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MERIAN Thailand

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I recently finished two assignments for MERIAN magazine, one of Germany’s best known travel publications.  I visited the Beluga School for Life in Khaolak to look at the effects of Tsunami, 5 years on and trekked through the hill of north Thailand to meet some of the country’s ethnic minorities. MERIAN Thailand is out in Germany, Austria and Switzerland now. (Feb. 2010 Issue)

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In 2007, my photo book, Palace Hotels of Rajasthan, was published by Reise Know How Verlag in Germany. Tom Vater wrote the text. The book covers a wide range of heritage hotels with royal connections around Rajasthan, from modest but attractive mansions to gigantic palaces, from pure, sumptuous Raj nostalgia to bottomless kitsch.

The book came about after two trips around Rajasthan, in 2005 and 2006, for a series of magazine stories on the hotel businesses of India’s splendidly eccentric maharajas.

This month’s Traversing the Orient Magazine looks back at some of the most interesting properties we stayed at.

I shot Paul Theroux

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The Calcutta connection.

During a recent Q&A session at Kinokuniya, a Bangkok Bookshop, best selling travel writer Paul Theroux asked his audience, whether anyone had been to Calcutta. Only myself and my husband, Tom, raised their hands.

Mr. Theroux, clearly as enthralled by Calcutta as a writer as I am as a photographer, called the city “an antique” and a “living museum”.

Hence Mr. Theroux had no problem recognizing me when I lined up to have one of his books signed by him. He asked me whether I was a travel writer.  I had to disappoint him and tell him I was in fact a travel photographer, but that my husband Tom here next to me was a fellow travel writer.

Mr. Theroux got up and greeted Tom and then graciously posed for a portrait.

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Three Pagodas Pass

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At the Three Pagodas Pass, in the wild and beautiful far west of Thailand, the orchid and furniture trade is booming, shoot-outs between Burmese rebels and Thai soldiers are rare and the area remains one of those beauty spots that have not yet succumbed to mass tourism.

View Aroon Thaewchatturat’s feature story on Thailand’s Three Pagodas Pass, republished in Traversing the Orient Magazine in May 2009.  Text by Tom Vater.

Tea Total in Darjeeling

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“Life is chaos, the world is chaos. The only constant is change. I like chaos and the way you position yourself in it. Where do we come from? What are we doing here and where are we going? We need to answer these questions to be free, to find our way. That’s what I’m doing in my tea garden.”

Not the sort of introduction one would expect from a tea plan­tation owner in the Darjeeling hills. But then, Rajah Baner­jee is not an ordinary man. He is the owner of the most highly prized tea plantation in the world. Makaibari Tea Estates in Darjeeling have developed sustainable, biodynamic agriculture at high returns. Rajah Banerjee, the enigmatic fourth heir to the estate, sells the world’s most expensive tealeaves. His main clients in the US, Japan, France and Germany buy up his entire harvest - before it is harvested.

View Aroon Thaewchatturat’s feature story on The World’s Most Expensive Tea, republished in Traversing the Orient Magazine in April 2009.  Text by Tom Vater.

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Aroon Thaewchatturat has published a series of six postcards in conjunction with BuddhaMagic, a UK-based company that facilitates the flow of love and Light.  The series of high quality images features Buddhist iconography from Thailand.

The cards will initially be available exclusively through BuddhaMagic and the Orchid Bookshop in the Silom Complex Shopping Center (4th Floor) in Sala Daeng, Bangkok, Thailand.

To view all postcards, please go to Galleries-Postcards.

handsAroon Thaewchatturat has contributed to a number of photobooks in the series Asia Unique by Hans Kemp. Titles currently available are Hands, Doors and Catch. Aroon’s images are included in Hands and Doors. Each title runs to 200 pages, 16×13.4 cm, hardcover with jacket. Text in English. Price US$16.95

Available in all good bookshops and at Amazon.

Two more titles, Loads and Signs are in development, to be published 2010-2011.

pan-gangesZur Quelle des Ganges (The journey to the Source of the Ganges, Gaumukh) is my third photobook published by Reise Know How Verlag.

Published in June 2008.

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Following the publication of her photobook on the source of the river Ganges, Aroon Thaewchatturat contributed more than 100 color and black/white images shot in 2007 in Uttaranchal, North India to “In Heiligen Hoehen“, a German non-fiction title on India’s holiest river in the 21st century, written by Tom Vater and published by Wiesenburg Verlag in March 2008.

If you’d like to read reviews or buy the book, please click on the image.

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