Alex Robertson Textor

National cemeteries are symbolically loaded places, and Daejeon National Cemetery in Daejeon, South Korea is no exception. Completed in 1985, the cemetery was designed, in the words of the official cemetery website, "to worship patriots, patriotic martyrs, and the souls of all the fallen heroes and the war dead."

This image was taken by LadyExpat, a prolific Flickr user. Its subject is immediately recognizable as a military memorial. The photographer's vantage point renders it particularly interesting.

Do you have a photo of a symbolically powerful cultural site taking up space in your personal photo archives? Upload it to the Gadling Group Pool, enable downloading, and sit back. You might just end up seeing your image pop up on Gadling as a future Photo of the Day.

For bragging rights, few places can match the Norwegian Arctic territory of Svalbard. It's far north. Really, really far north. How far, you ask? The northernmost piece of Alaska is at a latitude of 71 degrees north; Longyearbyen, the capital of Svalbard, can be found at 78 degrees north.

After years, possibly decades of looking at Svalbard on maps, pricing flights, and perusing websites, I finally visited the territory in late April. I felt as if I was shooting into the unknown, despite my advance research and my knowledge of the territory's tourist infrastructure. I felt a bolt of uncertainty as the plane landed, in a snowstorm no less, and then a sense of wonder as I spied enormous mountains. It was more beautiful than I'd imagined, and far quieter. The silence was a constant presence. Even the abrasive sound of a snowmobile didn't really disturb it, not for more than a few seconds.

Administered by Norway since 1925, Svalbard has around 2,500 residents. Most live in Longyearbyen, a little valley town with a cultural and retail infrastructure typical of far larger towns: a mall, a well-stocked supermarket, an Arctic Museum, a cultural center, hotels, restaurants and bars. During my visit in late April, all were pretty lively, tourists more rare than residents.

Though a Norwegian territory, Svalbard does not belong to Norway proper. Before boarding flights from Oslo or Tromsø–and after disembarking on return to the mainland–passengers have to go through passport control. The territory is governed under the terms of the Svalbard Treaty, which allows citizens of all signatory nations to commercially exploit the land and waters around and take employment in the territory. This explains the existence of Russian mining towns in Svalbard – Pyramiden (closed in 1998) and Barentsburg, which had 380 inhabitants at last count.

As befits a place commercially open to the world, Svalbard is a rather diverse place. While most residents are Norwegian, the territory is impressively international, with tourists adding to the linguistic melee. During a short midday stroll in the center of town, I heard Norwegian, Swedish, Tagalog, Swiss German, German, English, Thai, Portuguese, French, Flemish and Polish.

Gallery: Svalbard: The World's Northernmost Inhabited Place

The Arizona desert seduces. When I was a kid, my grandparents collected a magazine called Arizona Highways, which featured honest-to-God, awe-inspiring vistas of the Grand Canyon State. (As you can see from the link, the periodical still exists.) I wouldn't get to Arizona until I was 25, barreling down 93 from Las Vegas and crossing into New Mexico quickly. Those highways didn't look like the highways of Arizona Highways. It would take a few additional visits before I got to see the intense beauty that filled the pages of my grandparents' back copies.

Flickr user Styggiti captured this curious geological object on a hiking trail in Camp Creek Falls, Arizona.

Upload your favorite images to the Gadling Group Pool on Flickr. We choose our favorites from the bunch as Photos of the Day.

It's impossible to know what a lost conversation might have yielded. A lost conversation occupies a place in memory, a reservoir of sadness or relief. It's the shape of the reservoir that remains forever unknown. This uncertainty often renders the very recognition of a lost conversational opportunity difficult.

The decision to welcome a stranger into conversation while on the road isn't always easy. Nobody wants to be an easy mark. In places with pervasive tourism infrastructures, it's often the better part of wisdom to ignore touts and attempts at conversation altogether. There are, after all, many scams to avoid, many tourist traps to escape.

But often a self-imposed barrier to conversation on the part of a tourist or traveler precludes what would have been interesting, useful, personally significant, or simply an opportunity to share a laugh or two.

A year and a half ago I was in Mauritius, having a conversation with my partner on a beach. What was it about? No idea. A very tall man with dreadlocks came up to us and hovered maybe 15 feet away. Very quietly he asked us if we might be interested in buying some jewelry made out of sea urchins.

I couldn't hear him. "Sorry?" I asked. He repeated his pitch. "No thank you," I responded, somewhat curtly. We were not interested in his jewelry. He also wasn't really bothering us. Had our completely forgettable conversation not felt urgent, I would no doubt have been more polite. Hawkers are few and far between in this part of Mauritius, at least off-season, and his entreaty had been tame and gentle. But we weren't interested, and we were in the middle of a conversation in any case.

"Where are you from?" he persisted. Every time we got this question in Mauritius we had to make a decision. Either we enjoyed the unfolding game and entertained a dozen or so guesses before we revealed our nationality, or we nipped it in the bud by responding "American." This time, eager to get back to our conversation, we chose the latter option.

"I know America," he said with sudden clarity. He pointed at his chest with a single finger. "I am from Chagos." Suddenly, everything changed. He was no longer an unobtrusive if vaguely annoying hawker. "You are from Chagos?" I asked, suddenly alert. "Yes," he answered. And then he turned away abruptly. The lines of communication were closed. He was done.

Oh the San Francisco Supermoon. It is so big in this image that it almost looks Photoshopped into this otherwise delicate depiction of the City by the Bay. Flickr user jrodmanjr documents San Francisco's recent encounter with the rare supermoon – the coincidence of the moon's closest approach to the earth with a full moon.

How bright or big is the moon where you are? Take a photo of it tonight and upload it to the Gadling Group Pool on Flickr. We choose our favorites among the pool to be Photos of the Day.

British tourism is a big topic in 2012. With the Queen's Diamond Jubilee next month, the Olympics in July and August, and the Paralympics in August and September, the United Kingdom is under some serious scrutiny, in particular as a national brand and a tourist destination.

Here I ask Donald Strachan, travel journalist, guidebook writer and all around Twitter delight, some questions about the current state of tourism in the UK. (Be sure to check out my earlier Q&A on the state of tourism in Britain with Sally Shalam.)

Q: Donald Strachan, define your occupation.

A: I'm a travel journalist, an advice columnist for the Sunday Telegraph focusing on consumer travel technology, and a guidebook writer for Frommer's specializing in England, Wales, and Italy. I've also authored content for iPhone apps to Florence and Turin, and am working on some new self-published eBooks.

Q: As a travel writer, how did you come to specialize on the UK?

A: About eight years ago I decided that I didn't want to continue to fly, and I haven't been on an airplane since. That choice has narrowed the field down a little, obviously. I also think that there's so much within an hour's journey of anyone's home that they will never discover, even if they live to be 80. I think I made the right decision. I love the areas I know, and love having the time to explore them in more depth, without the lure of the next tropical island to distract me.

Q: How would you assess the state of tourism marketing in the UK – strengths, weaknesses?

A: To be honest, I pay very little attention to this. Marketing a destination is (necessarily, I guess) such a broad-brush activity, and yet what really interests people about a place is usually specific and fine-grained. I've always wanted to go to Buenos Aires, because I remember the tickertape raining down at the 1978 World Cup Final. It formed such a strong impression. How do you market to that?

The UK advertisements I have seen seem to stick to the clichés. There's nothing wrong with a cliché, in itself; so many of our travel goals, all this bucket-list stuff, it's basically a list of clichés. But as a specialist, I guess, it's my job to dig a bit deeper, to be respectful to those clichés a visitor wants to experience while gently nudging her or him toward something they haven't thought of. I rarely see anything that picks out the nuances of Britain, that really makes it obvious how different, say, Suffolk is from Somerset.

Summer advances slowly. Flickr user LadyExpat (Back in Daejeon) captured this idyllic springtime scene on Black Rock Beach in Halifax, Nova Scotia, this past Wednesday.

It wasn't always quite so lovely round these parts. Black Rock Beach, situated in Point Pleasant Park, was near the site of the public hanging of a notorious pirate in 1809. Today's vision of the beach is not quite so violent, thankfully; it looks like a truly lovely place for a spring or summer picnic.

Have you got a great capture of the changing seasons? Sure you do. Upload it to the Gadling Group Pool on Flickr. Our favorites from the pool end up as Photos of the Day.

A Sudanese desert landscape like this one doesn't materialize everyday here at Gadling. Sudan isn't the easiest country to visit, nor the least expensive. It's also not the very safest place to spend time as a tourist in the aggregate. Both the US State Department and the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office advise their citizens very generally to at the very least seriously investigate the risks before visiting Sudan.

I don't mean to make light of any of this in considering this image, snapped by Flickr user Mark Fischer in February in Ash Shamaliyah, Sudan, to be very striking. The contrast of the blue sky against the orange sand is beautifully interrupted by small, lonely buildings.

Upload your images of lonely desert landscapes to the Gadling Group Pool on Flickr. We choose our favorites from the pool as Photos of the Day.

I like this image of a cabin in the woods, despite its slight seasonal dissonance, because it resembles a scrapbook image. "This is Terry in front of that awesome cabin right before she spied a moose and freaked out," it could be annotated.

Or not.

This moody and lush image was snapped by Flickr user mciccone640 in Ontario in March.

Upload your own holiday or holiday-apparent shots to the Gadling Group Pool on Flickr. We choose our favorite images from the pool as Photos of the Day.

In the hands of Flickr user verargulla, these Gold Coast surfers seem to exist in a silver-gold haze – a dreamy netherworld of mist, skyscrapers and cooperative waves. It's enough to make the idea of surfing attractive even to those who've never successfully ridden a wave.

Upload your best images of surfers, skyscrapers and dislocated fantasies to the Gadling Group Pool on Flickr. We select our favorites from the pool to be Photos of the Day.