Nota Bene

Our tour of South America next took us to Brazil; specifically – to the city of Manaus (after a few adventures in São Paulo). But Manaus was just our base. The attraction was something a lot bigger and a lot more famous (just noticed – its Wikipedia page comes in a full 200 languages; rarely see that!). Have you guessed it yet? Yes, it’s the Amazon – the world’s largest (by both water volume and drainage basin) and arguably the longest river in the world!

Actually, we were more generally exploring Amazonia, aka the Amazon Basin, aka the Amazonian Plain, aka the Amazon Lowlands. And specifically – one of the Amazon’s main tributaries: the Rio Negro. Why? Because in these parts the Amazon is very silty and murky, and so there’s not much to see or do there. The Rio Negro on the other hand has much cleaner water and contains fish and dolphins and more, the surrounding ecosystem is richer, and indigenous people live along it in the jungle.

I say cleaner; here’s proof: the meeting of the muddy Amazon and the cleaner Rio Negro:

If you zoom in you can see it better:

And this mixing of clean and muddy water goes on for dozens of kilometers downstream from where the rivers meet. Here’s the confluence on Google Maps.

So where to begin? With the jungle, the indigenous people, and the rest of the locals? Local customs? Grottoes in the rain lit with shafts of sunlight?…

Read on…

Bye-bye, Atacama Desert!…

We pile into the cars, double-check we haven’t forgotten any suitcases or bags, and hit the road. Where to? The airport, of course!…

The nearest airport is in the small city of Calama, about 100km from our cozy digs in San Pedro de Atacama:

Read on…

I’d heard a lot about the thermal fields and geysers in Chile, and figured it was time to go see them for myself since the photos online were kind of underwhelming.

// Let me say this right away: Atacama does have thermal fields – but geysers? None. That’s why the “geyser” photos from there look so unimpressive. But whatever – onward to the El Tatio geothermal fields!…

All as per for thermal fields: much hissing, gurgling, bubbling, rumbling, and spraying of boiling water:

Read on…

We didn’t have much free time in St. Petersburg after the conference on the future of cybersecurity, so we only had room for one bit of sightseeing – a visit to the Krassin icebreaker museum…

The Krassin is a storied ship whose history is truly fascinating – but I’ll get to that in a bit. The first Arctic-class icebreaker in history was the Yermak, built at the end of the 19^th century based on the ideas of Vice Admiral Makarov – a remarkable man who did a great deal for Arctic exploration and development, and plenty besides. His dream was to reach the North Pole on an icebreaker. But calculations showed that doing so would require more power than the technology of the time could deliver…

Read on…

One morning – not too early, but still dark out – we piled into our vehicles and rolled out of Ust-Kut toward the ice road, heading for the town of Mirny (here)…

The weather was treating us well – a balmy -22°C for this time of year. We sure didn’t expect that!

Read on…

Atacama – pt. 1
Atacama – pt. 2
Atacama – pt. 3

So, shall we keep moving across the majestic mountain expanses of Chile’s Atacama? Of course we shall! How could there be a different answer? We didn’t come here for boredom, relaxation, assorted sybaritism, or spiritual languishing. We’re contemplative tourists. Show us the views – lots of them! :)

The next installment of entertainment to calm our restless tourist souls was catching a sunset in the Valley of Death (here) (Valle de la Muerte / Valle de Marte), which, curiously, doesn’t have a Wikipedia page)…

Beautiful – insanely so. The rock formations are painted in totally fantastic colors. But there’s a catch: the sun setting behind us, who were looking east. The shadow kept creeping over the landscapes around us, more and more relentlessly…

Read on…

Atacama – pt. 1
Atacama – pt. 2

The next must-see stop on our winter trip through South America was Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) (here). It’s the usual Atacama deal: unreal mountain scenery and intense colors, and meditative raptures while beholding the same. Today I’ll be showing you photos of it all, but you really need to see it for yourself!…

Read on…

(Atacama – pt. 1: Rainbow Valley and petroglyphs)

The Atacama Desert is all about multicolored mountain landscapes, vast lifeless expanses, and volcanoes lining the horizon. In this post, there’s more of all that – especially the multicolored mountain landscapes bit – but with a difference; where? Devil’s Throat, or in Spanish – Garganta del Diablo!…

Devil’s Throat is a narrow canyon carved into relatively soft rock by water. It winds left and right, sometimes doubling back on itself before twisting again. At some sharp bends, the rock has eroded into overhangs – almost like little grottoes. The trail along it is about 2.5–3km one way, so with photo stops and breaks, it’s roughly an hour-and-a-half to two-hour walk. Most people do it by bike, but we decided to hoof it.

Here’s where we’re headed ->

Entering the Throat! ->

Read on…

The Polytechnic Museum in Moscow is a fascinating place with unique science and technology exhibits – some preserved as the only surviving examples. Alas, it’s been closed now for renovations since 2013 – so they’ve been building and changing things there for 13 years now. I hope it’s for the better and that someday the museum will actually reopen to visitors. In the meantime, you can view its exhibits at VDNKh and in the museum’s storage facility at Technopolis Moscow. So, since I’ve always been drawn to technical things – especially unusual ones – when I was kindly invited to tour the latter facility, I immediately accepted. And I’m really glad I did…

There’s pretty much anything and everything you could imagine here! All kinds of technical devices, gadgets, cars and motorcycles, photo and video equipment, televisions and radios, calculators, space artifacts – and even a mock-up of… an atomic bomb. To my surprise, there’s one thing they don’t have at all – agricultural machinery (why?!). But everything else is represented – maybe not in vast quantities (so not quite like the “Encyclopedia of Technology” in Verkhnyaya Pyshma), but still plenty…

Read on…

The Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Plant on the Angara River is a fascinating facility with an equally fascinating history. Construction began way back in 1954 – over 70 years ago. The first turbine unit came online in 1961, with the rest phased in gradually. For about eight years this power plant held the title of the world’s largest by installed capacity. (Fun fact: the crown then passed to another Soviet plant, the Krasnoyarsk HPP.) Anyway, here’s the Bratsk HPP:

A mightily powerful structure…

Read on…