a reminder, this is what the book looks like:

Incidentally, the other day I received – again! – a recommendation email from Amazon, which is yet further proof of how stupid algorithm-controlled “AI” (‘absent intelligence’) is, which can’t even detect the identity of the name of the recipient and the book’s author:

The “activity” referred to in the email, by the way, must be from me checking from time to time whether there have been any more ratings or reviews – but it’s been a while since any new ones were added. If any of you have the book, like it but haven’t yet posted a glowing review of it on Amazon, maybe you could still consider doing so?

But so much for the book.
  

Last week I also uploaded another new DT Blog post about a single dark destination. As promised it’s another atmospheric ghost town in Namibia, namely Pomona, a much more desolate and far less visited place compared with the better known Kolmanskop, which had featured in the Blog post before this new one.

The new post is again primarily a photo essay (for more background info see the website chapter about Pomona, which is also out now) and features several intriguing images. And amongst those shots of the crumbling structures and desert sand encroaching on them is also a special find made at Pomona – that oryx skull pictured in the featured photo at the top of this Newsletter. It’s one of my absolute favourite photos I took in Namibia.

Oh, and in case you don’t know what a living oryx looks like – they’re the most majestic-looking ones of all the antelope species – here’s a photo of one close up:

I took this photo at the Bagatelle Game Ranch, where you can get close to several animal species. Note that they cut the pointy ends of the horns off, presumably out of safety concerns, so no tourists could get doubly impaled by those horns. Oryx, aka ‘gemsbok’, are also the animals I saw the most frequently in Namibia. As my guidebook said, they’re the “quintessential desert antelope”. And as my guide on the Pomona tour said, they only come in two forms: “top fit or dead”; indeed, you never see a weak or skinny one.

And as I say in the Pomona Blog post, I have yet more in that ghost-town category up my sleeve that will become the next Blog post …
  

But so much for this time.

All the best,

Peter