Tag Archives: must see

[*see the last-but-one paragraph.]

Of late my blogposts have been coming forth in series. There have been Kimberley 1-7, there are the Top-Places-themed posts coming up, and now, here – the first post of another series: on Saint Petersburg – the Window to Europe…

Here we go!…

First – a bit of a long-winded intro. Long-winded, moi?

For some unknown reason I recently decided to tot up the number of cities in Russia I’ve been to. I mean just cities, not towns – so, let’s say, places with at least 100,000 folks living there. And I also mean cities I’ve properly visited: in which I stayed at least a few days. Accordingly, ‘passed through’, ‘saw its airport waiting for a connection’, even ‘quickly checked out its kremlin’, etc. all don’t count.

It turns out that my total for Russia is 14 cities. Listed from west to south to north to east, they are: Kaliningrad, Pskov, Velikiy Novgorod, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Rostov-on-Don, Novorossiysk, Kazan, Saratov, Volgograd, Sochi, Yakutsk, Novosibirsk, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski.

Of course there have been other towns and cities I’ve been to, but they don’t get included in my total due to the above-mentioned exception rules. So, ‘visited’ towns and cities not making the list include the following:

Uryupinsk, Kozmodemyansk, Dmitrov, Dubna, Kolomna, Torzhok, Kozelsk, Kem, Belomorsk, Kholmsk, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Lukhovitsi, and many, many more…

I then wondered what such a list but of US cities would look like… Woh: 16! Two more than in Russia:

Anchorage, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Chicago, Louisville, Dallas, Austin, Boston, New York, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Orlando, Miami.

The ‘barred’ cities and towns for the US are: Honolulu (Hawaii), Valdez (Alaska), Sedona (Arizona), Palo Alto & San Jose (California), El Paso (Texas), Page (Arizona), Key West (Florida) and many others (even our office in Woburn (Massachusetts) – disallowed!).

Hmmm, let’s see… the USA has just under double the population of Russia (320 million and 140 million, respectively). That means one city of Russia should have a coefficient of two when comparing the two nations’ visited cities… No, that doesn’t work: then I’d have been to the ‘most cities’… in Singapore! (with its population of 5.5 million, 25 times smaller than Russia).

Let’s look at some of the populations of countries whose cities I’ve visited…

Norway – five million souls, and I’ve been to two cities – Oslo, the capital, and Bergen; that is, twice as many as in Singapore. Where else?…

…New Zealand! – 4.4 million persons. We acclimatized and slowly strolled about in Auckland, and spent a night in Christchurch and closely inspected its highlights the next day. Then there was Wellington and Dunedin where we bedded down one night each, but no inspecting – so they don’t count.

Do we have a less-than-2,000,000-population country in the visited list? Yes!…

…Gabon! 1.6 million Gabonese, and I was in Libreville for a few days just six weeks ago. Cyprus! Limassol and… Nicosia and Pathos only passed by – meaning Cyprus not a competitor! (Although there’s just over a million population there). Andorra! Been, strolled, skied – 85,000. But who’s the champion? Monaco! Monte Carlo. Clear leader. 30,000 population. And I’ve been there many, many times.

So, if you take into account a city’s country’s ‘handicap’ coefficient, get to Monte Carlo. It equals 4500 cities in Russia or 10,000 towns in the US. Oh, something isn’t right there. The method’s all wrong. We could take into account economic coefficients, geographic area coefficients… but no; I’m already a bit tired of all this, and what I’ve already written turned out to be way too long…

OK, enough math mirth :).

Experimental comparison ramblings aside, recently… I was in Saint Petersburg (note to US readers: the original one)!

The splendid, saintly, seductive, sensuous, statuesque St. Petersburg. I was last there seven years ago, in the summer of 2008. We had our partner conference there. And since then every year I’d kept promising our Peterites I’d be coming back soon, but always shamefully failing to do so.

Seven years I’d been promising. In the meantime we’d opened an office there, we’d then moved to smarter premises, and now 80 KLers work there diligently for the good of the company and the world. A lot has changed, and I was always was promising but dragging my feet. Well, at last, I finally made it up there! Hurray – I’m writing this in St. P: one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

So, what have we here that was here last time? The Neva‘s still flowing through the city, there’s Nevsky, St. Isaac’s, the Admiralty building, Peter and Paul Fortress, and the Astoria; the bridges still open and Petergof is still a real crowd-puller.

Read on: What else was new?…

Hi all!

Many of you have probably noticed that I get around this globe of ours rather often. More often than not this getting around is for business (meetings, conferences, speeches, etc.), but I normally try and fit in a bit of free time too so I can go and inspect this or that place of interest nearby. Sometimes this is a mere ‘see, take pics; sorted; next!‘. Other times it’s a matter of seriously studying some seriously amazing natural and/or historical phenomena.

As I’d look at all these wonders of the world, I’d often think to myself: ‘everyone should see these’. I’d then normally get to thinking ‘what else needs to be seen in this world?’ What are the most interesting and breathtaking places on the planet? And once upon a time (many years ago) I was handed a ‘Top-100 Most Beautiful Places in the World’, or something like that. Around the same time I also saw a TV program called the ‘Тop-20 Places to See Before You Die” (again, or something like that).

After viewing both, the first thought that struck me was, ‘these ain’t right’, and it occurred to me that the writers/program makers probably hadn’t really seen much of the world at all, let alone be qualified to write lists on the best places in it. So it was there and then when I decided to intervene directly and come up with my own list – ‘of the very best and most interesting places on the planet, which all need visiting one day – if you’ve the time and cash to spare’ (or something like that).

New Zealand

More…

As mentioned in my previous post, in this one I’ll quickly go over what we didn’t see in Kimberley, but really wanted to.

Since Kimberley is a truly titanic territory, seeing it all in three days (a mere long weekend) is simply impossible. However, I was assured we did get in all the best bits of the territory. Also, another important objective was reached: Now I know where, when and specifically how inspecting the place’s natural beauty spots needs to be done. Thus, the below material should be taken as a plan of action for future visits…

So, herewith, some pointers for how best to plan and organize a sightseeing vacation in Kimberley, Australia:

– Season to visit: April-May – right after the rain season; so as to see the waterfalls at their best – in full gusto.
– Micro-timing of the trip: when there’s either a new or full moon; so as to see the tides at their best – at their maximally extreme.
– To have one or two days’ plane or coach excursions; so as to see all the sights described and photo’d in my Kimberley posts 1-6.
– To charter a ship for, say, 10 days (preferably with a helicopter, or to come to an agreement with a local chopper company).
– Sail on the ship from Broome to Wyndham (or nearby – wherever the ship can moor); so as to be able to inspect all the most significant coastal beauty.

… And those most significant coastal beauties are as follows:

1. King Cascade, somewhere on this river. (Surprisingly, the Internet has little to say about or show of this place.) It’s around 200km (as the crow flies) northeast of the Horizontal Falls. The few pics on the net are here.

Source

More…

G’day folks!

I’m back – with tales from the outback…

In today’s installment, a bit of narrative, but mostly just lots of pics – both from up in the air and on the ground.

The landscapes here are stupefying. Endless horizons and beaches, islands, savannah, rock formations, cliffs. There’s so much to take in… so much to, perhaps, paint. Shame, say, Turner or Constable never made it down here.

Rerad on: Bodacious baobabs…

Each year at the end of May through early June, Sydney goes all visually vivid of a night. Vivid Sydney comes to town – a festival of ‘light, music and ideas’ with lots more besides. It kinda takes over the whole city: The famous Opera House gets all hallucinatory, there’s a laser show in Darling Harbour, and buildings and bridges get made over with bizarre visuals projected onto them.

Read on: Popular means hordes of folks…

A few words about the vehicle that transported us about in Utah. And let’s not forget the super chauffeur…

Here she is, a classic of the genre, giving the Land Rover Defender a run for its money: the Toyota Land Cruiser. Quite an old one at that. Only demonstrates the ruggedness of this remarkable 4×4:

At first I wondered why the need for such large wheels and tires…

… I quickly found out: Extreme off-roadness!

Read on: unevenness, rocks, boulders, jaggedness and steep slopes…

Why this national park is called the Arches is a rhetorical question. But if you haven’t been following this mini-on-the-road series from Utah, then read this.

Yes, you want huge natural rock arches – you need to come here. There’s just so much awesome archness here. Wikipedia says there are as many as 2000 here, ranging from the meager to the massive, and from the weird to the wonderful. In our day here we managed to see just nine! They were: Surprise, Skull, Delicate, Tower, Skyline, (the two) Windows, Turret and Double Arch.

Let me jump in here at the deep end: the most beautiful and most famous (and that takes into account desktop wallpaper:) arch of them all is… this one here – Delicate Arch:

Read on: 70 spellbinding sights…

The red rocks of Utah – a simply captivating sight; from the outside, that is, which is what we checked out yesterday. Today it was time we had a look at all this from the inside. So off we headed to the Arches National Park‘s Fiery Furnace rocky massif. This is what we saw…

Read on: Woh! Surprise surprise!…

Since the previous day my brain had been variously boggling and boiling. This was eased a little by steam being emitted from said boggling and boiling brain out via my camera, but that alleviation process then went too far, leading poor brain into a state of half dehydration.

The diagnosis sounds like this:

I’ve (finally) been to the canyons of Utah!

Eyeballs fairy exploded, jaws drooped down to waist level, tongues hung out of mouths, minds… simply blown. Cameras – white hot with non-stop use! The latter in fact were the only things that didn’t completely lose the plot. The human beings and their mentioned body parts however just conked – unable to the take in unencompassable – in the red and white canyons of Utah.

Read on: Not bad, eh? This pic was just for starters…

Still in the US toing and froing between cities, we decided to make a quick stop in a town I’d never heard of: Wendover, Utah State. The town houses the nearest airport to the famous Bonneville Salt Flats. A saliently saline splendid spot!

Read on: The mirages on the horizon…