Features

  Gulf of Thailand / AFP Piercing the water’s surface with its almond-shaped mouth, a giant Bryde’s whale opens wide for one, two, three seconds, gulping in anchovies as a boatload of awed tourist look on in the Gulf of Thailand. It’s a rare glimpse of marine life in its natural habitat, in a kingdom overrun with mass tourist attractions ...

  Concarneau / AFP They came all the way from Japan to France with a crazy idea: establishing a factory for authentic dried bonito flakes, a key ingredient in Japanese cuisine that is very rare in Europe. Dried bonito fish, also known as katsuobushi, has a distinct umami flavour and is the main ingredient in dashi, a traditional stock which ...

  Cairo / AFP In an endless cacophony of car horns, Mostafa Ekram each day confronts the frenzy of Cairo’s traffic jams: pedestrians darting out into the street, swerving tuk-tuks and even donkey carts. At the wheel of his SUV, in the heart of Egypt’s bustling capital, he doesn’t bat an eyelid as he narrowly dodges a black tuk-tuk, a ...

  Mumbai / AFP India’s only surviving opera house has been restored to its colonial-era glory, reopening to the public more than two decades after it closed in disrepair. Once the place to be seen for Mumbai’s great and good it was forced to close in the 1990s after years of financial struggles. But a painstaking seven-year project has transformed ...

  Cairo / AFP In an endless cacophony of car horns, Mostafa Ekram each day confronts the frenzy of Cairo’s traffic jams: pedestrians darting out into the street, swerving tuk-tuks and even donkey carts. At the wheel of his SUV, in the heart of Egypt’s bustling capital, he doesn’t bat an eyelid as he narrowly dodges a black tuk-tuk, a ...

  Fez, Morocco / AFP An Iranian archaeologist has spent years in an almost single-handed quest across the country’s hills and desert plains to uncover ancient rock art that could be among the oldest in the world. Now he hopes that renewed ties with the West after years of international isolation could help decipher its mysteries. Despite its rough beauty, ...

  Berlin / AFP The dance company that legendary German choreographer Pina Bausch, who died in 2009, built into one of the world’s most acclaimed is doing its utmost to foster her moving legacy. Beloved of fellow artists and seen as a visionary by her peers in the dance world, Bausch mixed dance and theatre to produce a tumult of ...

  Kinshasa / AFP “Getting a letter in the post is a first for me, and what’s more at home!” says Odette Tshibambe, a student in her thirties in Kinshasa. Her excitement is understandable. After 30 years of turmoil for the postal service in the Democratic Republic of Congo, letter carriers clad in smart canary yellow shirts have finally returned ...

  Budapest / AFP Ninety years after his death, the secrets of the world’s greatest escape artist, Harry Houdini, have been unlocked in a recently opened Hungarian museum devoted to the Budapest-born illusionist. Set high in the capital’s lofty Castle district, the House of Houdini lifts the veil on the box of tricks used by the famous magician, who lived ...

  Lampung / AFP It was the middle of the night when the villagers sounded the alarm: a huge Sumatran elephant was raiding their rice fields, and they needed urgent help to drive it back to the forest. Dodot — a veteran Indonesian elephant keeper trained to handle such emergencies — rushed to the scene, fearing villagers would take matters ...