Tag Archives: hotels

China-2023: eats, sleeps.

I’ve shown you how awesome China‘s lesser-known (to non-Chinese) natural-beauty-tourisms can be. But what about the places to stay and dining options for tourists there? How do they stack up?

Quick answer: it all depends on how much you want to spend, for there’s everything in China from bargain-basement lodgings and street/fast/junk food, through to 5* hotels and gourmet cuisine at fine restaurants. As for us, we mostly went for somewhere in the middle for both accommodation and dining – sometimes opting for somewhere nearer the upscale-end of the spectrum; for example, in Enshi (canyon, cliffs) we stayed at a small private hotel that was really very nice indeed. The views: wonderful ->

In the cities we tended to stay in larger hotels – often franchises of international chains, and overall they were decent and comfortable. The views to be had from the rooms in some of them were pretty decent too, for example in the hotel in Xinning County near Langshan where we stayed after our decompression-river-cruise on the Fuyi River. In one direction:

In the other:

Read on…

African vacation – ver. 2023: Oceanic decompression, then home!

And finally, as per tradition, it was time finish off our typically active vacation – this time our Kenya safari – with a spot of decompression: to take it easy after all the dashing about and tourism-till-you-drop and getting up early every morning to fit everything in; also, to make sure the return to the reality of everyday life doesn’t take place too quickly for the mind (or is it spirit, or even soul?!) to cope

And since our tour of Kenya’s national parks took us, slowly but surely, eastward – from Nairobi over to the east-African coast along the Indian Ocean – the perfect setting for decompression was deemed to be Diani Beach, just south of Mombasa. Why? Because “it has been voted Africa’s leading beach destination for the fifth time running since 2015” (– Wikipedia, 2020). And I can see why: not busy at all, super-fine sand on the beach, and refreshingly cool water (too cool for comfort actually, neoprene advised)…

Not that we resorted to the neoprene; we were here to take it easy: no active anything – including watersports. Instead – inactive everything; e.g., beach + Bombay Sapphire, and sun + Scotch – on the rocks sand!

Read on…

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African vacation, ver. 2023: Amboseli – elephant-land.

After the brief Bali-interlude, we’re back in Kenya…

First – recap:

Pre-safari Nairobi – done.
Ol Pejeta reservation – done.
Lakes Naivasha and Nakuru – done.
Maasai Mara – done.

Next up, Amboseli National Parkhere. Amboseli is more of the same wonderful wildlife but with the accent firmly on elephants – and with none other than  Mount Kilimanjaro in the background…

Read on…

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African vacation – ver. 2023: Hippo Point.

Before continuing with my narrative along our route through Kenya, I must tell you a bit about where we stayed on the bank of Lake Naivasha. It was at Hippo Point (but don’t click that link just yet)…

Now, before reading on, dear readers, can you guess what I’m about to write here? Was I one-star-hotel slumming it, or five-star-living-large?…

See, I do both – and everything in-between. I prefer 5*, of course – who doesn’t? – but sometimes lesser star-rating hotels (or no-star establishments, like Airbnb-style apartments in remote towns in deepest Siberia) are the only thing going. In Tibet and Nepal the ratings tended to dip, while in Kamchatka and Altai we’ve always bedded down of a night in the tents we carry on our backs all day. Then there are the spartan but cozy-enough cabins we sleep in on yachts workhorse ships – that sail around, say, the Kuril Islands or even Antarctica. Things sometimes get real bad: in the year 2000 we stayed a night in an abandoned port in Belomorsk; it was… indescribable. Heck – the trauma lingers to this day!

So, come on folks, what do you reckon?…

Well, it went like this at Hippo Point:

Joke. That’s the former servants’ quarters of even stables of the British landed gentry that must have had the place built and who lived here originally. Here’s where we were staying:

No, it’s not an Edwardian country pile in Surrey – it’s actually Hippo Point here in Kenya!

Inside, just like outside, and just like the lawn and garden – all in traditional English style. Couldn’t complain…

…Wait: yes we could!…

See, the place was so old-fashioned and typically British that it still featured old-fashioned and typically British… taps (faucets to our American friends); meaning: one tap is for (freezing) cold water; the other – for (scalding) hot water. No mixer tap/faucet where you can get just the right temperature for the water for your bath. And bath’s the right word since – there’s no shower here either! What? In 2023? :0)

We have a walk around the property and its grounds…

Africa, stone fireplace, armchairs. The only things missing are a Sir John and Lady Mortimer or some such!

All’s set for cocktails at sundown ->

And finally – my luggage lost by Ethiopian Airlines arrived! ->

Over there – zebras!

From here to the lake – a zebra crossing! ->

Sunset: another aaaaah ->

And that was that. All very nice. We’d have loved to have stayed longer in this little piece of England, but we had to be up and off in the morning…

The rest of the photos from Kenya are here.

Global Partner Conference – in a lesser-known emirate on the up and up.

We had our Global Partner Conference 2023 the other week. And, getting ahead of myself, let me tell you it was a great success!…

Our global partner conferences are one of the most important regular business events for us. They’re where we tell our partner companies (distributors, system integrators, service providers, and so on) from all over the world how our products and services are developing, and how those products and services can help their customers solve the most difficult aspects of cybersecurity all the more. In turn, our partners share with us how their business is growing and changing, what’s happening in their regional markets, what they want more of, and what their customers dream of. Then it’s back to us to tell them what we envision they’ll be wanting in a year’s time, in two years’ time, and in five. And it all looks something like this:

Read on…

Wadi Rum: red rocks plus red desert, minus the Martians.

Hi folks!

And you thought my tales from the Jordanian side were done and dusted? No – not quite; not just yet. For there’s still the Wadi Rum (wadi = “valley” in Arabic) desert I need to tell you about and show you…

And I need to tell you since Wadi Rum is soooo awesome. A red desert, and everything else red too: red hills, red rocks, red canyons… I look at these pics and I’m already nostalgizing – and I was there only a couple weeks ago! Basically it’s the red rocks of Utah / Arizona + the red sands of the Namib desert = more redness than Mars!

But, curiously, it’s not all that well-known by tourists from afar. A bit like Kamchatka. But it should be! No, wait: but then there’d be too many tourists! But no, I can’t keep quiet about this place for such selfish reasons. All righty; conscience cleared, onward!…

Read on: Wadi Rum: red rocks plus red desert, minus the Martians.

Luxor luxury living.

Rounding off my tales from the Egyptian side, I simply had to share with you my impressions of the hotel we stayed at in Luxor – the Sofitel Winer Palace Hotel. It’s so wonderful it even has its own Wikipedia page! ->

It’s an old colonial hotel built more than a century ago – and you can tell that as you walk inside: there’s a separate, service entrance on the ground floor for luggage and servants, while the guests – the aristocracy and the like – walk up a flight of grand carpeted stairs to enter:

Read on…

The ornate topology of old English hotels.

It’s been a while since the last instalment of my tales-from-the-places-to-stay-side (hotels tag), mostly due to the fact that the places I’ve been staying in of late have been nothing to write home – or on a blog – about. But that changed recently, when we were in London!…

We stayed a night at the mighty Mitre hotel, which is right next-door to Hampton Court Palace, as it’s the perfect location for starting out early on the sixth leg of the Thames Path!…

A traditional English hotel:

  • Ornate if a little puzzling topology of the interior spaces;
  • Thin, steep, ancient, wooden, creaking staircases!
  • Old English musty-musky rug-and-fireplace smells (+ sounds);
  • You could shoot a period drama here with hardly any adjustments or decorations!

Read on…

Light at the end of the… reactor!

The other week a group of colleagues and I were up in St. Petersburg on business. And in among our busy schedule while there we paid a useful and informative visit to the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant. And it was there I got my first glimpse of Cherenkov radiation (and you thought radiation was invisible?), which I’d dreamed of doing for years. I also stood on the roof of a working reactor of RBMK (Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosti Kanalniy, meaning ‘high-power channel-type reactor’). An unforgettable experience!

Note: since there’s absolutely no photography allowed at any nuclear facility, the photos below are all taken from the internet.

So, the main thing: Cherenkov radiation. In case you haven’t clicked the link, here’s what it says about it on its Wikipedia page: ‘Cherenkov radiation is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity (speed of propagation of a wave in a medium) of light in that medium’ (the links –added by me).

And you can actually see this wonder of physics – and beautiful it is too: a fluorescent blue in the core of a nuclear reactor in cooling fluid. The spectacle is a cosmically fantastic one…

(photos from Wikipedia and here)

Read on…>