Ruins of Los Angeles:
The Old Griffith Park Zoo

Not far from West Hollywood, in one back corner of Griffith Park, are the bizarre ruins of the old Los Angeles Zoo (1912-1965), where animal-scale catacombs covered in graffiti and rusted cage bars with vines creeping between any narrow gap give way to picnic tables and family memories. GO >>

Ruins of Los Angeles:
Sunken City of Graffiti, Wildflowers & Concrete

If you head north along the Los Angeles coastline, you can find a once posh neighborhood that slid into the sea back in the 1930s… After the cranes, and at the end of Fermin Park, is a tall fenced gate and barricade. Past the fence, the road continues to an abrupt end, and well below that is the so-called sunken city of Los Angeles. GO >>

Golden Hour Thoughts in Lhagong, Tibet

I couldn’t decide which idea held more magic for me: that this was a giant fortification full of monks and nuns who, not fearing death, were more than a match for any earthly army or floodtide of settlers or an immense palace full of exquisitely beautiful people of belief, happily lashing their souls to some great transcendent hum. GO >>

Foolishness and Generosity in Gorkhi Terelj, Mongolia

The massive scale of grass floodplains and thin riverine forests here in northeastern Mongolia make them more suited to horseback riding than to walking, but I was a happy speck moving slowly through dung-maculated valleys full of the bleached skulls, spines and other stray bone bits of departed animals… I walked for hours, sometimes joined by wary-then-playful dogs, passing alongside grazing horses, cattle, and several vomits of dandelion-munching yak. GO >>

All photos copyright 2012 (c) Brian Awehali