Nota Bene

For the first time in my life I’ve seen a comet unassisted – with just the naked eye. Oh my Gerasimenko! ->

Greetings all – from China’s Qinghai province, where right now up above our heads we can see the 62P/Tsuchinshan comet without a telescope. And it’s going to be flying past Earth for around another week!…

Like I say, I hadn’t seen one before, since they’re a rather rare phenomenon – even though there are plenty of them; for example, there’s the famous Halley’s Comet, which we won’t see again until July 28, 2061 (if clouds don’t get in the way).

So when will 62P return to our cosmic skies? Some astronomers think… never!

I love railroads. And since there’s a fairly new one that starts/ends at Nizhny Bestyakh – on the opposite bank of the Lena River from Yakutsk – we just had to investigate (after arriving back in Yakutsk on our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition)…

Opened in 2011, it runs a full 808km (!) in length in total – all across permafrost (how’s that even possible?!) ->

…And we even got a ride on it – in this here “general’s” wagon. Huge thanks to the guys who made it happen! ->

Read on …

After Oymyakon, we decided we needed to check out the local disused airport – in the village called… Airport (in Russian – Aeroport)! ->

In WWII it was used as a back-up airport for ALSIB Lend-Lease aircraft. After the war it became a civilian airport, and now – as you can see – it’s well and truly abandoned:

Read on…

I left you in the previous post with our leaving Oymyakon heading in the direction of the original Kolyma highway. All righty – let’s go!…

The Old Kolymsky Tract is the highway road the R504 replaced. You might think it’d be abandoned by now, but you’d be wrong – kinda. A long stretch of it is fully serviced and regularly cleared of snow and has the odd small village alongside it. In places – near Tomtor – it even has street lighting ->

Read on…

Still with plenty of time to spare on the return leg of our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition, what else could we check out along the way? Answering that was easy: Oymyakon – for the third time in as many years!…

Read on…

It hasn’t been a month since I was last in China – and here I am back again already! This time though it’s not on a business trip; far from it. It’s one of my traditional vacation tours of China’s lesser-known natural-and-meditative beauty offerings, followed by my inevitable tales-and-pics from PRC-side for all of my dear readers )…

Before I kick off though, a +1 to the long-neglected – but not forgotten – #dz-information tag. “What’s that?” you ask? It’s when my regular travel companion (since something like the year dot) – DZ – puts fingers to keyboard for, as the tag suggests, an important informational bulletin. All righty. Reins being duly passed over…

Read on …

Intro

Luck was on our side when heading back south on our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition: we’d narrowly missed being stranded for several days in Tiksi, and were way ahead of schedule. And it was this latter spot of luck that permitted us to spend plenty of time examining and enjoying a very special feature of the North – which I’ll be writing a lot about and showing a great many photos of in this here mega-long post. And as the title to the post indicates – the special feature is… the Indigirka Tube ->

So, what is the Indigirka Tube?…

Read on …

And so it goes…

You follow the path of life, running here, slowing down there, focusing on this and that, getting caught up in small tasks, darting around the planet, and suddenly – boom: you find yourself being 59 years’ old!

Fifty-nine. That’s a serious number of years. Stock – as ever on this day – needs to be taken (real quick; don’t over-think it:)…

I’ve done a great deal throughout these 59 years – but I still need to do a great deal more. I’ve seen, prodded, tasted, smelled, and photographed half the world already – but I still dream of seeing, prodding, tasting, smelling, and photographing the other half. So that’s what I’ll do – and full-steam ahead!…

Read on…

Hi all!

As per my chokka, ongoing business-trip schedule, I recently found myself down in Sochi where we had our 12^th conference dedicated to industrial cybersecurity. Every year the industrial topic gets all the more popular, while our exhibition gets all the more large. Nearly 450 guests were in attendance this time – meaning we wouldn’t have all fitted into last year’s venue; accordingly, the view out the window was a little different to the usual one:

I kicked things off to a packed hall (just how I like it) ->

Read on…

What with several business trips the world over since the spring, plus a few Kamchatka-2024 posts already sneaking onto these here blog pages of mine, you might think that my tales from the extreme-north side (our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk road expedition) could be over. How wrong you’d be!…

But even I admit that it’s been a while since my last Tiksi-post. Accordingly, quick rewind to where I left you months ago…

I left you with our having left Tiksi heading back in the direction of Yakutsk just before Tiksi was cut off completely for over a week due to a particularly intense arctic blizzard, and our realizing that we were waaaay ahead of schedule – as in: we’d be back in Yakutsk in half the time we’d planned; yes – a full 10 days earlier!

So what were we to do? Arrive back earlier and that was that? Of course not. No, instead, we decided to head back toward Ust-Nera and investigate much more closely Indigirskaya Truba – the Indigirka Tube. Well why not? After all, we’d plenty of time, and – more importantly – the naleds there were fully frozen, thus posing no danger…

// What’s the Indigirka Tube? Find out here.

So – back to Ust-Nera it was. Not that it felt much like our second time in as many weeks on this expedition, since the snowstorm had changed how the landscape looked so much. Here it is two weeks earlier ->

And here’s the exact (see the same road signs?!) same spot after the storm:

Onward – through the only-barely-cleared road – the Kolyma Highway…

Read on…