South of the Cordillera Real, the landscape changes to a huge tilted block with steep escarpments, and a deeply eroded 300km slope to the east. The almost treeless highland area here is called the Puna. In the fertile valleys, agriculture is important, with cereals, alfalfa and fruit crops. Averaging 15°C, the climate is like permanent [...]

Described by a French explorer as a ‘microcosm of our planet’, Bolivia has a wonderful diversity of geographical features, wildlife and flora, mineral deposits and tropical produce, but nowadays it rather lacks in prosperity.
Unlike most South American countries, Bolivia has no sea coast. It is about the combined size of France and Spain and is [...]

In 1968, while America was bogged down in South-east Asia, the Soviet Union faced another challenge to its rule in Eastern Europe. The new Communist party leader in Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubcek, brought in a series of political and economic reforms recognized as the ‘Prague Spring’. Censorship was abolished, police powers were curtailed and workers had [...]

There was further friction in 1961, when the East German government took steps to stop its citizens fleeing towards the West via East Berlin. On 13 August, the Berlin Wall was put up, cutting the city in half. At first, it consisted mainly of barbed wire. In the months and years to follow, it was [...]

As peace talks got underway in Korea, some dramatic news burst on the world from Moscow. On 5 March 1953, following nearly 30 years as dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin died. For a although, power was shared in between two veteran Communist party officials – Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev. But in February [...]

With the end of World War II, the fate of the world rested in the hands of the two so-called superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union. They had fought together against Hitler but, as their friendship turned to hostility, the stage was set for a new conflict.
In 1945, the Allied powers met [...]

Cook was pretty successful at keeping his own men free from diseases, and at the end of his second voyage the Royal Society gave him their highest award, the Copley medal, for his work for seamen’s health. Life at sea in the 18th century was tough and unbelievably unhealthy. On a long voyage, the captain [...]

But also travelling on Endeavour had been a keen gentleman botanist, Joseph Banks, who later became President of the Royal Society; a well-known Swedish botanist, Carl Solander, a landscape artist known as Alexander Buchan, and an artist, Sydney Parkinson, who was to record all the flora and fauna they encountered on the voyage. Between them, [...]

Cook’s fame, nevertheless, rests on the achievements of his last 10 years, the years of Pacific exploration. When he died, the map of the globe, which had shown such extraordinary gaps prior to, was in general outline as we know it today. Cook had charted, with phenomenal accuracy and detail, a massive number of islands [...]

On 24 January 1769 the Endeavour rounded Cape Horn and its captain, James Cook, entered the Pacific for the first time. His explorations of that ocean were to change life for the peoples of the Pacific forever.
Plenty of Europeans had been towards the Pacific before, of course. After the Portuguese circumnavigation led by Magellan in [...]