One of the best fishing painters of this planet

Well, this is at least my humble opinion. I believe that my friend Setsuo Hamanaka is a hell of a good painter and I LOVE his stuff. Not only he draws beautifully, but he also paints fish that are not easy to find elsewhere and that any lover of Popping and Jigging game chase the most.

GTs are one of his favourite subject. One of his original oil on canvas paint is hanging on the wall of my house entrance hall, and it welcomes me every time I step in. Is a priceless treasure I truly care for.

Setsuo, is also a good fisherman and he helped me few times getting in contact with some of the most influential Japanese fishermen, from whom I have learnt a lot. Last time we met was in Panama, with Kitamura-san, for a sort of a jigging symposium.

Please, do yourself a favour and visit his web page and galleries: you will see his great gallery with fish, landscapes, seascapes and animals. He sells his prints worldwide and if you love game fish as I do, you might want one of those hanging from the wall too.

http://s-ham.com/index-english.html

Dubai

Yep, been there, me too. In our way to the Maldives we had to do a stop over in Dubai and together with some friends we decided it could be fun to stop in Dubai for one day, just to see it.

Arrived to Dubai darn late at night and drove to the hotel in a fancy cab. Morning wake up around 9 and after a laaaarge breakfast we decided to hire a driver to show us around. This guy, a young man from Afghanistan, decided he wanted to show us the "old" part of the city, which eventually turned into a big mistake for a couple of reasons. For what we have seen there's not a real old part, and on top of this, since the more interesting part is a market area, being a Friday everything was closed. So much for the historic land.

The things turned out to be a tad better when we headed for the modern, galactic development of the city. The Buri Al Arab hotel, the incredible estates around Palm Island, the Buri Dubai Tower and so on. Everything showed a great deal of futuristic architecture, and everything seemed to be over the top, built to amaze the poor tourist who cannot believe his eyes.

You might like it or you might not. Personally I do like few things and don't like the majority of the others. Is a bit tacky for my taste, and a sort of Disney world for the modern traveller or the real estate buyer looking for the coolest thing around, if cool that is. Said that, I left the city with mixed feelings, not sure whether I like it or hate it, and kind of puzzled as well. We are living in a difficult economical moment and Dubai is investing on its development a huge deal of money. Is there people around able to pay for such luxury and modernism ? There's thousands of apartments, houses and villas to let or for sale, if they don't go away for how long the oil will be able to pay the bills ?

I loved Emirates Airlines though. Great service, lot of room for your legs even in tourist class and great looking flight assistance. None of them was Arab, mostly Asian and Europeans, I also met a girl from La Garrucha, a small village near Almeria where I sometimes go fishing. Not many women around in the city as well, few tourists and few locals with the burka

One of my friends said that Dubai was betting in a different kind of tourism development, for once the oil is gone. Looks like a tough assignment to me, but I ain't no sheik...

Rotten Paradise ?

I have just come back from one fishing trip at the Maldives and once again, since I started visiting the small inhabited islands to take photos, I have been disgusted by what I have seen. Every one of those little gems is covered with litter and garbage of all kinds. Cans, bottles, shoes, ropes, nets, chairs, plastic, buckets you name it. Most of this stuff obviously comes from the sea, a place that many people still consider as a gigantic trash bin, but more often that not you see small amounts of this rubbish been dropped there by unconsidered people, who probably don't know any better.

Talking with a Maldivian guys, and one who actually gets 100% of his income from tourism, he said that nobody lives in those islands. The way he was saying it meant that nobody takes care about them or even cares for that matter, which would be more appropriate thing to do. The government does nothing to keep their treasures clean and tidy and to educate or control the people, and the Maldives are slowly turning into a very pretty garbage bin.

Not to forget the amount of litter you see in the current near the islands, floating close to the coast together with patches of oil, ropes, and debris of all kind.

I have been travelling to the Maldives since 2004 and things, so far, have only got worst. The islands where the resorts are located are well kept, but this unfortunately doesn't happen in the islands where the locals stay, and Male is the living example for this, and those where nobody lives, which supposedly are inhabited by the local birds and visited by the tourists who sail around the Maldives with a mother vessel, and lands to those patches of sand and palms, to breath the purest essence of this, supposed-to-be, paradise in the Indian ocean.

Keeping the islands clean would be a source of income for some people and finding the better way to treat the litter is a major problem that the Maldives have to face in the nearest future. Not an easy task, yet not an impossible one.