Category: Travel

Inspector Sands

I knew about doctor codes, but not Inspector Sands. I wonder would I remember if it actually happened though. :)

Inspector Sands is a code phrase used by public transport authorities in the United Kingdom, including Network Rail and London Underground, to alert staff to a fire alarm without needing to evacuate the station. The exact wording depends on the station and the nature of the incident. For example: “Would Inspector Sands, please report to the operations room immediately.” or “Would Inspector Sands, please report to Platform 2.”

Touching Cloth More Like….

20-odd go-arounds and touch-and-goes at Düsseldorf during Storm Friederike, plus some seriously ballsy landings. I can hear the Irish passengers applauding when the wheels touch down from here.

Quad Flight Over Cork

I can see myself watching this daily for a week, looking for more and more of Cork’s oddities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRgYuK4epfM

What I love most about perspectives like this is the inside of city blocks, the cramped mess of buildings that they end up, but usually with little cubbies of light and even greenery. Speaking of which, I had absolutely no idea there was that much green behind Shandon. None. Really must pop in there some day, I’ve put it off for years.

Well done that man. I’d love to know what quad he has, the handling and video are, again, superb. The comments say it’s DJI Phantom, but given the flight time and distance, I’m skeptical. Whatever it is, it puts the cheap Chinese heap I bought to try to shame. :)

Crossing Congo-Kinshasa in a Landcruiser

I’ve been reading this forum account of a couple travelling all on their lonesome across Democratic Republic of Congo for several days, it’s gripping! This after they’ve already driven tens of thousands of clicks in Africa, Japan, Siberia, Mongolia, the Stans and the Middle East. Here’s the setup, and some photos. It’s a long story with a bit of distraction in comments from other users, but perfectly readable if you ignore everything not posted by RadioBaobab. The only difficulty with the story is that I’ll now be distracted by days of African history on Wikipedia…

Expedition Portal Forum: in 2006 we sold all our belongings literally: ALL, quit our jobs, took all of our saving money and decided to go on a little trip. We had done our homework during the many months/years we had saved up for it and bought and prepared a Landcruiser. I will go into further detail on the preperations later on. We planned to travel for 1 year. People who have done this too will certainly remember the moment when you say goodbye to all your family and friends knowing you will not see them for an entire year. That is a big decision to make. We travelled overland, 25.000km down Africa west route and after 9 months found ourselves in South Africa. We liked the travelling so much and found it such a pitty that we had such little time left to drive back that we started counting our money: Lo-and-behold, if we didn’t do crazy stuff we could extend our 1 year trip with another year. We shipped our car to Japan and from there drove trough Siberian Russia, Mongolia, Central Asia all the stan countries, the middle east back to Africa. Once there, we really longed to visit the East side of Africa and while we were at it we could visit DRC, a country that I have dreamed and read about for so long. So that is what we did. After the traverse of DRC we would find ourselves back on the westcoast and we would drive back north as central as possible via Niger-Algeria which was a pretty daunty route in 2008. We travelled for 715 days non-stop. 100.000km. We never went home or even set foot on the European continent during that time. In fact, we did not have a ‘home’ apart from our car. We had crossed dozens of remote deserts, driven trough some of the most barren mountain ranges in the world, hacked ourway trough many jungles. Returned on our paths many times when we though we were risking it too much. Always unsupported. Always with the two of us. Always with the same car.

Airspace Rebooted

This is a visualisation of the airspace over Europe during and then after the lovely Icelandic ash cloud. It’s just plain terrifying at the end. I’ll pass on being an air traffic controller, thanks.

BBC’s The Box

BBC News: We have painted and branded a BBC container and bolted on a GPS transmitter so you can follow its progress all year round as it criss-crosses the globe. The Box will hopefully reach the US, Asia, the Middle East , Europe and Africa and when it does BBC correspondents will be there to report on who’s producing goods and who’s consuming them.

Mendes & Cork City Council GoCar Car Sharing

This is an absolutely brilliant service. I realise it’s not new, but still, fair balls to Cork City Council for innovating at an Irish level.

Car-pool programme initiated in Cork city (Sunday Business Post)

Residents of Cork city can sign up to share a pool of cars under a new transport initiative.

Cork City Council has entered a partnership with Mendes GoCar, a company that will provide vehicles for car-sharing for periods of as little as one hour.

It is the first time the system has been used in Ireland, but it has been in operation in Switzerland and Germany for 20 years, and for more than ten years in other parts of Europe, Britain and the US.

Private users of the system sign up online and pay a once-off fee of €50, while business customers register for €100 and pay €25 for any additional drivers. All users must have a full licence with at least two years’ driving experience, and have to pay a refundable deposit of €200.

Once authorised, they get a smartcard which unlocks the cars at a particular time, and a customer identification number, which is entered into a handset to start the car. There are eight vehicles in the fleet – six Ford Fiestas, one Ford Focus and one Ford Transit.

(Thanks for the pointer Damien.)