Virtual Traveling
I downloaded Google Earth a few months ago, which is a compliment to their online map feature. No matter what the haters say, and I'm not a fan of some of Google's policies especially as they pertain to their China project, this is an amazing 'free' feature.
Unless you're one of my three friends that read here you may want to skip the rest of this.
So I'm wasting time on the internet last night winding down getting ready for bed and I figure I'll visit my own site (this one right here) and check out my blogroll. I don't know why I don't do this more often. I put the sites there in the first place because I originally read something from them that I found worthy, yet I hardly visit them. Within the first two links I found that I needed to re-title one of the blogs as they had changed their name.
On the third link-click I find this:
Outside the Arab and in the Western world Islam has a fairly peaceful modern track record. Muslims in the Bulgaria and Romania have lived peacefully with their Christian neighbors. The Balkan Wars dealt with nationalism and clan loyalties rather than religion. Turkey has been very Western traditionally. Tatarstan, home of the once uber-violent Tartars, is now a peaceful Russian republic with Christians, Jews, and Muslim Tartars living together.
Tartarstan! I'm reading in fits and starts The Travels of Marco Polo, and I'm getting to the part where he was in the court of Kubla Khan and he's giving a short history of old Genghis, emperor of the Tartars. But wait, wasn't Genghis the leader of the 'Mongol' horde? An explanation awaits here.
Anyway, fire up Google Earth and travel to Tartarstan and find the capital, Kazan. From there I follow the Volga to the Moscow canal and into Red Square.
I wander around looking at traffic patterns for a bit before heading east into Mongolia and China. Then south onto Tibet, Nepal, India and Pakistan. I find Mount Everest and from there look for K2. I can't find it so I search for coordinates on the internet and locate it on the border of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and China.
While in the mountains I use the tilt control after I get to a low enough altitude and do a flyby along the Himalayan range, picking out the taller peaks and crashing through in the way mountains. I wander into nearby Afghanistan through the Pakistan border and into Kabul. God what traffic.
A quick fly-around the mountains surrounding the city from low altitude, check out the airport, then south to Kandahar. Not much detail around these parts so I head west into Iran.
Spend a short time in the south and head up to Tehran to check out the sites. I'm getting used to the low altitude flyover and do the usual 'round the mountains' stuff and then, looking south I see a road. I must have spent the better part of an hour following it southeast at about a four thousand foot elevation.
Just the other day I was bemoaning the fact that I don't have a globe. But I'd have to have a damned big one to reproduce the effects of flying around the earth via Google. You'll have to excuse me as I try to retrace my steps from last night to find the road to the Persian Gulf.
