Tag Archives: hotels

ສະບາຍດີ folks!

Back to Laos – for a continuation of my tales (and pics) from the Luang Prabang side…

Curiously, the city is the country’s alternative capital (the government hopped back and forth between Vientiane and Luang Prabang several times), which is why traces of investment in urban infrastructure from days of yore remain here. And since back in those ancient times it wasn’t all about buses and subways, what they built were temples – some of which have survived through to today.

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Today’s post is all about the campsites we stayed at on our summer rafting trip down the Sayan Oka River, of which there are many and in different flavors, but which all turned out to be decent. Even though there was a pretty heavy stream of rafting tourists (every day we crossed paths with one, two, or three groups), and on top of that fishermen started showing up farther downstream (they come upriver in motorboats through some fairly rough riffles), we always found a nice little spot to spend the night.

Sometimes it was in a forest:

And very nice they were too:

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Hi folks!

Back to my habit of mixing things up both chronologically and geographically, today’s report isn’t from Southeast Asia (Laos); it’s from Buryatia – just north of Mongolia. Actually, Laos is directly south of Buryatia, but I digress…

First – quick recap…

Our Sayan Oka River escapade: ~280km to cover on the water, with a couple of rapids and countless very interesting riffles along the way. We started at the Buryatian village of Orlik, and from there it’s all the way down to Verkhneokinsky (Irkutsk Region). The elevation at the start is ~1370m, and at the finish it’s ~560m. That’s a total drop of ~800m. Along the way the river cuts through the Eastern Sayan, where it gets pretty wild in places. That stretch is roughly 170–180km long (depending on how you count it); the rest is the warm-up/run-up at the beginning, plus coming out onto the plain and floating down to the finish at the end. Everything in-between is in the mountains. The most interesting and most action-packed segment of the whole run is the Orkho-Bom gorge, which is 65km long – though I never did figure out exactly where it begins or ends.

The first two days of rafting were fairly calm: we just cruised along with the current – only occasionally paddling over to where it ran faster. And now and then we came across some shallows and easy little riffles.

But then we came to the start of the mountain section – waaay over there, just before those mountains, was the left turn into the gorge. And we’re off!…

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The fall-2026 conference marathon is in full swing, and this is coming to you (not quite) live from our Russian++ partner conference in Guangzhou, China. It’s all as per: ~100 key partners representing 90+ companies from 30+ cities. Meetings, hugs, presentations, and technical and commercial sessions – all in a day’s work!

And here we are – all set to kick off:

A while later – full house!

As usual, I opened with a keynote:

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Bem-vindos de volta, pessoal!

As promised, the second part to my report on our lodgings in the Brazilian Amazon. Land-based: done (yesterday); today… see the title!…

If only I’d known beforehand, I’d have made a point of lingering aboard this vessel a good while longer. I’ll come clean right away: faced with several options, we didn’t go for the one that would save us money – we picked this little boat based on… can you guess?! ->

There she is, parked alongside the more budget-friendly options :) ->

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Olá pessoal!

It’s time to tell you about the places we stayed at in the Brazilian Amazon – those on water and on land. Today: land – and there was just one: the Mirante do Gavião hotel. And since we checked in straight off the yacht – that is, from the river side – and left by seaplane, we never did get to see what it looks like on the other approached-by-road side, but only from the river – and from the inside:

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Our South American road-trip early this year was a belter – as regular readers already know. As per, thousands of photos are still being sorted to be turned into (hopefully interesting) photo-based stories, with videos getting uploaded too. As usual, I’m sharing practical info along the way: the routes we took, where things are on the map, where we stayed, what the comfort levels were like – that kind of thing. And on today’s menu: where we stayed in Chile’s Atacama Desert in the town of San Pedro de Atacama (here)…

It was a hotel called Our Habitas. It belongs to a chain of stylish hotels in cool locations around the world (Latin America, the Middle East, Namibia…). But this isn’t an ad for the chain or this particular hotel. There are other solid options here too – including simpler and cheaper ones. We just happened to stay here, so that’s what I’ll be writing about. Let’s go!…

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I was a little too hasty in my last post when I ended it with “that’s a wrap on Argentina“, for there were the traditional post-scriptum posts I’d forgotten about. All about Argentina’s roads – in the next post; in today’s – all a few words and pics about eats and sleeps in Argentina…

For the most part, things were as we expected. Down south in Patagonia we found plenty of comfortable little hotels and decent campsites. But when we got to the Jujuy Province, we landed in what felt, by local standards, like the lap of luxury!

Case in point: the Hotel Huacalera. A wonderful hotel! We saw online that it has a pool, but we weren’t really in the mood for that kind of relaxation. All we needed were showers and a good night’s sleep, and to get moving again the next morning. But hey, when a little extra comfort is on offer, why not? ->

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…That’s a rhetorical question. Of course, a Kamchatka expedition begins… at the airport :). But it depends on where you’re flying in from. For me, my trips to Kamchatka have pretty much always started at Sheremetyevo Airport (Terminal B for many years now), with the whole crew traditionally meeting up in “Magadan”…

// Which reminds me… Once, we congregated in Magadan, several hours later landed in Magadan, and another hour later dined in… Magadan :)

This time it was simpler: we were flying straight to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky!

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Ok folks… time to share my impressions of the places we stayed at during our January trip through Latin America…

Overall, everything was excelente! The only trickiness came on the Inca Trail: we had to spend the cold nights in sleeping bags in tents, but, given the lack of hotels up there, what else could we do? Still, the amazing huge meals we were served on the Trail made up the tents thing; but back to the excelente bits…

Naturally, in urban locations, we tried to stay in decent places – if there were rooms available: unfortunately, we only made the final decision to go on our LatAm-2025 trip about a month earlier, so accommodation wasn’t always available (also: permits to climb Huayna Picchu, next to Machu Picchu, were already sold out). The moral: book everything well in advance!

In both urban and even rural areas you can find quite decent places to stay. Here, for example, is the courtyard of our hotel in Cusco, in the Spanish colonial style:

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