Where are You?

Once a month, Jen and I play this game from Conde Nast. They give us a riddle with a picture from a somewhere in the world and we have to find out where they are talking about. I figured that I would share with everyone and let you have some fun too. They pick a winner once a month and that person gets $1,000. We figured, if we ever won, we would have to go to that place. You can enter by clicking on the link above. Have fun! (and if you get it, don't spoil it for the rest of us)

You're not exactly standing on high-end lakefront property. The scruffy, scraggly shore beneath your feet seems to be located in a proverbial no-man's-land. Looks are deceiving, however. The entire seventy-thousand-square-mile region you are visiting is extremely rich in minerals. Considering that a large chunk of this country's revenue is extracted from the ground, you might want to stake a claim in the coppery hills surrounding you.

Two years ago, a style director traveled seven hundred miles from the capital to conduct a fashion spread in terrain much like this. His work appeared in a renowned travel magazine (okay, the one in your hands). "It was the hardest shoot I've ever been on, but it was worth it," he says. "I was surprised by the natural beauty and by how incredibly diverse the landscape is." It's so varied that you'll wonder at times if you're touring one of the lowest points on earth or a windswept plateau (looks can be deceiving, as we said).

The brackish lagoon before you is hardly the only body of water you'll see on your trip. A famous alkali flat spreads over a thousand square miles, amplifying the sense of emptiness. Are you thinking of a desolate land of yaks and yurts? Again, things may not be as they seem. In fact, this region is crawling with people. One town in an oasis north of the lagoon is packed with visitors as well as expats. You may want to join them for a popular two-week bike trip in which you'll pedal as many as fifty miles a day past volcanoes and a geyser and spot gregarious rosy creatures strutting around the waters, combing the mud for dinner.

The terrain you are exploring is situated more or less on the knob of a walking stick–shaped country, in an area called the Grand North, or, officially, the Second Region. To this day, a nineteenth-century war that lasted four years defines this nation's relationship with a neighbor (you go annex someone's coastal access and see if he likes it).

The lagoon is often described as emerald green—although it's anything but in this light. More proof that things are not what they seem…

Where are you, anyhow?