Tag Archives: on the road again

All righty. The Christmas tree’s been taken down, the New Year merriment appears to have vanished, and it’s still very cold and snowy. So what better time for a bit of taking stock in the calm, cold light of day January. Therefore, as per tradition (2015, 2014, 2013), herewith, a cursory glance back over my personal highlights my year…

The first thing I can say is that it was a relatively calm year. In all 92 flights – lagging quite a bit behind the previous year’s record of 116. All the same, a couple of months were very intense aviation-wise: 12 flights in March and 13 in September. On the other hand, I had my first whole month without flying anywhere at all in many years: November.

Now – a bit more detailed:

Read on: Any round-the-world trips?…

After what has possibly been my longest ever ‘stay’ in Moscow (er, but I ‘live’ here:) – a full month! – I recently resumed my habitual routine of not being in the same place country for long. It’s good to be ‘back’; but the downtime in Moscow was great too. But I digress…

Anyway, I eased myself into the business-globetrotting thing steadily – taking not a full leap to the other side of the world, but a mere little jump not all that far away, relatively. And the first thing I noticed after landing that made me all curious was this here sign next to the lift in the offices we were visiting:

Read on: Stairs are there to keep you fit…

Wuhan is a city in central China. And ‘Wuhaa!’, I thought when reading about the place on Wikipedia…

Turns out it’s a ‘sub-provincial city’ despite being (i) thoroughly massive, and (ii) the capital and main administrative center of the Hubei province.

The city covers an area of 8500 square kilometers (five times bigger than London!), and has a population of 10 million (almost equal to London). Even for China, the rate and volume of construction in Wuhan are kinda crazy. Mammoth new districts appearing like mushrooms after the rain… actually more like trees of a forest growing up as everything is (really) high-rise. For now the brand new residential skyscrapers are empty, but when they do get filled up, I reckon the population will easily overtake London + suburbs. That’s ‘sub-provincial’ China for you, folks!

Read on: Security for the people…

The shortest route from Geneva to Milan is through the Mont Blanc Tunnel. I’d long heard about this route, and now I’ve finally had the chance to drive it for myself. And I can report the route’s a nice one. Not very long (only ~320 km), and very picturesque in the French part.

Read on: Mont Blanc in all its glory…

Next up on our tour of Greenland – the town of Ilulissat, 550km north of Nuuk, and 200km inside the Arctic Circle. Yes, that means that in July the sun never sets, which we tested – positively – for ourselves.

There are no roads between Nuuk and Ilulissat (!), so it was back onto one of those small red planes to get up to the town. This is only a good thing as the views out the windows are spectacular – that is, if you manage to get a window seat: air tickets don’t come with an assigned seat as usual, so you have to be up front in the line. But that can be tricky, since they announce the gate number only in Danish, then English Greenlandic (again an example of Greenlandic laidbackness – but this time I wasn’t too happy about it).

We flew with a quick connection in Kangerlussuaq. And that’s where I got lucky: I was allowed to sit in the cockpit all the way to Ilulissat – sat in the third seat behind the other two :).

Read on: the rare cockpit views…

By some quirk of fate I often fly across the North Atlantic. Europe-America-Europe; sometimes Asia-America-Europe; sometimes other, more exotic combinations. Example: sometimes I get to fly over Greenland. Sometimes this is at night – so nothing to report there. Other times it’s by day, but the weather’s typically polar and the visibility’s poor. But just sometimes, very occasionally, I get lucky: jetting over Greenland when it’s sunny and panoramic…

One such time for example was in July 2012: Crazy trip, crazy plane, crazy nice weather.

Fast forward to July 2016, and it’s crazy nice weather again up over the big green white land. But this time I wasn’t just flying over, I was to land and then stay a few days. Hurray!

Read on: inside, deeper, more and more …

Back on Tenerife. Terrific! And since we’d scheduled in a full day to acclimatize before the business part of the trip, it was high time to get behind the wheel and off around those hairpins and up them volcanoes. Naturally!

Now, normally to get to the top of a volcano your need to trek, climb and clamber up it, sometimes for several days (Kilimanjaro, for example). There are a few exceptions, one being Mount Etna, which can be scaled via first a ski-lift then specially equipped buses. Another is Mount Teide on Tenerife. This one’s for reeeaaal lazy tourists.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BHRVkrVh5nD/

Read on: A gentle touch from altitude sickness…

I reckon snooker is the most… progressive of all cue sports. The most fun and enthralling to watch too. It takes cool composure, a sniper’s precision, and strategic cognition to be a successful player. Don’t know the rules? Here they are.

As I told you yesterday, we were at the Riga Masters just recently, and I had the honor of awarding the cup to the winner – this one here:

The start of the final…

Read on: it was a long nail biter…

The other day I experienced my first ever flight on a Sukhoi Superjet 100! Here’s my brief report thereon…

Well, it was… ok. A bog-standard airliner. Small, sprightly. Takes off quickly and gains altitude real quickly i.e., steeply.

Read on: Why snooker and fishing?…

Phew. Another regional partner conference done and dusted. We have quite a few every year: North American (this year in Cancun); Latin America (recently in Bolivia, but this year I sadly couldn’t make it); and APAC (just the other week in Vietnam). There’s also an ‘Emerging Markets’ conference – the one that we’ve just done and dusted, in Barcelona – which covers Latin America (yep, they’re lucky – they get two conferences a year), Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

As always it was as always: meetings, presentations, discussion, negotiations and so on: the serious bit. Then there was the fun bit: a gala dinner, this time in Barcelona’s Maritime Museum. Super place for a super supper :).