Tag Archives: china-2024

Though these tales and pics from the Chinese side are only just warming up to get going – in the meantime we’ve gone and completed our China-2024 trip!

Cheeky spoiler: this year’s China-in-the-fall trip was especially full-to-the-brim with active tourisms:

• Over two weeks a full 23 (!) natural and historical objects were visited, strolled, prodded, delighted in, and – of course – photographed;
• Places we stayed for at least a night – 11;
• Distance covered on the road (by our driver) – more than 5000km!

The concentration of OMG-impressions and emotions during our China vacation this year was off the scale – all about which will be coming to these here blog pages soon (after the Kamchatkan tales are done)…

Just in case you missed them, here are parts one and two of this China-intro-trio. Now – on with part three! ->

Read on…

Ni Hao!

Our China trip continues…

In the city of Xining we turned westward – thereby exchanging mountain forests, rivers and lakes for nothing much besides desert. Not that the views to be beheld were any worse for it…

So what can I say about this part of China? In no particular order, this is what:

These desert landscapes are in the northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai, which sits next to the Tibetan Plateau – the Roof of the World; yes – the world’s highest (and largest) plateau above sea level. Yes – meaning breathing up here can be rather difficult. We’d planned for this however – having been acclimatizing up around two or three thousand meters above sea level for a week already.

By Chinese standards, the place is sparsely populated: just under six million folks live here over an area of 720,000 square kilometers. That’s a population density similar to that of the whole of Russia – the world’s largest country (including all its vast but sparsely-populated Siberian and Arctic regions).

Read on…

Regular readers of my tales-and-pics of my travels to far-flung countries (and some nearer to home) will recall that, usually, in the first half of October, colleagues & friends and I get ourselves over to China!…

Read on…

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!