Elisez les 7 nouvelles Merveilles du Monde !

pour moi

L’opera de Sydney
l’Empire state Builing
la Statue de la Liberté
la Sears Towers
le Golden bridge
le Brooklyn Bridge
la Q1 towers

bon je sais jsui pro americain mais bon et puis les Builing c es ma passion lool

plus ou moins que les chinois avec la grande muraille à votr avis ??? 😛

plus ou moins que les chinois avec la grande muraille à votr avis ??? 😛

Cri d’alarme pour le Taj Mahal

agrandir la photo
AGRA, Inde (Reuters) – Le mausolée du Taj Mahal, plus célèbre monument indien, est menacé de péril par la pollution et la pression démographique.

« Si les choses continuent ainsi, le Taj Mahal va décliner comme un homme malade », prédit K.S. Rana, un militant engagé dans la préservation du monument situé à quatre heures de route de New Delhi. « En raison de la pollution, il va subir un effet de corrosion, une détérioration des pierres qui le composent. »

Le mausolée est flanqué d’une rivière polluée par les rejets de déchets et est presque toujours enveloppé par le smog rejeté par les cheminées alentours et les pots d’échappement des voitures.

Il a fallu 17 années de labeur et 20.000 ouvriers pour ériger au XVIIe siècle ce monument orné de marbre blanc.

Sugam Anand, qui dirige le département d’histoire de l’université de la ville d’Agra, où s’élève le Taj, affirme que le monument souffre de « jaunisse ».

« En raison de l’accroissement de la pollution, des facteurs de pollution de l’atmosphère, il est vrai que le Taj se délabre plus rapidement. Il nous faut à présenter contrôler cela. Il nous faut prendre des mesures pour stopper ce déclin », a-t-il dit à Reuters.

Le Taj Mahal a été construit sur ordre de l’empereur Shah Jahan pour accueillir le corps de sa femme, Mumtaz Mahal.

La ville d’Agra compte aujourd’hui quatre millions d’habitants.

The Rock is a hard place
Monday, February 12, 2007 The Bulletin
Herds of tourists splash out their cash each day to crawl over the sacred site known as Uluru. Some seek adventure, others enlightenment; many leave unsatisfied, griping about rip-offs and absent Aborigines. And, sadly, a few become part of its legend. By Paul Toohey.
March 29 last year,late evening on the Uluru ring road: a 44-year-old Australian tourist in a four-wheel drive, towing a dinghy, becomes completely lost. This is understandable – sign-posting around the Rock is dismal. He flags down an oncoming vehicle to ask directions to the Rock. The car stops. A policeman gets out, leans in and tells the tourist that Australia’s pre-eminent natural icon is only 100m away. In fact the driver’s headlights are shining right at it. The officer then books the man for blowing .116, but that’s not the point.

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The point is: can anyone see Uluru for what it is?

For some, the Rock is about creation – maybe a god, maybe geology, but either way an awesome, unknowable strength. A check against conceit and reminder of our smallness, although most quickly snap out of such humble introspection and clamber straight to the top to claim a victory of sorts.

For British woman Ethel Hetherington, 52, the Rock was about Aborigines. It was a sacred site, not a thing to climb. After all, the local Anangu people do not like visitors walking up it. There’s no official version of her death on October 24, 2004, although people who live around the Rock have a pretty good idea of what happened.

Hetherington had been drinking at the Outback Pioneer Hotel & Lodge with some younger Aboriginal men who’d come in from Mutitjulu, the strictly no-access no-alcohol community hidden away on the south side of the Rock. Only guests of one of the hotels may drink at the Yulara resort. Aborigines – before authorities cottoned on to the ruse – would take out cheap dorm beds at the Outback, with no intention of sleeping there but using their key as a drinking pass.

Perhaps the men were becoming a little rowdy and were asked to leave. Perhaps Hetherington became indignant, saying the hotel was racist to the traditional people of the land. Hetherington and the men drove the 20km out to Mutitjulu. But, says one man who has talked to the Aborigines who were with her that night, Hetherington may not have been prepared for the realities of Mutitjulu. She was sitting around, half-cut, in a wrecked and badly lit township, listening to a language she didn’t understand. Maybe they hit on her; maybe they didn’t. Either way, Hetherington’s romantic notions of Aboriginal life evaporated. She chose her moment and left.

To reach her Yulara hotel, Hetherington should have taken the dirt road to the right. That would have taken her to the base of the Rock, where traffic passes regularly. Instead, she turned left and headed down the red-dirt track on what is sometimes known as the Flagon Freeway because people try to sneak alcohol along it into Mutitjulu. She walked all night in the opposite direction to everything. She never left the road, making 22km before she dropped and died.

Ethel Hetherington was, in a sense,the one who got away. People who enter the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park become a micro-managed species known as Visitor. Unless they are day-trippers, making the 440km run from Alice Springs, with just enough time to glimpse the sights before starting back, people find themselves in the grip of either the strict park rules, or of the seamless management of Voyages, the company that runs the Yulara resort.

Voyages run everything in Yulara, from the camping ground to the five-star Sails in the Desert Hotel. They run the super-market and the cafe. You have to stay with them – there is nowhere else. There is a feeling of falling into the jaws of a corporation, but they are careful to appear eco-friendly and, particularly, connected to the Anangu.

Automatically tacked onto every bill is a $2 surcharge. The money, which has been collected since 2003 and is matched up to $200,000 annually by Voyages, is for the Mutitjulu Foundation, which aims to « relieve poverty, further education and/or improve health » at the community no Visitor is allowed to see. The money is stored in trust until the planned project, a respite centre, is built. The surcharge can be removed from a bill on request but the guilt factor is persuasive: how would you feel demanding not to be charged $2 to help the suffering?

Not as bad as might be imagined. At a Senate inquiry into the state of Australia’s national parks, senators learned that 30% of the estimated 390,000 visitors each year asked that the surcharge be removed. The reaction of David Heath and Rick Pearce, from Liverpool in England, is typical. « It’s supposedly for the Aborigines, but I’ve only seen one Aborigine since I’ve been here, » says Pearce. « The whole complex states they do so much for Aborigines, but I haven’t seen any working here. I know $2 is nothing, but I was annoyed. » Still, Pearce won’t ask that it be removed.

At the Uluru hearing, Senators Andrew Bartlett and Claire Moore expressed surprise that anyone would ask that the surcharge be removed, especially for such a good cause. But they’re senators. They didn’t pay for flights, rooms, dinners or the $25 it costs adults to enter the park. They didn’t bring the kids. And unlike most others, the senators got to meet Aborigines – even if it was at the other end of a microphone.

Getting close to or understanding Aborigines is the stated desire of many who visit the Rock. But there aren’t too many opportunities. Visitors can take a tour with the Aboriginal-run Anangu Tours and their guides, traditional people who talk via translators about the few Rock sites which are not shrouded in secret lore. They are, by all accounts, excellent tours, but only a few Anangu are qualified to discuss sites, and even then men can’t talk about women’s sites and vice versa. Mutitjulu is a very small community of some 300; there aren’t enough Anangu with the proper knowledge to pass on to the hordes.

Many visitors imagine they’ll find chatty Aborigines sitting about in caves, excusing themselves as they nick off to spear passing kangaroos. It follows that some tourists expect to take photos with the equivalent of a roadside American Indian. It won’t happen. The Anangu are a gracious but prickly people, who don’t sell themselves out.

Many Anangu speak little or no English – or claim they don’t. It works well that way. If they present as bilingual, their responsibilities increase. They will be asked to attend endless meetings with government officials, rangers, resort managers and visitors. They will be forced to make decisions on behalf of others, and Aborigines are notoriously wary of speaking for other Aborigines. They like to keep low.

Visitors learn nothing of the Anangu’s creation stories for Uluru and Kata Tjuta (the Olgas). Some visitors find this frustrating, but if they really wanted, they could dig around old anthropological texts for the myths. But even then, there is no « rainbow serpent passed this way and made Uluru » legend. It is a complex matrix of stories that focuses not on Uluru or Kata Tjuta, but on creation itself. Even « Uluru » refers to just one small site on the Rock. Anangu don’t see the Rock as one thing – they were persuaded by whites to give it one, catch-all name. There was a perceived need to indigenise « Ayers Rock », and likewise « the Olgas » became Kata Tjuta.

Around the Rock are numerous sites described as « sacred ». Photography is not permitted. Visitors get no explanation why. White tour guides take cultural training courses and tend to use the secrecy to their advantage, talking in whispers and building up the mystery. From then on, all commentary is up to them. This has led to a phenomenon noticed by The Bulletin while eavesdropping on guides – not so much the craggy old coach guides, who show the required minimum respect and just get on with the task of hauling humans – but the younger guides carting smaller busloads.

They talk emotionally of Australia’s rotten record in dealing with Aborigines. The Rock has become Reconciliation Central, a marker of Australia’s shame. Our past is now sold off as a tourist feature. Does that explain the radiated joylessness of visitors to the Rock? Guides tell of unspeakable acts of viciousness and cruelty and visitors feel the pain. That’s fine, when it’s true, but some of them have got it awfully wrong.

One skinny, bearded English tour guide is overheard telling a group of impressionable young Europeans: « It was legal to shoot Aborigines in Australia up till the late ’60s. » Staggering bullshit, of course, but he doesn’t stop there. He claims Australia once « tried to sell the Rock » to America; and he gives his version of how Uluru was handed back to the traditional owners in 1985. The Aborigines, he says, kindly agreed to continue to let visitors come because « we don’t want to take away from you people what you took away from us ». It didn’t go quite like that. One of the conditions of the hand-back was that the Anangu lease the park back to National Parks and Wildlife, for the use of all people, for 99 years.

One young tour guide who will be called « Ian » (or he’ll lose his job) has a better feel for the place. He’s been doing his job for years and it’s work that brings benefits, including driving wide-eyed, bikini-topped girls around. But he’s exhausted by Rock politics. He’s disappointed with how the Rock is run; there’s no « holiday atmosphere », he says, and things seem dead and forced. He’s frustrated by the limitations created by the all-pervading « No Unauthorised Entry » signs, the lack of dunnies, and the whole feeling of being processed by Voyages and the park. Sometimes, he admits, he camps his tourists out bush, on Aboriginal land, to give them a real experience. He’d not only lose his job for that – he’d be prosecuted.

« The old Australia’s gone, » he says. « Look at all the restrictions. » So, I ask him, what’s your tour about, then? Trying to pretend it’s still here? « That’s it, exactly, trying to pretend. But if they ask the right questions, I’ll tell them. »

On rare occasions when the climb is closed for « cultural reasons », usually because an important Anangu person has died, Ian tries to use it as « a good talking point for tourists, a real-life drama ». But, he says, watch the big tour companies. They kick and squeal and demand it be reopened. All their talk about sacredness suddenly disappears because, says Ian, the main reason people come to Uluru is to make the climb.

He is always asked why there are so many photo bans. « To people who want to know why a site’s sacred, there are no answers. I dare say that’s an Aboriginal prerogative. We’ve poisoned and shot them through history, so we can’t really ask too much of them. If you’re worried about sacred sites, don’t step off the plane.

« People are interested in Aborigines – that’s a definite. The most common question they ask at the Cultural Centre [a joint-run Anangu Parks learning and art-purchase point near the Rock] is: ‘Where are all the Aborigines?’ Then they ask why they smell, why they bash each other. Their whole perception of Aborigines is what they see in Todd Mall, Alice Springs, before they come out here. »

A young English visitor with ochre face-paint finds Ian and me talking. « Is it true that up till 1967, Aborigines were a protected species of wildlife? » she asks. Not quite, although some early legislation spoke of « natives » and « wildlife » in the same breath. She’s just come down from Thailand, where she went up into the hills and saw indigenous tribes dancing for tourists. She found it demeaning for all involved. But she’s read the brochures and fully expects to see painted, naked people gnawing on marsupial bones. And if she spent long enough in Central Australia, she would see that. But she’s a passer-through, and those bones are chicken.

« How about, » Ian tells her, « if I took you to the home of a traditional owner? And I showed you a man sitting in a lounge chair watching the cricket? What would you think? » She does not know what to say. « The truth is you’d be disappointed, wouldn’t you? » She nods, then says: « I don’t understand this place. » I don’t blame her.

Ian tells visitors that the Rock is the most politically sensitive place in Australia. He’s wrong. Land title issues have been resolved and the park is jointly managed between Anangu and National Parks. But it is the most politically raw place in Australia. We ask, but do not prevent, people from stomping over the biggest sacred site in the world. And on one side of the Rock, visitors live in comfort. On the other, Anangu live in squalor.

I notice over several days that visitors, particularly Australians, are worried about giving their names when discussing what the Rock means to them. They know they are supposed to respect Aborigines, and they – sort of – do. But they think they’ll be pinged as racists for speaking. And they want to know what the hell these sacred sites are about.

« John » and « Mary » have different motivation for name concealment. John – shirtless, tattooed, muscled – reeks of the Special Air Services and hidden battles. He confirms his military past. He and Mary are not happy with the camp ground – no soap in the bathrooms, broken-down washing machine, nowhere much for the kids to play – but they can live with that.

They have read the Anangu warnings: signs that say, « Please don’t climb » and how « Too many people die here ». People topple off the Rock at regular intervals. They get up high, where the wind blows hard, lose confidence and panic, or do what they’ve always dreamed of doing then cark it in their hotel rooms afterwards. The climb, by all accounts, is not easy.

« Yes, we climbed the Rock, » says John. « Awesome. But the waves of Asians – I’m not racist – is almost overwhelming. The wind is the scary bit. » John found it strange that he was permitted to climb and yet there was not one ranger on duty at the starting point advising of the risks.

I got up at sunrise to watch the human herd. Indeed, there was no ranger or signs warning of the degree of difficulty. Nothing to warn children or the elderly to reconsider. I watched people set off, then freeze with fear after only 100m to 200m, sit down, then crawl on their hands and bums back down to the base.

« I’ve never been to a national park where you’re doing something so dangerous and there’s no one there [to offer safety advice], » says John. Such a comment from an SAS-type is saying something. As he came back down, nervous people on the way up were asking him if the climb was going to get harder. He said it was.

When I ask if he is interested in the Aboriginal connection around here, John says he doesn’t believe it exists. « They put so much emphasis on Aboriginal this and that, but there is no Aboriginal face. If they didn’t want us to climb, they’d shut it. If you saw the thousands of people streaming up yesterday morning, at $25 a head … we all know what they’re doing with the money. »

John thinks they’re drinking it. But in fact Anangu get only one quarter of the gate takings, shared between three communities. The remainder goes to park management. What do the Aborigines do with their cut? Who really cares? They cannot enjoy the Rock as they did for thousands of years. The terms of the hand-back meant they had no choice but to allow visitors in – but even so, the Anangu have been generous.

The real demand that they share the Rock with others comes not from governments or tourists but their own belief system. Think of it this way: if their creation stories are the equivalent of, say, the Big Bang Theory, then the Rock is much bigger than the Anangu as a people. They cannot « own » the Rock, just as they cannot own whatever powerful forces shaped it; they can only have primary responsibility to care for it.

« I don’t like the restrictions, » grumbles Gatean Saint-Gerlais, a visitor from Quebec and lung-transplant survivor who is fulfilling a 30-year dream. He and his wife, Dominique, sold everything to come to Australia. The Rock is at the heart of their pilgrimage. « If they don’t want photos, why do they open it? We respect it, we won’t write on it, saying, ‘Gatean & Dominique 2007’. I am taking photos, even if they think I’m rude. »

It is our wartime enemies, the Germans and Japanese, who of all foreigners love the Rock most. We know disarmament made them rich: they gave up making weapons for cars and TVs and now they have money and mobility, the strange spoils of wars they lost. You can ask them till you’re black and blue in the face: they cannot succinctly explain the attraction. And that, in itself, is part of the wonder.

It is that it’s not the Sydney Opera House or the Eiffel Tower. It is not the product of human ambition. It can’t be owned, sold or relocated. And it can’t – you’d like to hope – be destroyed.

Just as they do at Kakadu, Uluru-Kata Tjuta treats visitors like a stereotype of 40 years ago: holiday-making families of vandals setting off in the station wagon to see the bush. They think we’re going to chuck litter and paint our names on boulders, and torture or feed tiny mammals. They don’t realise we’ve changed. We’ve learned to look and not destroy. Although it’s hard to say whether it’s the park rules or the Rock itself that make adults feel like children.

Germans and Dutch love that muted khaki « bush » clothing, with multiple pockets, net underarms and camera-dangling points. But the bloke in the dark green work shirt is Australian. He’s wearing King Gee. Matthew Steven and his partner Sue Sparkes are from Maryborough, Queensland. We stop to talk in light rain along the trail at the base of the Rock.

« I’m really interested in the sacred site stuff, » Steven says, « but I want to know what is there. What makes it so important? We could cop it sweet if they gave some overview and held back their secrets, but there’s nothing. We’ve got tribes where we live and they give out a lot of information and we’ve got a pretty good understanding of what they’re about. » He wishes they’d say a bit more here.

Steven also points out that there is nowhere the curious visitor can find a scientific explanation for the Rock’s creation (« born out of subterranean ructions 70 million years ago » etc etc). It’s as if to discuss geology would offend the mythology. Still, taking another look at it before setting off for Kings Canyon, Steven says his complaints are overridden by the splendour of it all. « It really is a ripper Rock, » he says. Steven struck me as just about the ideally evolved ordinary white Australian: tolerant yet questioning; cynical but understanding. And then, the weirdest, saddest thing.

Two days later, there’s news from Territory police of a double–fatality road smash on the Luritja Road, which runs to Kings Canyon, east of the Rock. Three Koreans in a tiny Hyundai Getz hire car put two wheels in the dirt on a bend, lost control and slammed headfirst into a Hi-Ace camper. Two days later, the name of one of the dead is released. He is Matthew John Steven, 45, of Maryborough, Queensland.

The news leaves me bereft, although enough said lest it be thought I am co-opting grief. That is for Matthew’s partner, Sue, who is lying in Alice Springs hospital. A friend to whom I tell this story says: « That’s the power of the Rock. So many who see it die. » I don’t like to think that way. The idea of the Rock selecting death for some who visit is way too out there. Azaria Chamberlain was taken by a dingo, not a Rock. And I explain Steven’s death the same way as the police: lousy driving by one of the Koreans.

Still, as Ethel Hetherington showed, you don’t want to get sucked into the Rock. Let the Anangu see it their way, let us see it ours.

The Japanese tourist Hasashi Ito, from Tokyo’s outskirts, has come for four days and so far stayed seven. He hasn’t met Aborigines; hasn’t climbed the Rock. He’s doing nothing but sitting by Uluru, with his girlfriend, unable to leave, basking in its inscrutable glow. « I feel it. It’s one of the most powerful places in the world. » Which is just another way of saying what Matthew Steven said – « It really is a ripper Rock. »