Nota Bene

Hi folks!

You’ve had your aperitifs, finger-nibbles, and soup (one, two, and April 1); now for… a salad starter!…

How long have we been road-tripping on Yakutian highways and winter roads? Oh – three weeks already! Time to be heading back home I guess…

As usual for my expeditions, I’ve taken a ton of photos and videos during our road trip, and they’re gonna take plenty of sifting and editing, which will take plenty of time. That’s why today you’re having an extra starter in the meantime – a few more pics and impressions from this extraordinary Siberian automotive adventure to tide you over. I hope they’ll be interesting in and of themselves, and also to act as a stimulus for some of you, dear readers, to one day make the trip yourselves…

And so, my preliminary sifting has given me images from our trip like this ->

That’s not a highway; that’s a Yakutian winter road – no asphalt, just ice!

But it wasn’t all super-smooth cruising on ice; we had to resort to roads and sometimes just tracks too, upon which even in sturdy 4x4s our speeds came down to under 20km/h ->

Read on…

The internet connection here is really unstable – coming and going all day long. Just now it’s available though, so here’s my next mini-tranche of Siberian on-the-road/wilderness pics:

These photos are of a winter road upon a frozen river. As you can see – sunny and cloudless: a beautiful day indeed. The internet’s disappeared again just now, but I’ll show you where this is on the map when it’s back… ->

Read on…

Hi folks!

Well, well; I wasn’t expecting this: we’ve made a world-first discovery in Yakutia while on our Far-North Road-Trip – mega-heavy water!

The pioneering discovery was made in the Indigirka river, here. We were crossing said frozen river in our 4x4s, and we decided to take a photo-stop as the surrounding scenes were so spectacularly beautiful. Almost by chance, we looked down at one point, and that’s when we noticed something unusual in the frozen ice. Upon closer inspection – yes, there they were: floating rocks. Floating – as in, they must have been floating when the river water wasn’t frozen, and when it did freeze they were left stranded, suspended in the ice. Don’t believe me? Check out my pics! ->

Can you see the pebbles there? Neither lying on the riverbed (as you’d normally expect), nor floating on the surface (as some highly-porous pebbles might, like pieces of pumice, say). We thought we were seeing things, but no – there they were, truly dangling about mid-water!

Can’t make the pebbles out? Here are a large and tiny one outlined in red ->

Read on…

Hi folks!

Been a while, I know. But there’s a good reason, as you’ll see…

I’ve finally – after getting on for three weeks! – gotten the opportunity to share with you at least some details about our latest winter remote Siberian road-trip adventure. I wasn’t able to earlier since the distances involved are dizzying long, the weather’s constantly thoroughly deep-frozen, and the autobahns winter roads are… winter roads (no rest areas, not much of anything but ice and snow and endlessness). Then of course there was the internet nuance we came up against: there is Wi-Fi in even the tiniest of villages along the way, but… it’s inaccessible to travelers passing through – there’s no way or place to pay for it! But more on such wtafs trifles coming up later in the upcoming posts on this, our latest Russian-wintery-wilderness road-trip from the extreme side (this post being the first in the series). For now though, as per tradition – some introductory photos with a few accompanying introductory words…

So, first off – our route. Here it is. Wait a while (like a minute+!) for it to open (it’s Iridium).

As for the pics, they’re simply magical – especially the ones taken on and of aufeis; for example ->

The March weather – as to be expected in northeastern Siberia – frigidly frosted ->

…But since when has that ever stopped us?

Check out some of the ride stats:

Read on…

In my last post, after our walkabout we said our farewells to Barcelona. Today – I rewind back a bit to a day between our getting overloaded with euro-awards in Innsbruck and my being overloaded with interviews and meetings at Mobile World Congress. For, whenever I can fit it in when here in Catalonia, I just have to get a rental car and cruise along one of my favorite roads – one that hugs its coast ->

En route, we occasionally stopped for walkabouts and the odd bite to eat in towns. Curiously, there was practically nobody about and most stores and cafes were closed. I was surprised the eateries we snacked at weren’t closed too. Ghost towns. And all on the typically (in summer) busy Costa Brava! ->

Read on…

As promised, more tales from the Catalonian side…

Work hard – play hard is one of my mottos, and that went for in Barcelona recently too. After working hard at Mobile World Congress, we had two free days on our hands. The first was taken up with getting to, up, and back down Montserrat, as reported a few days ago. In the morning of the second day we checked out the progress of the construction of Sagrada Família – which I told you about In yesterday’s post. Which left us with an afternoon, which we filled with a relaxed ramble around Park Güell (which I hadn’t been to in at least 20 years) and later along the famous pedestrianized tree-lined street called La Rambla (so, not quite “playing hard”, but we weren’t being idle either!). But first – the Gaudi (and Güell)-designed Park Güell…

Read on…

Sagrada Família is probably the most important touristic (architectural, cultural… basilical) building of Barcelona. Though its construction began in 1882 (no typo folks!) – overseen by no less than Antoni Gaudí himself – it still hasn’t been finished nearly a century-and-a-half later! Indeed, perma-construction is one of the church’s inalienable traits that makes it so unique. It’s like, how can you have a Sagrada Família that’s not under construction – since there’s never, ever, been such a thing?! When the project is finally completed, I’m fairly sure there’ll be something missing from its whole essence )…

Read on…

Hi folks!

Just recently, while I was busy at Mobile World Congress, I was informed that back here in Moscow the season of spring had finally arrived! Sure, there’s still plenty of snow around – but it’s falling less and less frequently, and less and less heavily. And what there also is now plenty of is… sun – and birdsong! Hurray! I had to see this for myself. And that’s exactly what I did at the first opportunity after flying back from Barcelona ->

It’s been a wonderful winter, with sooo much snow (there are still plenty of piles of it taller than me dotted all over) ->

Read on…

If ever you have a two or three hours to spare in Barcelona, there’s always plenty to choose from to fill those hours with something wow-touristic in the city. Just the easiest and most obvious often will do the job, like a stroll down La Rambla and around the Gothic Quarter. But should you ever have a full day to spare and the weather’s neither rainy or too hot, then you really need to get out of the city. And one of the best local destinations has to be Montserrat (the mountain; not to be confused with the island that was named after it, which isn’t quite local;).

A truly wonderful construction – a multi-peaked ragged-jagged mountain range surrounded by lower and more undulating hills. Could it be the start of the Pyrenees? No – the edge of those is nearly a hundred kilometers away…

(I wanted to take a pic like the one above, but none of mine came out ok; therefore, thank-you Wikipedia)

Read on…

Hola amigos!

From Innsbruck, off we flew (with our top awards in our luggage) to Barcelona. Once there, we headed on over to the vast Fira Barcelona venue (awards in hand!) for a monster of an exhibition-conference. And the monster was of course Mobile World Congress (MWC). As usual, everyone who’s anyone in the mobile communications/IT world was there, and it was rammed, noisy and fun! ->

I call it a monster due to its size: like a monster truck, it’s gigantic. It’s also a survivor. For it’s been around since practically year-dot when it comes to large mobile/IT exhibitions-conferences, and hasn’t fallen by the wayside like some of its former “colleagues” like the once-similarly massive CeBIT or COMDEX. MWC has managed to keep up with the times, modernize and diversify; or, to put it simpler – it just became all the more shiny and super-interesting to appeal to a broader audience. ¡Respeto!

Our romance with MWC goes way back – to when it was still known as 3GSM (it became MWC in 2008). Alas, I don’t have much to show for it today – since I’d never heard of “blogging” in the early 2000s. My earliest published bits and pieces hail back to 2010 and 2011 (just a few pics on Kaspersky Club (Google Translate text only)). Sure, MWC’s had it’s bad patches (like in 2021), but it’s bounced back (and gotten bigger and cooler and flashier every year). ¡Mucho respeto!

And here we were again ->

Read on…