[{"content":"In Luchegorsk I had met this marine guy who worked for the 155 Naval Brigade in Vladivostok. We had a few beers and some food and it was really nice to talk to him. His English was quite good.\nAfter this meeting I never had contact with him again. And then recently I read that the 155 Naval Brigade was involved in the \u0026ldquo;Special Military Operation\u0026rdquo; in Ukraine. Now I got curious. Did this marine guy also go to Ukraine?\nI had one photo of him and me at the restaurant table, so I uploaded this photo to a website named facecheck.id that does facial recognition. You never know.\nuploaded one photo And low and behold: the website came back with a list of hits and the number one hit was a man with a beret.\nnr. 1 hit, with beret I checked the emblem on the beret and bingo, 155 Naval Brigade. So now we have a no. 1 hit, of a man with a beret, and the military unit matches. And the age also matches, roughly. Must be him!\nThe match pointed to a website poteru.net where I could find more info about him. Poteru.net turned out to be a website that lists all Russian casualties of the SMO or Ukraine war. Today (early 2026) the counter is at 186.000.\nigor chestnyh His name was Igor Chestnyh (Честных Егор Александрович), he was a member of the 155 Naval Brigade from Vladivostok, and he had died on 6th March 2022 near Kiev, aged 35. He was in a unit of about 600 men and this unit was wiped out by the Ukrainians, about 300 died.\nhttps://poteru.net/soldier/39665\nThen I checked my phone, was he maybe in my phone? And yes, he was! While in the restaurant I must have put his contacts in my phone, I even had his phone number and email address.\nPoteru.net writes:\nYegor Aleksandrovich Chestny was born on January 14, 1987 in the village of Novopokrovka of the Primorsky Territory.\nAfter graduation, he studied at the Admiral G. Maritime State University. I. Nevelsky, from where in 2005 was called up for military service in the 14th separate guards brigade of special purpose in the city of Ussuriysk.\nHaving passed to service under the contract, he served in the airborne assault battalion of the 155th separate Guards Order of Zhukov to the Marine Corps of the Pacific Fleet.\nThe special military operation was his third military mission. Senior sergeant Yegor Honestkh took the last fight on March 6, 2022 in the Kiev region.*\nThe daughter that I had seen him walking with in Luchegorsk must have been about 13 years old when he died.\n","date":"17 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2026-02-17-about_igor/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"About Igor","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"17 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/colour/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Colour","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"17 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/","section":"Monochrome","summary":"","title":"Monochrome","type":"page"},{"content":"","date":"17 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Posts","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"17 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/russia/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Russia","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"17 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Tags","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"17 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/vladivostok/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Vladivostok","type":"tags"},{"content":"This is a monument in Ukmerge, Lithuania. Originally it was standing on the main square right in front of the municipality building in the city center. But when the Soviets were kicked out in 1991, the Lithuanians decided it was time to kick this monument as well, so they moved it.\nmonument in ukmerge But where to? Because, well, maybe it was placed by the wrong people, but the monument itself was not so bad after all. So instead of throwing it in the dump, they moved it to about 500 meters down the road towards Kaunas. Not the prime location where it was before, but still not a bad place. Very visible for all traffic between Ukmerge and Kaunas.\nIt has been standing there since 1992, They maintained the small plot of grass around the monument and they even added a sign that explains the history of the monument. Until February 2022 when they decided it was time for a little paint job. Instead of being a relic from the past, the monument is again the living expression of todays real-world.\nYou see the slightly lighter yellow patch on the knees in the middle? That\u0026rsquo;s where somebody painted a white \u0026lsquo;Z\u0026rsquo;, and then the Z was covered with yellow again one day later.\nWhat about the empty spot on the main square in the city center? This is what they placed there.\nnew monument in ukmerge new monument in ukmerge With the Russians gone you might think the days of brutalist design were over as well, but no\u0026hellip;\nukrainian colours on the new monument ","date":"14 May 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2022-05-14-monument_in_ukmerge/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Monument in Ukmerge","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"14 May 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/ukraine/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Ukraine","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"10 May 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/lithuania/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Lithuania","type":"tags"},{"content":"The current war in Ukraine brings back bad memories for older Lithuanians, and very strong sentiments for the younger ones.\nlenin Lithuanians were deported to Russia in great numbers between 1945 and 1952. About 130.000, or well over 5% of the total population. Most older Lithuanians have friends, neighbors or family member that were deported, and the younger Lithuanians grew up with the idea that Russia is not a friendly neighbor.\nlenin Note that Russia is not the same as Russians. About 10% of the Lithuanians is ethnically Russian and these \u0026ldquo;Russian Lithuanians\u0026rdquo; are quite well integrated. But Russia as a neighbor is something they want to be very careful with.\nstalin The tensions between Lithuania (and the other Baltic countries) and Russia are nothing new. Lithuania was occupied by Russia for most of the 19th century, and only in 1919 did Lithuania manage to become independant. That did not mean all was quiet and well, on the contrary: quite a few Lithuanians supported Russia and some serious infighting started, which lasted until the Ribbentrop-pact in 1939.\npožėla greifenbergeris čarnas giedrys Above is a photo of a statue of four freedom fighters, or terrorist, depending on your political views, from the interbellum period (1919-1939). From left to right:\nKarolis Požėla: born 1896, studied in Estonia, worked for the Red Army. Actively supported Russia en resisted the independant Lithuanian government. Sent to jail several times, and after his seventh arrest, in 1926, he was shot dead.\nJuozas Greifenbergeris: born 1898, studied in Russia. Karolis was a member of the Russian Union of Communists. He supported civil unrest in Klaipeda and in 1926 the Lithuanian government had had enough en he was executed.\nRapolas Čarnas: born 1900, studied in Moscow. Became Financial Officer for the Central Commitee of the All-Union Leninist Communist League of Youth of Lithuania. That long name didn\u0026rsquo;t help, in 1926 he was shot dead.\nKazys Giedrys: born 1891, worked in the USA, and from 1918 became leader of the Commisariat for Lithuanian Affairs in Petrograd. In 1923-24 he was involved in illegal activites in Kaunas and got arrested. Executed in 1926.\nFour young men, in these statues they burst with energy and power, and all ended with a bullet in the head on 27 December 1926. Near Druskininke in Lithuania there is a parc/expo with one-hundred of such statues and bustes, all with freedom fighter or terrorists from the interbellum. Most of them were executed.\nlenin Lithuanians remember with fear and revulsion this period, the second world war, and also later years until Stalin\u0026rsquo;s death in 1953, characterized by nightly knocks on the door, executions, deportations. Today they feel free and secure with NATO article 5 and an EU-membership.\nBut if you tell a Lithuanian that now, so many years after Stalins death, maybe they should try to improve their relation with the big neighbor, they laugh. \u0026ldquo;Totally naive\u0026rdquo; they say, \u0026ldquo;better keep a gun\u0026rdquo;.\nunknown soldier ","date":"10 May 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2022-05-10-lithuanians_and_russians/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Lithuanians and Russia","type":"posts"},{"content":"This is the German graveyard from WW-I, near Nantillois in France. Allied graveyards are perfect displays of well-kept lawns and marble,especially the American graveyards. But the German graveyards look a bit delapidated.\ngerman graveyard near nantillois german graveyard near nantillois german graveyard near nantillois I have seen German graveyards from WW-II in the Ukraine and they look much better, very well maintained.\n","date":"30 January 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2022-01-30-german_graveyard/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"German graveyard","type":"posts"},{"content":"my mother\u0026rsquo;s hands My mother\u0026rsquo;s hands.\n","date":"28 January 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2022-01-28-my_mothers_hands/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Hands","type":"posts"},{"content":"Patiently sitting and watching his mother\u0026hellip;\nwaiting Photo taken with a Huawei P30 phone\u0026hellip; Throw your DSLR in the trash.\n","date":"26 November 2019","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2019-11-26-waiting_for_food/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Patience","type":"posts"},{"content":"My daughter is an experienced sailer. A few weeks ago, while sailing in Friesland, she spotted a sailboat for sale. She knows market prices and it took her less than five minutes to make, what she thought, a good deal.\nsaiing And she was right. It needs some minor repairs, a little paint here and there and she has installed an autopilot, but otherwise this boat is nice. Perfect one cylinder diesel, it goes plop-plop-plop. This is on the Markermeer.\n","date":"4 September 2017","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2017-09-04-sailing_markermeer/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Sailing Markermeer","type":"posts"},{"content":"Nieuwe Waterweg next to the Maerlantkering.\nnieuwe waterweg bij de maerlantkaering ","date":"5 June 2017","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2017-06-05-nieuwe_waterweg/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Maerlantkering","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"5 February 2017","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/biking/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Biking","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"5 February 2017","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/gps/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"GPS","type":"tags"},{"content":"Biking long distances means you will need some kind of navigation aid. Paper maps are mostly gone except as a backup measure. Some people use TomTom-like systems specially designed for bikes, but nowadays you don\u0026rsquo;t need these special tools anymore: your smartphone will do just fine. And it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to be the latest 700 euro supersmartphone, personally I use a Samsung Galaxy S4 from 2013 which my kids say is antiquated.\nThis tutorial will show you to do it. Please note that this tutorial is only for Android-people. If you have an iPhone I can\u0026rsquo;t help you, I am sorry.\nHere is how to do it (with an Android phone).\nBatteries # When using your smartphone as the main navigation aid, you will need extra battery capacity. For a trip in Russia I replaced my standard Samsung battery with a supersize battery, about three times the size (and weight) of the standard battery. The phone now looks like a brick and my kids say it looks hilarious (on top of antiquated), but it will run for three days without a problem. Using the phone for navigation during eight hours still left me with 80% battery capacity.\nAlternatively you could buy spare batteries, or bring a power bank. In some modern phones you can\u0026rsquo;t swap batteries anymore so then the powerbank is the only option. Go check eBay for the possibilities, and search for \u0026ldquo;powerbank\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;extended battery\u0026rdquo;.\nebay powerbank and extended batteries Software # For software I use OsmAnd, and the rest of this tutorial is based on that. There are many alternatives, but I wanted a system that has excellent detailed maps and that can work offline, with downloaded maps. Google Maps is fine too, but you will need internet on the road and depending on where you ride, internet may not be available. I use the Pro version of OsmAnd, I think it costs around 5 euro in the App Store. I forgot why I paid for the Pro version of OsmAnd, the Play Store shows a free version as well so maybe that one works just as well. I find the OsmAnd interface a little quirky so you may need some time getting used to it.\nosmand Preparing Your Trip # I prepare my trips with Google My Maps (not the standard maps.google.com but www.google.com/mymaps, you need to login to your google account). I then do the following:\nprepare a route using the google route planning tools convert kml to gpx import the gpx into OsmAnd. And voilá: OsmAnd will tell me where to go. Here are the steps in more detail.\nPreparing A Route # Google helps me prepare my route. Google Maps has a special section called mymaps, and this allows you to create your own maps, and export these maps to KML-files. To get there, I search for \u0026ldquo;google my maps\u0026rdquo; and then some links will show up such as https://www.google.com/mymaps and https://mymaps.google.com/. You will need to login to your Google account and then you end up on a website that looks a bit like the normal Google maps, but with some extra functionality.\nSomewhere there should be a button or link that says \u0026ldquo;create a new map\u0026rdquo; and then you end up in an interface like this:\ngoogle maps mymaps Now click the \u0026ldquo;Add directions\u0026rdquo; button (hover your mouse over the buttons to find this button), enter start and finish addresses, and Google will create your route.\ngoogle maps mymaps Most of the time you will need to change the route a little here and there. For starters, Google defaults to a route for cars, and since we will bike, you must change a setting and Google will recalculate.\ngoogle maps mymaps Also you can drag the route to make changes. For instance, Google tries to send me through the Russian enclave near Kaliningrad between Poland and Lithuania, but I want to avoid that area so I drag a little to make sure we stay just South of the border.\ngoogle maps mymaps When all is ready we click on the three-button menu and then \u0026ldquo;Export to KML\u0026rdquo;. Voilá, first step is done.\ngoogle maps mymaps Convert KML To GPX # Your KML-file must be converted into a GPX-file. This is an easy step, there are online tools everywhere, for instance at https://www.kml2gpx.com/. Upload your KML-file, then download your GPX-file, and bingo, second step is done.\nImport GPX Into OsmAnd # The last step is getting your GPX-file into OsmAnd. There are various ways to do it, depending on the make and model of your phone. On some phones you can connect via a USB-cable to your PC or Mac and then your file browser will show you the contents of your phone memory. Personally I use a small piece of software on my phone called \u0026ldquo;wifi file transfer pro\u0026rdquo; that allows me to upload files to my phone via a web browser. All methods are ok.\nBut the question is: where do you store your file? On my Android I store the GPX-files here:\nexternal memory / Android / data / net.osmand.plus / files / tracks /\nbut on your phone the Android folder may be somewhere else, not on the external memory. If you find a folder net.osmand.plus but it does not have a subfolder files/tracks/ then create these folders with the exact names as above: files/tracks/.\nOnce you\u0026rsquo;re in your tracks folder, just drop your newly created GPX-track. We\u0026rsquo;re almost done.\nDisplaying The Map # Now on to displaying the map on your smartphone screen. Start OsmAnd, open the menu and click \u0026ldquo;Configure map\u0026rdquo;, then click \u0026ldquo;GPX tracks\u0026rdquo;. And yes, your track should be there somewhere. Select the track and go back to the main screen. You should see your route, in blue.\nNow click the navigation arrow at the bottom, and OsmAnd will ask whether it should use the displayed track for navigation directions. Select the track, click the Go-button, and off we go. Have a nice trip.\ngoogle maps mymaps ","date":"5 February 2017","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2017-02-05-gps_bike_navigation/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"GPS navigation on the bike","type":"posts"},{"content":"cow barn in khabarovsk Cow barn near Khabarovsk. Outside -25 degrees Celcius. Inside -5 degrees? I didn\u0026rsquo;t measure, but it felt very warm.\n","date":"14 April 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2015-04-14-cow_barn_in_russia/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Cow barn near Khabarovsk","type":"posts"},{"content":" I had zero problems with my bike. The Shimano gear system worked flawlessly, absolutely faultless. I remember going to France when I was 16 years old with the old metal shifters on the frame and I was worried that the modern plastic clicky things are too fragile and complicated and easily break. Not so! The Shimano system worked perfect in the cold. Not one single hickup. balaclava The brakes, also Shimano, worked fine too, no problems. I read in the forum that oil based disc brakes could freeze up, but they didn\u0026rsquo;t. To be honest I do not understand why they would freeze up, it is the same DOT4-fluid that is in every Toyota and Lada, their brake lines don\u0026rsquo;t freeze up either. shoes bought in vladivostok, with extra insulation inlays. but it was not enough. next time I must add neoprene covers, or buy something with real fur I was a little lucky with the weather. Sure it was cold, but I had no snowfall, and only moderate headwind. Could have been a lot worse. gloves I got from the family in kiinsk, made from some kind of wilt. very simple and very effective. i wore them all the time Russians are a little distant when you meet them, but they open up rapidly. They are all willing to help once you talk to them. In restaurants they very easily make contact, wodka helps. Wodka, some bacon, black bread and onion, I have come to appreciate the stuff.\nThe traffic, at least in that region of Russia, is very ok. YouTube is rife with dashcam car crash movies from Russia and I have seen bad accidents in Ukraine, but my experience here was very positive. Relaxed, no hurry, no horning, they wait for crossing pedestrians. It feels just as safe as in The Netherlands. The only accident I saw was a small fender bender thing in Khabarovsk, that was it.\nThe Russians love paperwork. I order a coffee in a caffee-bar, so the waitress writes a note: one coffee, milk, sugar. Then she turns around and behind her a small window opens where there is another girl who makes the coffee. I see this girl also writing down: one coffee, milk, sugar. Finally when I pay I get a handwritten bill. Three pieces of paper that must cost more than the coffee itself. There is two people running the bus: one drives, the other does the tickets. Halfway the ride a third gets in who counts the passengers then matches it with the accounting of nr. 2. There is personnel sitting and waiting everywhere. An average store that we would run with a staff of ten, they will have at least thirty people employed. There are shop assistants sitting behind counters polishing their nails, lovely. I must say it makes for a very stressless environment. Nobody is in a hurry, everybody has time for you. Maybe it is not efficient but after a few days in Russia you start wondering if they are really doing it wrong. Maybe not.\nEvery railway station has not only guards but also these metal detector portals. The portals beep all day and nobody cares, they just let them beep. After the incident with the dogs I had a big knife visibly mounted on my bike. Nobody blinked an eye. my knife, ready to slash a dog. didn\u0026rsquo;t need it fortunately My camera worked flawlessly. I had an Olympus E-P2 with two fixed focal length lenses, a wide angle convertor, eyefi-card and three spare batteries. Worked without one single problem, kept taking photos even at -30º Celcius, except that my fingers would freeze to the camera and the SD-card produced a write error twice. I am not sure the write-errors were caused by the cold, but in both cases the camera worked fine again after a few hours. This camera can survive a drop, it has no touchscreen, just dials and buttons and I could take photos with my gloves on. olympus e-p2. turned out to be very reliable I had an Anker battery pack in my Samsung Galaxy S4. The standard battery pack is 2700 mAh, the Anker is 7800 mAH. I had two GPS trackers running on the phone continuously, one writing my track to the SD-card every minute and the other reporting my position to the internet every ten minutes so that if the tiger would show up, my family would at least know where to retrieve the bike. Also I used it with OsmAnd, an OpenStreetMap mapping application that has the maps on the phone and does not need internet, to monitor my progress and position. Usually by the end of an eight hours ride I would still have 70% or 80% battery left. Better be safe than sorry. I never looked at the paper maps I had with me. osmand and openstreetmap.org has very detailed maps My drinks froze regularly. Whatever I packed on the outside of my bike packs in plain air would freeze in no time. Other bottles I would pack inside a bunch of clothes in the bike packs, they would last a little longer but not the full eight hours of a ride. I had a bottle in the inside pocket of my outside coat, that bottle would also freeze. I tried different products, not only Coca Cola, but even stuff that was green and yellow and looked very unhealthy and full of nasty chemicals. It all froze, just like Coca Cola. The final solution was to keep a bottle on the inside of my arm sleeve, near my arm pit. That worked!\nIf you have an internet contract with our Dutch provider KPN, forget about getting any real connectivity. Every Russian kid has his nose in a 4G smartphone, but KPN-clients get nothing. I made a few calls to the Helpdesk in The Netherlands but they had no solution. I never got anything faster than 2G, on manual settings that I had to change constantly, and then KPN sent me a 35 euro bill for no service. When I came back I filed a complaint and their response was an arrogant boilerplate letter, saying it could be a mix of factors, you know, my phone, the weather, Putin, whatever. In their emails KPN couldn\u0026rsquo;t even get my name right. Goodbye KPN, I am already on T-Mobile.\nyep, no contact. no helpdesk. no kpn kpn can\u0026rsquo;t get my name right, they think i am mr. bergen world map minus north \u0026amp; south america ","date":"29 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-29-vladivostok-other-observations/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Vladivostok, some more remarks","type":"posts"},{"content":"At nine in the morning the camera crew knocked on the door. They did a small interview, we made one shot outside, and that was it. The result was shown on Ussuriysk TV, I think it was a local station. The result is here:\nwww.telemiks.tv\nlenin in ussuriysk I had told them I would not bike all the way to Vladivostok, so after the interview I went to the train station and took the train to Vladivostok. I felt a little guilty about that to be honest: being on TV with a bike story, then when the camera stops going with the train. But no more biking, Ussuriysk was the end of the biking part.\nussuriysk railway stationx So how much of the 750 kilometers did I actually ride my bike? Not as much as I wanted: about 400 kilometers. There was one stretch that I skipped because I thought it was too risky, also I allowed myself a day off to walk to China (unsuccesfully) and finally I just ran out of time. But if I ever do this again I think I could do the full 750 km in two weeks.\nfishermen on the way to vladivostik. at sea just off the coast they drill a hole in the ice and go fishing. the long bags they carry have the ice drills. and some wodka, i guess Just a little more training, and different packing. Sixty percent of the stuff I had with me on my bike I never needed, such as a sleeping bag for instance. So next time I can take one overcoat instead of two, no sleeping bag, fewer trousers, fewer but better gloves, fewer caps but just the right ones, etcetera. One thing that I willl certainly change is my shoes. I bought shoes in Vladivostok that I thought were warm enough, but I must get something even better and maybe also add neoprene covers.\nthis is the ice drilling equipment you see in every shop ","date":"24 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-24-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Train to Vladivostok","type":"posts"},{"content":"Bike ride Sibirtsevo-Ussuriysk, 80 kilometers. This was the longest trip, but I figured that if I would leave a little earlier I could make it. However, it turned out to be cold, really cold. This was the coldest day so far, below -30º Celcius. Because of cold feet I had to walk a lot, and it took me three hours to cover the first ten kilometers. This was not going well. My brother in The Netherlands was following my GPS tracker via the internet and he sent me an SMS message, asking if I planned to keep walking all day. My fingers were so cold I couldn\u0026rsquo;t type an answer.\ncold Later that morning the temperature went up to -29º Celcius, but if you go downhill that is still anything but comfortable. During one particular downhill run I braked all the time because if I did anywhere above twenty kilometers per hour I would just freeze to my bike and my brain would loose contact with my feet. Halfway the downhill run my cheeks hurt a little, but after a minute it got better.\nworker fixing my bike. we\u0026rsquo;re inside his shop, but better stay fully dressed Or that\u0026rsquo;s what I thought. At the bottom of the hill was a small shop (супермаркет or supermarket) and I went in to warm up a little. From the back came an old babushka. She slowly walked up to me, looked at me for a second, said something in Russian, then lifted her arm and tapped my cheek. And I felt nothing. \u0026ldquo;Pok pok\u0026rdquo; I heard, not good. I tried with my own hands and damn, my cheeks were frozen, completely stiff. She said something like опасно which translates to dangerous and sounds like \u0026ldquo;oppassen\u0026rdquo; which is Dutch and means \u0026ldquo;be careful\u0026rdquo;. See how easy these languages are? But my cheeks were frozen.\nThis was a clear warning. You feel really nothing when you freeze. I added another balaclava after that.\npolicemen that took me to the tire repair shop, and even paid the bill Just before the finish in the village of Mikhaylovka I got a flat tire. On the other side of the road were two police officers with a laser gun. Their speed trap immediately closed, laser gun disappeared in the trunk, and instead they came over to me. One of them spoke a little English. Flat tire, ok, follow us. They took me to a tire shop some 500 meters away, and told the tire guy what to do. They put me in a chair, gave me coffee, paid the repair bill, and disappeared. How is that for police service? These were the policemen from Zavodskaya ul., 1 Mikhaylovka, Primorskiy kray, Russia 692651. If you\u0026rsquo;re in the area, say thank you from me.\nшиномонтаж means something like tire montage In the restaurant in the evening several people introduced themselves asking if it was my bike parked outside. The last one that came to sit next to me said she was a journalist, and was it ok if she sent a camera crew next morning to my hotel room? Sure it is\u0026hellip; Imma gonna be famous on Russian TV!\nin the restaurant everybody wanted to take a photo with me. This guest here is two meters high, two meters wide, he\u0026rsquo;s from the same village as jaws ","date":"23 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-23-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Ussuriysk","type":"posts"},{"content":"Bike ride Spassk-Dalny-Sibirtsevo, 55 kilometers.\nIn this video I say that the temperature is -10º Celcius, but -10 was where the thermometer readout on my speedometer stopped, it could not indicate anything colder. Actually it was about -20º Celcius, but still quite comfortable.\ncold So far I had only seen two other bikes: one man riding a bike in a suburb of Vladivostok, and a young guy riding a bike in Pereyaslavka. Literally two bikes, nothing more.\nshameless selfie. last one, i promise And then, between Spassk-Dalny and Sibirtsevo, I see a bike trail in the snow. You may think it was my own trail because it seems I am looking back, but I am not: I drive on the left-hand side of the road and I look forward. And here is this bike trail. There is another biker!\nPity I never saw this biker in real life. At some point the trail just vanished.\nbike trail! there is another one! diesel 35 rubel/liter, that is about one-third of what we pay in the netherlands ","date":"22 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-22-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Sibirtsevo","type":"posts"},{"content":"Time for a ride in the bus. I decided to skip a stretch and take the bus to Spassk-Dalny. Very comfortable.\nBus station in Dalnerechensk Again I could just throw my entire bike somewhere in the bottom belly of the bus, no problem. Halfway Spassk-Dalny the bus stops at a small market next to the road where you can get Coca Cola, coffee, a sandwich.\nThe sign says вместе вкуснее or tasty together открыто means open. but when you close the window, is it still open? The answer is yes, they close it all the time, so knock-knock if you want a sandwich In Spassk-Dalny I took the hotel opposite the bus station.\nThis hotel had a special feature. After completion of the building of this hotel they must have realized some plumbing was missing, and now that the hotel was ready they had a small problem. Well not in Russia, no problem here. Just run the plumbing on top of the finished floor, then build a box around the pipes, and \u0026hellip; voilá, problem solved. Check the next photo: marvellous engineering.\ningenious solution Behind the hotel was a parking and there somebody had parked his Toyota or Kia with a running engine. You see it more often here, they park the car and leave the engine running. Whether that is out of fear for not being able to get it started again from the cold, or whether they just want to have a nice warm interior is unclear to me. I was told some modern cars have an automat, they start and stop automatically regularly, to keep the engine temperature up.\n","date":"21 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-21-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Spassk-Dalny","type":"posts"},{"content":"Today was my day off, I decided to go to the Chinese border, which is maybe five kilometers from the city. Why I wanted to see the Chinese border I am not sure, just curiosity, I wanted to take a photo of China. I did the same once in Poland when I took a photo of Belorussia. Polish border guards showed up out of nowhere in less two minutes.\nvending machine in the hote The sign says \u0026ldquo;machine doesn\u0026rsquo;t work. And see the sing on the right? Transliterated it reads \u0026ldquo;bufet\u0026rdquo;, easy!\nI took a taxi to a monument [here](https://www.google.nl/maps/place/45%C2%B056%2747.3%22N+133%C2%B041%2715.9%22E/@45.946472,133.687747,791m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x0?hl=en) and then I started walking to the river which is also the border, [here](https://www.google.nl/maps/place/45%C2%B058%2705.9%22N+133%C2%B040%2742.8%22E/@45.9683,133.678558,790m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x0?hl=en\\target=\\ \u0026ldquo;_blank\u0026quot;)\nHowever on Google Maps it is not entirely clear whether you\u0026rsquo;re still in Russia or already in China, and there is a small difference between Google Maps and OSM-maps. After two kilometers, still 700 meters away from China according to Google, I ended up at a fence with a gate and guard with a Kalashnikov, [here](https://www.google.nl/maps/place/45%C2%B056%2722.6%22N+133%C2%B040%2732.8%22E/@45.939623,133.675788,791m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x0?hl=en\\target=\\ \u0026ldquo;_blank\u0026quot;)\nchina must be here somewhere\u0026hellip; What did I want? A photo of China? Ehh\u0026hellip; The guard made a few phone calls, and then an SUV showed up with an officer. Officially this was not ok, but, you know \u0026hellip; come in, five minutes, for coffee. I got in the SUV, we drove to a building some 400 meters away, I got a seat in the officers bureau, and then coffee. I was now still 300 meters from China. The girl that brought coffee spoke perfect English, her mother was an English teacher. After twenty minutes I was told the visit was over and they would bring me back to the gate. Fine. Still no photo, but who cares.\nAnd then, on the way back to the SUV, two men show up in plain clothes, they start talking to the officer and after a few minutes they decide that we must go back into the building, just five more minutes ok?\ngate, guard, kalasjnikov All other photos were deleted from my camera. The sign on the photo says STOP in Latin letters, but they also have signs that say стоп in Cyrillic, they mix it\nThen the interrogation starts. Name, passport, what was the purpose of my trip. Khabarovsk-Vladivostok? OK. How you travel, where is your car? On a bike? Really? A moment of silence, and then: \u0026ldquo;Please, can we see your passport again? Can we look at the photos in your camera? Where is your phone, can we see it? Yes please give it to me.\u0026rdquo;\nIt took about thirty minutes, then the interview was over and, surprise, they brought me back all the way to the hotel. I must say they stayed friendly and polite all the time. But no photo of China.\n","date":"20 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-20-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Walking to China","type":"posts"},{"content":"Luchegorsk-Znamenka, 55 kilometers, or that was the plan.\nstalin is gone, lenin is everywhere. this is luchegorsk Znamenka you will not find on Google Maps, but on Nokia Here maps and on openstreetmap.org you can see it. Although there were no hotels on any of those maps, the marine guy had confirmed to me that there was a hotel in Znamenka, although he had never been there himself because real marines sleep outside in the snow. I was slowly getting used to the cold and this looked like an easier ride. It was, except for the cold. The more I go south the colder it gets, and I had to wear my ski goggles for most of the trip. Also in the afternoon I got some headwind and it was not an easy trip.\nwhere is the tiger? another shameless selfie, and still no tiger But the worst was the hotel. I paid 300 rubel for a room which is just over four euro, that should have raised a red flag. But it was absolutely terrible, it was dirty and total crap, and these people were very unfriendly. I decided to walk away and I didn\u0026rsquo;t even bother to ask my 300 rubel back. I fully understood why the marine guy preferred to sleep outside. Later I found the place on Google with an amazing 3.2-rating, and there are some reviews that you can run through Google-translate yourself, quite hilarious.\nSo I walked back to the main road M60-A370, but I knew I could not make it to the next village Dalnerechensk. Dalnerechensk was still 40 kilometers and it was already five in the afternoon. What to do? Was I going to violate my rule: don\u0026rsquo;t start a trip unless you can walk out of it?\nrussia from the cabin of a minivan driver taking me to dalnerechensk Hitchhiking. I used to hitchhike when I was a student, why not try again? And guess what, the first car, a small van, stopped, what a miracle. We took out the front wheel of my bike, threw everything in the back, and there we went. The van was a UAZ-452, you see these vans everywhere and although they look pre-historic they refuse to fall apart. Four-wheel drive, 2.7 liter 82 hp engine. Within 40 minutes I was in Dalnerechensk where the driver dropped me at a nice hotel. I gave the driver 300 rubel which he accepted, and that was it.\nthis van took me to dalnerechensk This is a UAZ-452, red text is about a road/mobile laboratory\nThe hotel in Dalnerechensk was really nice, one of the better places. Plenty space, all clean. Just the hotel room was rather hot, maybe 25º Celcius, and I can\u0026rsquo;t sleep like that. So when I failed to find the temperature regulator, I finally decided to just open the window. Sorry for that.\nIn the middle of the night I woke up, I felt a little cold. No wonder, it was still 25º Celcius, but this time below zero. Oops! I tried to hide under the blankets for a few minutes, but finally I had to give in, climb out of bed and close the window again. That would have been hilarious: survive a sub-zero bike ride, then freeze to death in a hotel bed.\n","date":"19 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-19-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Znamenka and Dalnerechensk","type":"posts"},{"content":"I woke up a little late, but this wodka stuff is amazing in that it gave me no headache, I felt totally clear. Wow, maybe that\u0026rsquo;s why the Russians drink it, to feel totally clear. Okay then, time for another bike ride. From Bikin I rode to Luchegorsk, about 60 kilometers. Now the area south of Bikin is some kind of nature reserve and there are bears and tigers supposedly. If you go to YouTube and you search for \u0026ldquo;tiger highway bikin\u0026rdquo; you will see a tiger on the highway near Bikin.\nkhabarovsk 219 km, vladivostok 549 km Bears and tigers, right... But hey, not to worry, the bears would be asleep, and the tigers, well... the reason they put these movies on YouTube is because there aren\u0026rsquo;t many tigers on the highway, it\u0026rsquo;s unusual. Tigers don\u0026rsquo;t like highways.\nBut this highway was not very busy. Maybe four cars per hour, max. This thing about the tiger kept revolving in my head, I started worrying a little about the tiger. What if right now the tiger shows up and ... It feels very very lonely out there, Russia is big big big. Sure, four cars an hour is still four cars an hour, on the other hand I am sure a tiger doesn\u0026rsquo;t need fifteen minutes and also I am not used to this kind of emptyness, it was a little uncomfortable. Total silence. No cars, no planes, no birds, nothing. You stop biking and you only hear yourself, breathing, walking. There is nothing else.\nbike parking Instead of getting eaten by a tiger, I got chased by some asshole dogs for about ten minutes. These were not friendly dogs. When they finally left me alone I stopped and digged a big knife from the bottom of my luggage and kept it within reach for the rest of the trip. Next dog is for me\u0026hellip; And when I finally saw Luchegorsk on the horizon I was happy this part was almost over.\nnumbered logs In Luchegorsk I was looking at my GPS to figure out how to get to the hotel. Immediately an SUV stops, man steps out, says he is Igor, can he help? How does Igor know I am a foreigner? Anyway I explain that I need a hotel and he says \u0026ldquo;follow me\u0026rdquo;, brings me straight to a hotel. Super easy, very friendly.\nsame house on google streetview In the evening I walked around a bit to find a restaurant. I asked a man if he knew a restaurant. \u0026ldquo;Sure\u0026rdquo; he said, \u0026ldquo;I will walk you there\u0026rdquo;. He brought me to a restaurant and then of course I invited him for a beer and some talk. He was a navy officer with the marines from Vladivostok and we talked about politics and his work in the navy. He had to laugh about me doing sixty kilometers a day. \u0026ldquo;In the navy we also do sixty per day\u0026rdquo; he said, \u0026ldquo;on foot, in the snow\u0026rdquo;. These people talk very easy and openly. They often told me Putin may have been good for Russia, but they are not sure about the future. The last guy that I talked to was the taxi driver back to the airport in Vladivostok. Ilia, a Russian native speaker, also spoke Chinese, Japanese and English, and his English was totally ok. He told me that he doubted Putin would try to hold on to his power. Referring to the 1961 wall in Germany he felt that now it was the rest of the world building an economic wall around Russia. Putin is popular, but it is not that they don\u0026rsquo;t care and only absorb what\u0026rsquo;s on TV. Most of them that I was able to talk to seemed to be very well informed and I found that their perspective is not very different from mine, the main difference is that they are being lied to by RT and other Russian newspapers, while we are being lied to by the New York Times, CNN, the Dutch NRC and Telegraaf. Of course I only talked to the people that speak English, that\u0026rsquo;s not really representative for all Russians.\nNote: the navy officer has died in Ukraine. More info here.\nIn the hotel they had double windows with two separate frames, you see them in France a lot as well. You can open both frames separately. They put old clothes between te window and the frame to stop the draught, which is very effective until some stupid tourist tries to open the window.\nold clothes as insulation against draft from the windows. simple and effective old clothes ","date":"18 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-18-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Luchegorsk","type":"posts"},{"content":"I didn\u0026rsquo;t bike. I was happy I had survived the previous two days, but the next city was Bikin, 90 kilometers away, temperature had dropped a little more, and the road was hilly. I was sure I could not make it that far, and also I had no idea about hotels halfway, so worst case case I would have to walk 45 kilometers in freezing temperatures. I thought it was too risky and I took the bus to Bikin.\nthe bus to bikin bus windows completely frozen The bus is easy over there, it costs very little, and I could throw the entire bike including packing in the stowage compartment of the bus. That was easy!\nchina is around the corner In Bikin I first saw public water taps. Apparently in some houses it is difficult to keep the water going, so instead they have water taps everywhere in the city.\npublic water tap public water tap An then another thing I had not seen in The Netherlands: when someone enters a café, he or she is being followed by a cloud of mist because of the low temperature outside. Makes for a nice dramatic entrance.\ncloud of mist when someone enters a café In Bikin I found a very nice hotel, brand new, with only one guest: me. A taxi driver took me to a restaurant where six Russians were celebrating a birthday. They spoke a little English, they invited me to their table, they drank wodka at an amazing speed and with each glass they waited for me to finish the previous one. My Russian language skills improved, but say bye bye to next day\u0026rsquo;s bike plans, I was sure I would not be able to ride my bike.\ncity heating in bikin All pipes run above ground for easy access. I guess once underground no way you have access for maintenance or repair\n","date":"17 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-17-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Bikin","type":"posts"},{"content":"I rode from Khor to Vyazemsky, about 55 kilometers. It is not a long trip and while the temperature was below -20º Celcius, there was little wind and a blue sky. In total I think it took me four hours to do the 55 kilometers so speed was low. Why so slow? Low temperature, four layers of clothing, icy road, one centimeter of snow on the road, and thirty kilo luggage on my bike. OK maybe twenty, I didn\u0026rsquo;t weigh it, but it was a lot. Also I can\u0026rsquo;t go to fast because I don\u0026rsquo;t want to sweat. If you start sweating you run the risk that clothes freeze up, so I should go slow and avoid sweating, that\u0026rsquo;s one thing I learned on www.bikeforums.net. Later I re-read the first answer to my post on www.bikeforums.net, it was by a member named erig007, and he wrote: \u0026ldquo;Unless you have some kind of experience doing 800km in a week at those temperatures is a very difficult challenge. Everything is harder and slower when riding in this kind of cold weather. Chain grease freeze, your layering prevent your leg from moving, tires roll less well, cooling your body become less efficient because of the extra layers, roads are bumpy, snowy\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;. Erig007 was very right.\nhighway, 35 kilometers to go in a straight line The road was clean, but I didn\u0026rsquo;t ride on the asphalt, instead I used the shoulder, with a little snow still. There\u0026rsquo;s not that many cars, but the shoulder felt safer.\nThe last ten kilometers were particularly difficult. It feels like riding through very thick air, in slow motion. You breathe and breathe and you still run out of oxygen. I had cold hands and cold feet regularly and I had to get of my bike and walk until they were warm again.\nfreighttrain These train bring minerals and oil to Vladivostok. Each train is at least two kilometers long, and I think this line alone has tens of them every day\nI slowly got better at keeping my hands warm, but my feet remained a problem. Just before Vyazemsky I fell over on a road that resembled an ice skating rink, but no damage to the bike.\nshameless selfie On previous photos I was still driving on the right hand side of the road, but actually it is much safer to drive on the other side against the traffic. You can see the trucks coming, so I switched to the other side\nIn Vyazemsky I was supposed to go to the railway station (still all instructions from the family in Kiinsk), hand one note to the girl in the ticket office, who would then call somebody else, and then I had a second note from Kiinsk for this second person, and what was supposed to happen next I don\u0026rsquo;t know.\nVyazemsky railway station This scheme obviously was too complicated and fell apart at the first girl who started explaining to me that the second person had stopped working there long ago, that the phone numbers were wrong, etcetera. Well no problem, they had a hotel in Vyazemsky and one of the guards walked me to the hotel, one kilometer away. They have plenty guards everywhere, in hotels, restaurants, railway stations, bigger supermarkets, everywhere there are men and sometimes women sitting on chairs doing nothing but watching.\nrestaurant. two waitresses, one or two cooks, one guest In the evening I needed to find a restaurant. The woman in the hotel reception started her car and drove me to one. While I had dinner she visited a friend nearby, when I was ready she was waiting for me in the car outside. You will not find such treatment anywhere in Europe. Next morning I needed breakfast and this hotel did not serve breakfast. No problem, for me she made an exception: I was invited into her office and I got tea, sandwiches, cheese, sausages, everything.\n1 My hotel room. Not much, but there is only one hotel in Vyazemsky\nThis time I was not the only guest: in the room next to mine slept three workers. They had left their radio on max volume, and had fallen asleep. At two in the night I was fed up and walked into their room to switch off the radio. They couldn\u0026rsquo;t care less, one opened his eyes and gurgled a little but they were too drunk to talk.\nbreakfast Here a link to Vyazemski station by night. Photo made by Dong-Hyun Park who spends his life placing images from around the world on Google Streetview.\n","date":"16 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-16-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Vyazemsky","type":"posts"},{"content":"After these two days in Kiinsk I made my first bike ride. Important day, now the trip had started for real. Russians have a saying \u0026ldquo;you better have twenty friends than twenty rubel\u0026rdquo; and therefore I was not allowed to go to a hotel. Instead the family where I stayed made a phonecall with a friend named Tamara in Khor and I was supposed to ride to Tamara\u0026rsquo;s house, only 37 kilometers away. 37, Yup, I can do that. I got her address on a piece of paper and her house was marked on the GPS on my phone. Should not be difficult.\nBut the bike ride to Khor was. -23º Celcius, and by the time I was not even halfway in Pereyaslavka I was already exhausted and cold and I had to spend half an hour warming up in a shop and walk around on the street stamping my feet. I had done only ten kilometers and look how bad it was. These temperatures are scary. My Coca Cola had frozen up already so I had to buy a new bottle and protect it better.\nmy coke, frozen before I had even started The second part of the trip was not much better. My average speed was low, around fifteen kilometers an hour. It is not that easy to bike with two layers of thermal underwear, one blue jeans and heavy duty pants on top.\nIn Khor I easily found Tamara\u0026rsquo;s house. I had OpenStreetMaps on my phone, just follow the arrow, easy. Tamara I found sitting outside her house on a wooden bench in -25º Celcius, patiently waiting for me. I estimated she was about 75 years old, yet she must have been sitting there in the snow for an hour or more, waiting for me, making sure I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t miss her house. Tough! I don\u0026rsquo;t think Tamara ever visited www.bikeforums.net.\ntamara I was not allowed to leave the bike outside so had to take it inside the appartment. Tamara gave me borsch and bread and some wodka, and when I had eaten enough she started to do some real cooking for me: pelmeni, blini, more bread, more soup, well in Russia it never stops. And more wodka.\nBefore she got to work in the kitchen, Tamara installed me in front of her TV with DVD-player. She had two DVD\u0026rsquo;s, and the one I got to see was a documentary about St. Petersburg from 1970. It was mostly camera shots panning over buildings and parcs, with a Russian voice explaining what was so special about these buildings and parcs. After fifteen minutes I thought I had seen all buildings and parcs in Petersburg, but no, the DVD lasted longer than that. Much longer. Luckily there was wodka.\nAfter forty minutes buildings and parcs I explained to Tamara that I had to go to the supermarket, and I bought her some chocolates, sweets, salmon and other things. And Tamara was really very nice and friendly. These people are amazingly friendly and welcoming. That\u0026rsquo;s what I find so special over here: their industry may be gone, their Lada\u0026rsquo;s rotten, but they are friendly and they share.\nbike in tamara\u0026rsquo;s appartment ","date":"15 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-15-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Khor, Pereyaslavka and Tamara","type":"posts"},{"content":"On the 9th I took the train to Khabarovsk, an eleven hour train ride. These trains are comfortable, relaxing and they are not expensive, I paid 40 euro for 800 kilometers. I shared a cabin with three other passengers. Some spoke a little English. Each wagon has an attendant that makes sure we have blankets and coffee and tea. There is a hot water machine in each wagon, an impressive piece of equipment.\nhot water machine Hot water machine. Russian technology, looks dangerous and hisses, but works fine\nThe trains stops at major cities, but there are not that many on the 800 kilometer line, we stopped maybe six times in total. Everything over 20.000 inhabitants is major.\na beer Having a beer with another passenger. Many speak some English. Note again the mixing of Cyrillic and Latin alphabets on the labels\nSome passengers speak English. For sure there are more Russians that speak English, than there are Europeans that speak Russian. Unless you add the Russians that are in Europe because there are more Russians in Europe than there are Europeans in Russia. Read that again.\nSome railway stations have platforms, others don\u0026rsquo;t so you use a small ladder to get in and out of the train. At most stations the train halts for about five minutes and everybody gets out, smokes a cigarette, and then we go again.\nrailway station Railway station somewhere halfway\nKhabarovsk has 580.000 inhabitants. It is on the Amur river, which is also the border with China. The river was frozen so technically you could walk to China. I walked around a bit in the city center, visited a few churches, shopping centers, and then one museum which is unusual for me because one thing I always try to avoid is musea. Dead stuff on display, not for me.\ndairy farm Dairy farm. Freezes inside the barn\nFortunately the war museum that I wanted to visit was closed. That is, the door was open, but when I entered there were six women inside telling me they were closed. I wanted to walk out already but then they changed their minds, on second thought I could come in, no problem. They had a display of knights armor, copies of weapons used, pictures of great battles, portraits of generals, that kind of stuff.\nI stayed one day with a family that I had never met before, and then I spent another two days with relatives of this family in Kiinsk, which is a small village close to the Chinese border.\nkindergarten Kids on their Kindergarten playground. Hardcore Russian kids, they don\u0026rsquo;t mind a little cold\nThere is nothing in Kiinsk, except cold air. One night it was -35º Celcius and I wanted to go to the toilet which was outside at the end of the yard, maybe forty meters. First I tried to get there in my underwear, but after five meters I remembered there was a guard dog that maybe wouldn\u0026rsquo;t recognize me in my underware, for sure that would be a deadly mistake. Also -35º Celcius is just too cold, even if you make it to the toilet you will have nothing left to pee with. I went back inside and I spent a good fifteen minutes getting dressed. That was another moment when I thought this whole bike trip was maybe not a good plan.\nkindergarten Inside the Kindergarten, shoes on the heating pipe. The pipe rund inside the building and not in the wall which makes sense: no energy loss\n","date":"9 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-09-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Train to Khabarovsk","type":"posts"},{"content":"7th and 8th January is Orthodox Christmas. My agenda: buy a train ticket to Khabarovsk, go shopping for extra shoes and gloves, and attend a mass in the Pokrovsky Cathedral.\nI start with buying the train ticket. In the Netherlands all websites warn that train tickets must be purchased over the internet in advance, because once in Russia you pay double prices and the trains are fully booked.\nAll nonsense. I walk up to a cashier who asks when do I want to travel. On the 9th? OK, and do I pay in cash or credit card? 2600 Rubel please. That\u0026rsquo;s less than half the price I would have paid on the internet.\nBut there is one difficulty with buying a ticket locally and it has to do with the precise timing. For whatever reason all clocks on the main Russian railway stations show Moscow time. Figure this: you\u0026rsquo;re walking outside the railway station and your phone says 10:00 in the morning. You enter the railway station and the clock on the wall reads 03:00. Yes, that is the time difference between Moscow and Vladivostok. Now you tell the cashier you want to leave in two day around 8 in the morning. So she prints a tickets and it says: leave just after midnight.\nIt requires some mental acrobatics to get this right. Look at the next photo, taken inside the Vladivostok railway station. The exif-data in my camera say it is 7th January, 03:39, that is Amsterdam time. In Vladivostok it is nine hours later i.e. 12:39, lunchtime. And indeed, I was at the railway station somewhere around noon. Now check the clock on the wall: it reads 05:39. Yep, that\u0026rsquo;s 05:39 Moscow time again. Handy, no? I think no.\nmoscow time Moscow time on the clock. See this couple looking at a phone? I bet they\u0026rsquo;re trying to figure out how much time left, not easy\nThe Russians must have developed this mental flexibility to rapidly do the math, but I got lost each and every time.\nI went to a street market to buy better shoes, an extra pair of pants that I can wear on top of everything I already wear, plus gloves, better gloves. The street market is the domain of Chinese traders. Then I went to the GUM which is a Russian department store. They are in all major cities and they sell everything. Plenty personnel again, and they have plenty time to help.\nI also went to the main basilique to attend an Orthodox Christmas mass. I am Catholic and our masses take an hour, maybe ninety minutes but that\u0026rsquo;s about it. Orthodox masses seem to never end, it feels like an ongoing event and people walk in and out all the time. I couldn\u0026rsquo;t figure out when it had started or when it would end, I guess it ends on the 9th or 10th when Orthodox Christmas is over. I asked a pope if I could take some photos, \u0026ldquo;is ok\u0026rdquo; he said, yes the pope speaks English also. In our Dutch Catholic churches the average visitor is relatively old, fifty or over, but here everybody shows up, young and old.\nThat was it. Time to get on the train.\nsame breakfast every morning ","date":"7 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-07-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Two days to prepare the train trip","type":"posts"},{"content":"I spent some time in the hotel fixing the jetlag, and then in the evening I took a cab to downtown Vladivostok.\nJust for fun I try getting there with the bus, but after about one kilometer the bus leaves the highway and drives into the village of Trudovoye, and that\u0026rsquo;s the end point of this bus. Trains don\u0026rsquo;t run tonight, so all I can do is take a taxi. And yes, there is taxi, but getting these guys to actually take me to Vladivostok turns out to be difficult. What I want to do in Vladivostok? A restaurant? Which restaurant? Any restaurant? They don\u0026rsquo;t get it. What address I want to go to? Any address? Somebody dials a phonenumber and gives the phone to me, on the other end of the line is someone that speaks a little English. A taxi to Vladivostok? Sure, let me talk to the taxi drivers. And then again ten more minutes of discussing between them. It takes about half an hour before we finally start driving.\nVladivostok is a relatively new city, the Russians only came here at the end of the 19th century when they bought the region from the Chinese in 1860. The Chinese had just lost the opium war with the British and were unable to defend it, so they sold it to the Russians (Wikipedia). The taxi driver dropped me at some Burger King like place but I wanted some decent food and asked two men standing outside for directions. They said they would finish their cigarette and then take me to a better place in their car. Perfect.\nWhile smoking they started discussing politics, and off course it was about Putin and Obama and this stuff in Ukraine, and one particular remark stuck with me. They said that Europe could never win a fight from Russia because Europeans were weak. Weak, as in sissies. Unable to endure hardship.\nRussians were tougher, they said, Life is so bad here, you can never make it much worse for us, that\u0026rsquo;s why we are stronger. Then we got in their brand new 3-liter Isuzu SUV with automat, full leather, heated seats, Bose stereo, sunroof and whatnot, and they took me to a fine Japanese restaurants two kilometers away in Svetlanskaja street.\nBecause my brother Jacob can see where I am via my GPS tracker, he finds the restaurant, sends me the restaurant reviews via email and suggests a menu. First I order a beer and get tea instead which smelled like fish so maybe it wasn\u0026rsquo;t tea, but a second try works better.\nAfter the restaurant I walked around for a bit, all the way to the Pokrovsky Cathedral.\npokrovsky cathedral After midnight I took a cab back to the hotel. Plenty cabs here, and they don\u0026rsquo;t cost much. And in the old days I would worry a little if I could find the hotel again, but these days it is easy: I look at my phone and tell the driver where to go. This driver wants double price because it is late, so we haggle a bit about the price but not too much because I don\u0026rsquo;t mind if he makes a little extra. I am back in the hotel around 3 AM.\n","date":"6 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-06-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"First visit to the city","type":"posts"},{"content":"On 5th January 2015 I flew from Amsterdam to Moscow, then to Vladivostok. I had an Aeroflot ticket and I thought I would sit in a Tupolev, but surprise, Aeroflot doesn\u0026rsquo;t have any Tupolevs. Aeroflot has 16 Boeings, over 100 Airbusses and 16 Sukhois, and the Sukhois are the smaller planes for the short distances.\nklm from amsterdam to moscow That was the first sign of a Russian industry that has been marginalised over the last couple of years. And not only does Aeroflot fly Airbus, but also passenger cars are all Japanese and Korean: Toyota, Nissan, Kia, Deawoo, Isuzu. For trucks they have Isuzu, Daewoo, Saab-Scania, Volvo, MAN, and I saw a Mercedes, a DAF and a Peterbilt.\nYes, you still see Lada, Kamaz, ZIL and GAZ, but they are old \u0026amp; rusty, they rattle and they smoke, and within a few years they will have disappeared completely.\nIn Amsterdam I paid extra for the bike, 100 euro for KLM, and then in Moscow Aeroflot wanted to charge me another 100 euro for the second part of the trip. That\u0026rsquo;s Skyteam (KLM and Aeroflot) for you: working together, but not really.\nI still had another three hours before my plane left from Moscow, so I showed the girl my ticket for the bike to Vladivostok and waited. \u0026ldquo;Bike go in plane to Vladivostok\u0026rdquo; I said to the woman behind the luggage counter, and \u0026ldquo;me already pay, me pay no more\u0026rdquo;. For some reason if people speak Benglish or with an accent I start talking like that too.\nThe woman didn\u0026rsquo;t know how to handle this, she called her boss, who called another boss, who\u0026hellip; After fifteen minutes some ten airport boys and girls were gathered around my box, discussing what to do with this Dutch guy with the bike box. Then a 50 year-old woman in a uniform with square shoulder showed up and they all turned silent and waited. \u0026ldquo;What in box?\u0026rdquo; the woman wanted to know.\nNow we can laugh and think the Russians can\u0026rsquo;t speak English, but actually in my experience their language skills are much better than those of, for instance, the French douaniers in Lille, France. I once had a little encounter with those douaniers, and you would think since they are at the border, the French would speak some minimal English, or German maybe? But no, French is all they know. For sure the Russians are doing a much better job. I answered there was a bike in the box. \u0026ldquo;Ah! bike!\u0026rdquo; she said, \u0026ldquo;bike ok, is good no problem, bike is go\u0026rdquo;. Thank you lady! My bike went to Vladivostok.\nThe flight to Vladivostok is more than nine hours. That is: nine hours starting in Moscow, and then you\u0026rsquo;re already 400 kilometers into Russia. It\u0026rsquo;s longer than the flight from Paris to Chicago. Gives you an idea of how big Russia really is.\nnine hours Vladivostok airport is modern and clean, and warm as long as you\u0026rsquo;re inside. My coat, cap shawl etcetera were all hidden somewhere in my suitcase that I had picked from the luggage belt, and from the building I could see the taxis outside already. Just fifty meters away. I decided to quickly walk in my shirt to the taxi stand. Only fifty meters.\n-20º Celcius is cold. It is a little colder than I expected, actually it is a lot colder than I had expected, much much colder. Within ten meters I had to turn back into the building, open my suitcase and get my coat. And my cap. My sweater, gloves, shawl, everything. Unbelievable, that was cold!\nI got a little scared at that moment and thought that the whole bike trip maybe was not such a good idea after all. Damn, what a stupid idea, I should have listened to all those people telling me no. Too late now, I was there already.\nThe taxi driver took me to a hotel ten kilometers from the airport. I paid 2600 rubel per night, and with the rubel at 65 per euro that was not a bad price. It was a bit like a modern European 70 euro hotel, but then with a lot of personnel: a cook, two waitresses, a receptionist, an accountant for the paperwork, two guards and a housekeeper, and then two more that had unclear jobs. They had a bar and a kitchen, and the bar and kitchen were open all evening for just the three guests they had: me, and another couple. Not too shabby.\nhotel Friendly welcoming entrance gate to the hotel. There is a guard in the yellow cabin 24 hours a day. Note the red \u0026ldquo;MOTEL\u0026rdquo;: here it is written in Latin instead of Cyrillic\nhotel Hotel by day. Three guests\u0026hellip; And on top it says again motel but now in Cyrillic, they have no problem mixing the two alphabets\n","date":"5 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-05-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Flying to Vladivostok","type":"posts"},{"content":"Alles verpakt in een speciale doos voor fietsen, klaar om op Schiphol op de band te gooien.\nklaar voor vertrek bike-in-a-box ","date":"3 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-03-klaar_voor_vertrek/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Klaar voor vertrek","type":"posts"},{"content":"Bij wijze van aanmoediging kreeg ik weer een foto, uit Khabarovsk...\nsneeuw ","date":"3 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-03-sneeuw/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Sneeuw","type":"posts"},{"content":"Ondertussen begin ik het weerbericht uit Vladivostok een beetje te volgen. Dit las ik vandaag:\nThe roads in our Pacific capital turned into a vast skating rink after lethal ice fell on the roads. At a hilly crossroads in the city, it even seems locals were on standby to watch and film the latest mayhem as drivers skated, slithered and smashed into other vehicles one after another, as our video compilation shows.\nWhile Russian cities are normally the best in the world at clearing roads after heavy snow, the undulating cityscape in Vladivostok has always posed problems.\nA powerful cyclone hit the city on 1 December, with spectacular results as pictures show.\nOK, these video clips are from 2017 but it\u0026rsquo;s all the same.\nAnton Balashov, a journalist with PrimaMedia in Primorye Territory said: \u0026lsquo;The number of car accidents in Vladivostok snowballed. The snow did not spare even the snowploughs and clearing equipment. The first days of winter brought a whole range of weather events: rain, snow, blizzards and ice, snow drifts and strong wind.\u0026rsquo;\n\u0026lsquo;In the afternoon, when the snow was almost over, Vladivostok roads gradually began to turn into a skating rink. On Churkina and Tikhaya streets road services did not remove the snow in time, and didn\u0026rsquo;t sprinkle the roads with mixture of sand and salt. It meant that people could not walk or drive in these areas.\u0026rsquo;\n\u0026lsquo;Taxi companies refused to take orders from these districts of the city\u0026rsquo;.\n","date":"2 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-02-weerbericht/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Weerbericht","type":"posts"},{"content":"Vandaag even een klein trainingsrondje gemaakt, Almere-Bunnik en terug, 100 kilometer. De terugweg grotendeels in het donker en het werd best wel koud, ik denk tegen het vriespunt.\nKijk ik net op mijn telefoon, temperatuur in Khabarovsk:\ntemperatuur in khabarovsk ibalaclava ","date":"1 January 2015","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2015-01-01-koud/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Koud","type":"posts"},{"content":"Een mountainbike is vooral bedoeld om mee door de modder te raggen en het blijkt heel lastig om op een mountainbike spatborden en bagagerekjes te monteren. Daar kom ik nu achter.\nMaar er is een oplossing voor de bagagerekjes: de Thule Pack \u0026rsquo;n Pedal. Dat is een bagagerekje dat je met een vernuftig mechanisme en straps rechtstreeks op een voor- of achtervork monteert. Geen bevestigings-ogen nodig, past altijd en op elke fiets. De recensies op het internet waren positief dus ik heb zo\u0026rsquo;n rekje gekocht en op mijn fiets gemonteerd. Zie foto.\nbagagerekje Dit weekend een testritje van 100 kilometer gemaakt. Na 70 kilometer begaf de Pack \u0026rsquo;n Pedal het en begon los te zwaaien. Draadje van de kilometerteller ook meteen afgebroken. Ik kon niet meer verder rijden en zonder speciaal gereedschap van Thule krijg je het ding niet goed gemonteerd dus ik moest ergens aanbellen en mijn bagage achterlaten. De Pack \u0026rsquo;n Pedal kon ik nog enigszins vastsjorren met wat touw en zo kwam ik dan thuis, met pack \u0026rsquo;n Pedal maar zonder bagage. Test geslaagd, Pack \u0026rsquo;n Pedal werkt niet. Blijkbaar doe ik iets niet goed bij het monteren, waarom lukt het mij niet en al die andere mensen op het internet wel?\n","date":"15 December 2014","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2014-12-15-bagagerekjes/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Bagagerekjes","type":"posts"},{"content":"Heel moeilijk zal het niet zijn om de weg te vinden: er loopt één snelweg tussen Khabarovsk en VladiVostok en verder is het allemaal leeg. Maar in en rond de steden ligt dat iets anders en is het handig als ik niet de hele tijd naar de kaart moet grijpen, in de kou met dikke wanten is dat lastig. Voor noodgevallen heb ik wel een papieren kaart bij mij, gekocht bij Pied à Terre op de Overtoom in Amsterdam.\nosmand op de fiets Ik wil niet afhankelijk zijn van Google Maps want dat werkt alleen met internet, dat is er waarschijnlijk niet altijd. Ik heb een aantal kaart-systemen op mijn telefoon geïnstalleerd:\nOsmAnd Nokia Here Soviet Military Maps Custom Maps (gescande papieren kaarten) en dan nog Yandex en Locus Pro. OsmAnd heeft de meest gedetailleerde kaarten en werkt zonder internet, dus dat zal ik meestal gebruiken. Tijdens een proefrondje blijkt dat OsmAnd wel gesproken aanwijzingen kan geven, maar dat daar weinig van klopt. In de helft van de gevallen wordt je de verkeerde kant op gestuurd: \u0026ldquo;turn left\u0026rdquo; zegt OsmAnd, maar het pijltje wijst naar rechts, rara. Gelukkig kun je OsmAnd zo instellen dat een gesproken aanwijzing automatisch de display inschakelt, dus dan even kijken.\nSommige plaatsjes staan op geen enkele digitale kaart, maar wel op de kaart van Pied à Terre. Die kaart heb ik daarom gedigitaliseerd en ingelezen in Custom Maps.\nfive days on one charge Five days on one charge\nlcd display solidifies at -5 degrees celcius, useless. Tenslotte heb ik nog een kilometerteller op de fiets, maar die is tamelijk nutteloos omdat bij -5 Celcius de display ermee stopt. Om dezelfde reden laat ik mijn oude Garmin eTrex maar thuis, ook die display doet het niet in de kou.\n","date":"5 December 2014","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2014-12-05-navigatie/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Navigatie","type":"posts"},{"content":"Om mijn gezicht tegen de kou te beschermen heb ik twee bivakmutsen gekocht en een skibril. Zou toch wel voldoende moeten zijn voor -20 Celcius. Als ik mijn neus wil snuiten moet ik eerst afstappen en een halve minuut uitpellen.\nmutsen ","date":"28 November 2014","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2014-11-28-mutsen/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Mutsen","type":"posts"},{"content":"Ik neem een ouderwetse kaart mee voor noodgevallen, maar als het even kan blijft die ergens onderin de fietstas en gebruik ik mijn telefoon als routeplanner. Echt plannen is het niet, tussen Khabarovsk en Vladivostok ligt één lange weg, 800 kilometer rechtuit. Om het thuisfront te laten weten waar ik ben heb ik een tracker-app in mijn telefoon die elke tien minuten vertelt waar ik ben. Mijn positie verschijnt dan op een kaartje op deze website. Ik test twee tracker-apps: FollowMee en PublicBadge.\nmapx.aspx?token=61cb71e8-e3a6-4995-b870-85a286f12146\nFollowMee houdt een dag historie bij die als een lijn op de kaart verschijnt. PublicBadge houdt geen historie bij en verbruikt aanmerkelijk meer stroom. Dus dat wordt FollowMee.\n","date":"28 November 2014","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2014-11-28-trackers/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Trackers","type":"posts"},{"content":"De rit is 800 kilometer. Stel dat ik 80 kilometer per dag rij, dan moet ik elke 80 kilometer een hotel vinden. Vooralsnog vind ik heel weinig. Vanaf Khabarovsk is er volgens Google een hotel na 50 kilometer, en dan één na 150 kilometer, en dan een hele tijd niets. Yandex laat iets meer hotels zien, maar halverwege Khabarovsk en Vladivostok moet ik er maar niet op rekenen elke avond een hotel te vinden. Een tent heb ik niet bij mij want -30 graden Celcius is mij te gortig.\nDus hoe we dat gaan oplossen weet ik nog niet. Misschien gewoon maar ergens aanbellen, ik zal het zinnetje \u0026ldquo;Я могу спать эту ночь сарае\u0026rdquo; (mag ik vannacht in uw schuur slapen?) goed uit mijn hoofd leren.\n","date":"27 November 2014","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2014-11-27-hotels_zoeken/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Hotels zoeken","type":"posts"},{"content":"Dit weekend een nieuwe fiets gekocht. Het is een Cube TLD SL. Het zegt mij helemaal niks, er is zo\u0026rsquo;n overvloed aan mountainbikes dat ik door de bomen het bos niet zie. De websites van de fabrikanten zitten vol met marketing-lingo, ik geef een paar voorbeelden:\nsoepelere compressie demping in de FLOW modus Ballistec carbon/smartformed alloy SPEED SAVE microveringtechnologie CUBE Carbon Motion seat post AGM en ARG Allemaal kletskoek, geen chocola van te maken. De fiets die ik heb gekocht kostte eerder dit jaar 1400 euro en is nu afgeprijsd onder de 1000 euro omdat het een 2014-model is, daar kunnen de marketing-jongens binnenkort niks mee. Voor mij wel een geschikte fiets.\nMaar heel goed is hij ook weer niet. Vandaag op en neer naar Maaike en Wes in Utrecht gefietst, 95 kilometer. De voorrem doet het niet, dat zal wel iets met de SPEED SAVE te maken hebben. De achterderailler slaat consequent het op één-na-kleinste verzet over. De voorste derailleur loopt aan. De achterrem loopt aan. Er zit speling op het balhoofd. Allemaal niet goed voor de FLOW MODUS. En ik wil het stuur iets hoger zetten maar dat kan niet dus moet ik er een stuurverhoger op zetten. De marketing-jongens noemen dit \u0026ldquo;geometry\u0026rdquo; en \u0026ldquo;extreme high rise\u0026rdquo;.\nOndertussen maken vrienden en familie grapjes over de expeditie, en sturen ze mij foto\u0026rsquo;s zoals de volgende.\nfrozen biker ","date":"24 November 2014","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2014-11-24-nieuwe_fiets/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Nieuwe fiets","type":"posts"},{"content":"My daughter was in Vladivostok for three months for her studies and I thought that it was a nice excuse to make a little bike trip from Khabarovsk to Vladivostok, 800 kilometers. Usually I spend sufficient time in the preparation of trips, but unfortunately this time I rushed it a bit, and in the hurry I overlooked one tiny detail: the fact that in January it is a little cold over there. Cold as in: really really seriously cold.\nmy shadow Cold\nOuch. But since I had already spread the news about my bike trip there was no backing out. What had started as a nice plan, quickly turned into a true sub-zero expedition.\nTo get some expert advice I went to www.bikeforums.net where they have a special section on winter biking.\nThe main advice was to stay home. Some other advice I got:\nif you have no experience your chances of succeeding are very small what you are planning is a really really bad idea seems like heavy-duty trolling. But still other people offered serious advice, which I used as much as possible. I purchased balaclava\u0026rsquo;s on eBay, super arctic gloves, ski goggles, thermo underwear, and some more thermo underwear.\nthermo underwear I threw my phone in the freezer to check if it still worked at -20º Celcius, I went to the local butcher to check what -20º Celcius felt like in his freezer, and I bought a mountain bike. I did have three bikes already: one city bike which is useless outside the city, one racing bike which is useless on bad roads, and a special super-relax-seat bike which is useless everywhere.\nsuper-relax-seat bike, useless On my new mountain bike I installed some old luggage bags or panniers that I still had from a previous trip, plus a holder for my phone, and some lights. I was especially concerned about these lights. I mounted one on the bike steer, a second one I had on my helmet, and then two rear lights, one under the saddle and one all the way at the back. And I actually tested them at night with no moon, just to make sure I could see where I was going. Because, where I live there is so much light, even at night, that you never need a light, except to prevent being ticketed by the police. I didn\u0026rsquo;t plan to ride in the dark, but better be prepared. For all lights I had rechargeable batteries as well as single-use batteries. That should do it.\nMy new mountain bike, and fourty year old bags on the bike Here is the bike in my kitchen. It is a Cube. I had never heard of Cube before, let alone of the model number of my bike. There must be a lot of money in this mountain bike business because the marketing guys come up with the most ludicrous nonsense to sell their bikes. Mind you, these are not normal bikes, no, these are bikes with nanoparticles in the resin, Advanced Twin Mold and Zero techniques, Spread Tow Material and a biaxial structure with Ultra High Modulus.\nMy advice (also to the boys and girls at : buy last years\u0026rsquo; model. Because if you buy last years\u0026rsquo; model, not only do you get last years\u0026rsquo; model which is just as good as this years' model, but also you get a 30% discount.\nOther preparations mainly had to do with emergency scenarios. My main worry was about what to do when getting a flat tire halfway between two villages that are forty kilometers apart. Let\u0026rsquo;s say you get a flat tire, and it is four in the afternoon, and it is -20º Celcius. Now what? Fix the tire? Forget it, impossible at those temperatures.\neasy bike parking in the snow Worst case I would have to walk twenty kilometers in the dark at -20º Celcius and I am not sure I would have survived. I never solved that puzzle so instead I decided to check the map before every leg and never start a ride unless I could walk out of it before midnight.\nOther question: would my phone last for 24 hours in the cold? On eBay I purchased an extended battery for my Galaxy S4 which worked fine in the freezer and kept my phone running for a solid three days. Problem solved. Even after the trip I kept using this supersize battery, so handy to have a phone that can run for three days without needing a charger. I also bought a 50.000 mAh battery pack which theoretically would let me recharge the phone about six times. But that turned out to be theory. I could charge the phone maybe twice. Not as advertised but I still took it with me.\nOn my bike I had a sleeping bag with me. I am not sure why I took that bag. It could offer a little extra protection when necessary, and I could use it when sleeping in other peoples homes, but at the same time it was obvious I could not spend a full night out in the open in that sleeping bag. I might as well have left it home.\nvladivostok airport, very modern and clean What other preparations I made? I learned the Russian alphabet. You may think that is useless without learning some of the language, but it is not. It is very usefull, because many Russian words turn out to be recognisable for anyone that speaks a little Dutch, German, French or English. For instance, аптека translates into apteka, which is an apotheek in Dutch. Or кино: translates into kino, which is indeed a kino, or cinema. A метро is a metro, which is a metro. Easy, no? In the photo above I can now easily read Vladivostok on the building. Admittedly there are words like Железнодорожный, but those you just skip.\nweather ","date":"1 November 2014","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/vladivostok/2014-11-01-vladivostok/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Vladivostok","type":"posts"},{"content":"His street is the race course today. Waiting for the caravane\u0026hellip;\nluik-bastenaken-luik ","date":"27 April 2014","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2014-04-27-luik-bastenaken-luik/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Race","type":"posts"},{"content":"Kermis in Utrecht. These used to be very busy, but nowadays it is silent. Finished business.\nkermis in utrecht kermis in utrecht ","date":"20 April 2014","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2014-04-20-kermis_in_utrecht/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Kermis in Utrecht","type":"posts"},{"content":"joue du loup Skiing in Joue du Loup / Superdevoluy. Tried to keep up with my kids on their snowboards.\nResult: nope, impossible to beat them downhill. All I got was a nice injury, have to see a surgeon now\u0026hellip;\n","date":"18 March 2014","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2014-03-18-joue_du_loup/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Joue du Loup","type":"posts"},{"content":"Today it is a hotel, but previously it was the Abbaye des Prémontrés in Pont-à-Mousson near Metz.\nabbaye des prémontrés ","date":"3 February 2014","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2014-02-03-hotel/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Abbaye now a hotel","type":"posts"},{"content":"dutch rail interior Like the interior of a space ship.\n","date":"20 May 2013","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2013-05-20-dutch_rail_interior/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Dutch rail interior","type":"posts"},{"content":"January 2013, I am driving back from a meeting in Paris. I am not in a hurry, so I leave the péage and take the smaller roads. RN17, small village after small village, and then all of a sudden a war cemetary with a Dutch flag near Orry-la-Ville. Just over one hundred graves. Most of these boys died in Dunkirk in 1940. I walk around for a few minutes, take some pictures.\nThere is something disturbing about these war cemetaries in France and Belgium. Loneliness.\nwar cemetary Currently I am scanning slides. It is a massive undertaking, I have around 7000 slides, three minutes per slide, that is eh... two months full time. Maybe I should buy a batch scanner to speed it up. At the moment I am scanning slides that I made during a bike trip to France around 1980. I must have taken the RN17 back then because here is ... a slide of the exact same war cemetary.\nwar cemetary In 1980 clearly my film camera was better than my latest digital camera. Better lense, no chromatic abberation, better dynamic range, no blown out sky. Even the grass looked greener, the trees more healthy, and the tombstones were cleaner.\n","date":"14 May 2013","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2013-05-14-war_cemetary/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"War Cemetary","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"8 May 2010","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/germany/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Germany","type":"tags"},{"content":"This is the former NSA listening post on top of the Teufelsberg in West-Berlin, in Grünewald close to the Olympiastadium. The Teufelsberg is not a natural hill, it is man-made, from the rubble of Berlin after the second world war. The hill made a good place to build a listening post for monitoring communications in East-Germany. After the Berlin Wall fell the listening post was decommissioned, but the buildings remain.\nThe exterior of the building is just canvas clothing. Today, without maintenance or repairs, the canvas clothing is dangling in the wind, and just a little wind will make the building sound like a freight train, very impressive. The area around the buildings is sealed with no less than three fences.\nteufelsberg GeoLocation: 52.4972082N, 13.2395519E\n","date":"8 May 2010","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2010-05-08-teufelsberg/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Teufelsberg","type":"posts"},{"content":"Queens Day 2010, Amsterdam near hotel Americain.\nqueens day ","date":"30 April 2010","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2010-04-30-queens_day_2010/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Queens Day 2010","type":"posts"},{"content":"skating on water This is on the Oostvaardersplassen in The Netherlands, 4th January 2009. We had had some good ice that winter, and although the thaw had started on Thursday we still tried to skate a little more on Sunday. But skating on ice with just one millimeter water is nerve wrecking, and cold. You never know if there is a hole ahead. OK, you know there is no hole, at least yesterday there was no hole, so... After about ten minutes we had had enough.\nskating on water ","date":"18 April 2010","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2010-04-18-skating_on_water/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Skating on water","type":"posts"},{"content":"Minus 18 degrees Celcius.\nfrozen tree ","date":"5 February 2010","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2010-02-05-frozen_tree/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Frozen tree","type":"posts"},{"content":"The highway from Kiev to Warschau. This is how the government warns for speeding: they put the wrecks on display. Not that it helps much, drivers here and also in Poland think they cannot die in their cars. But they do. On my last trip I spent five days in Poland and the Ukraine, and saw two serious accidents, involving three cars (all total loss), with at least two people lying injured on the asphalt, and one dead. Take a look at the YouTube-clip below that was made near Bialystok and you will see something that is completely normal behavior in Poland, for which you would have your drivers license revoked in Germany.\nwreck ","date":"7 January 2010","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2010-01-07-wreck/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Wreck","type":"posts"},{"content":"It is a normal house next to a road in Poland. The house is still under construction, and there is a Mig in the front yard. The owner of the house is very friendly and shows me around his Mig. We climb on top, he opens the cockpit, offers me to take a seat. He explains about the 480 litre external fuel tanks, the tires are still pressurized and yes the missiles are gone. Why did he buy it, I ask. He shrugs \u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;well, you know \u0026hellip; it was cheap\u0026rdquo;, he says.\nmig mig ","date":"3 November 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-11-03-mig/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Mig","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"3 November 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/poland/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Poland","type":"tags"},{"content":"Driving through Poland is a dangerous experience. Some people say that Portugal is even more dangerous, but I\u0026rsquo;m not so sure, no matter what the statistics say. And even if Portugal is worse, at least you get to die in a sunny environment, a friendly atmosphere between warm hills and olive orchards. Not so in Poland. If you have an accident here it will be raining, snowing, freezing, and dark, with big trucks everywhere.\npolish roads ","date":"28 October 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-10-28-polish_roads/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Polish roads","type":"posts"},{"content":"mirror You\u0026rsquo;re fourteen, and about to go downtown. Just fix the mascara, and you\u0026rsquo;re ready to leave in five minutes twenty minutes one hour. Maybe. Maybe not.\n","date":"9 October 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-10-09-mirror/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Mirror","type":"posts"},{"content":"Two boys doing their homework, completely in sync.\n1 2 3 4 5 ","date":"7 October 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-10-07-synchronous/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Synchronous","type":"posts"},{"content":"The Kunstlinie is the performing arts centre in Almere. Fits very nicely in the new city center architecture with its squares and blocks, and it sort of connects the city with the lake. The only thing wrong with this place is the number of civil servants working there. Well, working\u0026hellip; I don\u0026rsquo;t know. Any time you enter the building there are three, four of them sitting behind a nice polished stainless steel counter, doing\u0026hellip;. nothing. They have nice uniforms though, matching the Kunstlinies interior.\nkunstlinie ","date":"2 October 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-10-02-kunstlinie/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Kunstlinie","type":"posts"},{"content":"This is the Bruynzeel in Zaandam (NL), or what is left of it. Used to be a door factory. Was taken over by Polynorm, and then Polynorm was taken over by Theuma, and Theuma shut it down. What remains is an empty building, home to graffiti sprayers and pyro-maniacs.\nbruynzeel bruynzeel ","date":"20 September 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-20-bruynzeel/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Bruynzeel","type":"posts"},{"content":"My daughter with a friend at the Kunstlinie, that\u0026rsquo;s the performing arts centre in Almere. They are both 15 so once they start laughing they can\u0026rsquo;t stop.\nkunstlinie ","date":"14 September 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-14-kunstlinie/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Kunstlinie","type":"posts"},{"content":"quiet My daughter and a friend dozing in the sun in a small village in the Zhytomir area, 500km east from Warszaw. Gucci, Ugg\u0026rsquo;s \u0026amp; iPods. Everything is quiet, except for a few larks and a storch that circles the village. This was before the war.\n","date":"12 September 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-12-quiet/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Quiet","type":"posts"},{"content":"amsterdam ferry ","date":"10 September 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-07-amsterdam_ferry/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Amsterdam ferry","type":"posts"},{"content":"Shadows in the new shopping center in Almere. This new shopping center really upgraded the city. Used to be one street with the standard shops, barely suitable for 30.000 inhabitants, and Almere had grown to 180.000. The new city center is nice, clean, modern, and there\u0026rsquo;s a huge underground parking area. It\u0026rsquo;s still windy, and not quite like Amsterdam. No tourists, no Nutella shops.\nshadows ","date":"2 September 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-02-shadows/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Shadows","type":"posts"},{"content":"krakovetz border The Ukraine is full of contrasts. Small villages with no gas or water, no phones, delapidated houses, horse ploughs, gravel roads with potholes. And Porsche Cayennes. Kiev has fifteen McDonalds, and then when you leave Kiev you travel back in time, 50 years in one hour. Bad economy, corruption. No wonder many young Ukranians want to leave for the west. But the west means Poland, and Poland is Schengen. Not easy to cross this border, you need to have a lot of paperwork done and then you need to be very patient as five hours waiting time is the norm.\nThis is the border near Krakovets at sunset, light still over the horizon, sign of a better world in the west.\n","date":"10 July 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-07-krakovets-korczowa_border/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Krakovetz border","type":"posts"},{"content":"east side gallery About one mile of the old Berlin Wall is still intact, the East-side Gallery, home to graffiti artists. I heard they recently removed the graffity in an effort to tidy up the place. A pity, there were some real masterpieces there. But there is the usual garbage also. Someone wrote \u0026ldquo;Catalonia is not Spain\u0026rdquo; on the wall. Quite ironic to write this on the Berlin wall. Maybe they would like to to have their own wall in Catalonia?\n","date":"10 March 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-03-east-side_gallery/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"East Side Gallery","type":"posts"},{"content":"Kiev metro.\n","date":"10 March 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-12-metro/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Metro","type":"posts"},{"content":"In Kiev you can buy a suit on high street, prices start at 1500 euro. Or you go to the market in the eastern suburb. This is cosmopolis, with Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Indians, Pakistanis and Ukranians. You buy a suit for 90 euro, and then they send you to the tailor who has a shop next to the market. Well, shop, it\u0026rsquo;s more like a shack with corrugated sheet metal on the roof, pallets, a door but no windows. No interior sectioning, no toilet, no nothing, just a sewing machine on a blank wooden table and a pair of scissors. He talks to the customers, she does the tailoring. Perfect job, five minutes, 7 Hryvnia which is 70 eurocents.\ntailor in kiev market ","date":"10 March 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-07-the_tailor/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Tailor","type":"posts"},{"content":"tgv The TGV in Montparnasse or Rennes, or maybe the Thalys at Gare du Nord, I forgot.\n","date":"10 March 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-03-tgv/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"TGV","type":"posts"},{"content":"McDonalds takeaway at Kiev metro station Plosjtsja Lva Tolstoho.\nwaiting ","date":"10 March 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-07-waiting/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Waiting","type":"posts"},{"content":"fractured finger First you attack your father from behind. He manages to stay on his feet, so then you hit him with your hippo. Daddy manages to get hold of the beanbag and swings it around. Oops, fractured finger, time for a trip to the hospital. The doctor has an advice for the patient: \u0026ldquo;next time forget the hippo grab the beanbag first\u0026rdquo;.\n","date":"10 January 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-10-11-beanbag/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Beanbag","type":"posts"},{"content":"chemicals This is where I used to work. Something with chemicals, ships, trucks, barrels, depots, near Rotterdam.\n","date":"10 January 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-03-chemicals/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Chemicals","type":"posts"},{"content":"football My son plays football, one match every Sunday and training twice a week. He knows everything about Ajax and FC Barcelona and match results and player transfers, like a walking encyclopedia. And I just don\u0026rsquo;t understand why he failed at his last math test. Because he\u0026rsquo;s a boy I guess.\n","date":"10 January 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-10-04-football/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Football","type":"posts"},{"content":"skating on black ice The 2008-2009 winter season gave us perfect ice. No wind, no snow, blue skies and cold nights created the best ice we have had in years. Totally black ice. You\u0026rsquo;re on the middle of the lake and you look down and all you see is bottomless black. And it feels very different from the stadium skate track where you have 5 centimeter ice on a concrete floor, this is ice floating on water and it makes a very distinct sound when you ride, ploink ploink ploink.\n","date":"10 January 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-02-skating_on_black_ice/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Skating on black ice","type":"posts"},{"content":"Image caption How I hate this. Taxes, insurance policies, bills, forms, credit card statements. My wife had a system where she kept everything in a box, and then once a month she would throw the box contents on the table and do all the paperwork in less than 60 minutes. I am now trying to teach myself the same trick. I am at 60 hours, and I don\u0026rsquo;t see any progress. Still, I think the stacks look nice, I have it sorted on \u0026ldquo;sender\u0026rdquo; and it gives an orderly look. Not that it helps very much.\n","date":"10 January 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-02-bookkeeping/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Taxes","type":"posts"},{"content":"Metro station in Charlottenburg, Berlin. Just a little further to the west is Spandau, where Hess spent a good part of his life in prison until he commited suicide in 1987 at the age of 93. After his death the British demolished the Spandau prison and today there is a Mediamarkt.\nmetro charlottenburg ","date":"1 January 2009","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/2009-09-03-charlottenburg/","section":"Posts","summary":"","title":"Charlottenburg","type":"posts"},{"content":"This is just a bunch of monochrome photos.\nMonochrome is easy. No white balance issues, no colours that distract, just contrast and composition. At the same time, monochrome can get a bit gloomy, so I mix in some colour here and there.\nAny comments you can send to xxx@galama.net.\n","date":"1 January 2001","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/about/","section":"Monochrome","summary":"","title":"About","type":"page"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/authors/","section":"Authors","summary":"","title":"Authors","type":"authors"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/categories/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Categories","type":"categories"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/series/","section":"Series","summary":"","title":"Series","type":"series"}]