November 11, 2024
Tag Archives: heli
June 4, 2024
On quad-bikes around Mayon Mount: but up to its peak – on no account!
Next up on our short tour of paradisiacal Philippine islands – the Mount Mayon volcano.
Getting there from El Nido on a scheduled flight would have taken us ages, and since we didn’t have ages, we took a chopper again instead ->
From the get-go – oh my grandiose greenness! But yet again my photos were spoiled by the reflections on the windows of the helicopter. I wonder if there’s already some AI ML technology these days that can filter them out? I hope so: it’d really help on my summer holiday in Kamchatka this year…
June 3, 2024
El Nido, the Philippines: islands, lagoons, caves, white beaches, turquoise sea. AKA paradise!
I keep a tally of the countries and cities I have the pleasure of visiting (for the first time), and just the other week I had an interesting +1 in Southeast Asia – the Philippines: my 105th country. And Manila was, oh – I’ve lost count; it was around my 320th city in the world I’ve now been to.
We were lucky this time: we had a long weekend there before the business part of the trip, so we decided to check out the beautiful islands of El Nido and also the Mount Mayon volcano. And since island hopping in the Philippines takes quite a while on scheduled commercial flights, we opted for the much quicker option: helicopter! ->
April 25, 2023
One-three-one-oh – meters below!
Curiously, in the comments at the bottom of my Instagram post about my visit to Orenburg, a dear reader suggested we visit her nearby hometown of Gui (pronounced Guy; not Gay). Another commenter stated something along the lines of, “What? That hole?!” To which the original commenter retorted, ~”actually, yes – it is a hole, kinda, since it has the deepest hole mine in the whole of Europe!” This interaction was all the more amusing to me since I was reading it… in Gui!…
We flew to Gui (incidentally, a +1 to my list of cities in the world visited) by helicopter. Perfect. In the car we would have missed the fantastic aerial-panoramic views of the vast steppe, and it’d have taken us four hours…
September 27, 2022
Bunisyak, Princess and Irkindinsky. The jewels in Putorana’s crown.
Having had a Putorana warm-up, then gone over the history of how the Putorana Plateau came about, it’s now time for a closer look!…
The weather was excellent, the chopper was all set, and the day ahead promised to be a busy one. Into the helicopter we pile, and off we fly!…
January 4, 2022
It’s not a motorcycle it’s a chopper, baby.
Ksudach caldera ring-walk: done – twice! Next up – a helicopter ride down to Kurile Lake…
One great thing about helicopters, at least here in remote Kamchatka – they come to you! You don’t need to get up early, get a taxi to the airport the other side of town, and then stand in various lines and wait around for hours until you’re finally seated on an airliner. With a chopper – all that’s missed out; for us, here, that meant it landed on the hot beach our camp was on! Distance from ‘bed’ to ‘seat on the means of transportation’ – a few hundred meters, covered in minutes!
October 25, 2021
Turkey from a chopper: from major to minor.
Flying around in a helicopter is always a pleasure; flying around in a helicopter in the fall – along a shoreline, in clement weather – that pleasure is multiplied several-fold. And that includes down in sunny Turkey…
Oh my glorious!
April 13, 2020
Helicopter Cape Town – outskirts and downtown.
NB: with this post about the place I visited before the lockdown I want to bring you some positivism, beauty and the reassurance that we will all get a chance to see great different places again. Meanwhile I encourage you not to violate the stay-at-home regime. Instead I hope you’re using this time for catching up on what you never seemed to find the time to do… ‘before’ :).
As promised in my previous post, herewith, a continuation of my Cape-Town-tourisms text and pics for your visual-curiousness-educational pleasure. Time for a chopper ride. A nice clean shiny bright red one at that…
First off – what we saw earlier, but from up in the sky. The Cape of Good Hope:
March 13, 2020
Victoria Falls: 2008 vs. 2020.
I’d been to Victoria Falls before – in May of 2008. Back then it was high water season, and much of the time practically nothing was visible – all shut off by a white shroud of spray. I decided then I wanted to return when the water was low. And 12 years later – here I was again: during low water season. Time for some photographic comparisons. And the differences, as you will see were sometimes like night and day. Check them out!…
March 10, 2020
Victoria Falls – the view from up above.
On my visit to Victoria Falls, the icing on the cake was the helicopter flight we took above them.
In this first pic – you see the ‘smoke’ rising up over there? That’s the ‘smoke’ from the waterfall. And that’s where we were headed in the chopper…
