Make sure bad luck isn't lingering in your future by celebrating the Japanese Setsubun Festival. Held on the first day of the spring season, it was once thought to be a New Year's Eve of sorts which no one wanted to start off on the wrong foot. Also called the "Mame maki", locals began to throw beans to drive away evil spirits or "Oni" thought to abound during a change in season. Despite being one of the lesser-known Japanese Festivals, people still celebrate it at shrines and at home as part of centuries of tradition. Every year during the Setsubun Festival, the head of the family "toshiotoko" dresses up like an evil spirit and positions himself on the front door of a house. Thereafter, the ...
It's summertime in the Mongolian steppe, and at such a northern latitude, we must wake early to beat the sunrise. Even in mid-July, the predawn air is crisp and cool in Mongolia's Hustai National Park, home of the last surviving wild ancestor to the domestic horse. We begin emerging from out traditional Mongolian gers, bleary eyed with cups of steaming milk tea in hand. As the horizon begins to brighten, we caravan out of camp on a jeep safari to spot the world's last wild horses. The takhi horse, native to the rolling green steppe of central Mongolia, went extinct in the wild in the 1960s. In 1992, the Mongolian Association for Conservation of Nature and the Environment and the Foundation Reserves for the Przewalski ...
