Interesting places visited by Tim

I'm starting this as something of an experiment to report on places I've visited which are interesting for some reason and which I suggest are worth going out of your way for.

Quick links to interesting places:

Luxor, Egypt

Three things I would point out as particularly interesting or otherwise fun on a visit to Luxor. The first is the site of the tombs of the artisans who excavated, fitted, and decorated the royal tombs. The artisans' tombs are on a miniscule scale in comparison to the royal tombs, have no particular fitments of note, and seem to be in general ignored by tourists. This, I feel, is a mistake on the part of the tourists; the artisans seem to have kept the best paints and the most intricate interior decoration for their own tombs, and, assuming that the Egyptian tourist board did not in fact fake the tombs last year, the paint has survived many thousand years looking as though it was indeed painted last year.

The second fascinating occupation is ignoring the tour guide and working out the basics of heiroglyphics from their settings. Start off by trying to spot number sequences, then try and figure out from the settings what the symbols for things like upper Egypt, lower Egypt, living royals, dead royals, and deities. I'm not entirely sure the guides all know what they're talking about so do try and figure things out yourself!

The third interesting experience is to stay in one of the hotels with gardens leading down to the Nile and to sip a drink as the sun goes down behind the mountains across the river. With a bit of luck to keep the giant tour boats out of the way and have a few dhows sailing past it's a magnificent experience. I suggest following it with dinner at the Winter Palace Hotel; take formal wear if you want to dine in the best restaurant, or enjoy the also rather magnificent buffet. In either case make sure to take a walk in the extensive gardens after dinner.

Bodie, Northern California

Most travellers visiting California seem to focus on the surf, the Hollywood stars, or the quite spectacular natural beauty of the national parks. Don't miss these; they are certainly worth seeing, and interesting things in their own right, but covered well elsewhere.

Bodie, on the other hand, seems a relative unknown even to resident Californians. Tucked away in the northeast corner of the state, it's a town only accessable by offroad vehicles or pedestrians, normal road cars having to be parked a short walk from the town. That, perhaps, is the first clue that this is no ordinary town. Indeed, it has no cars on the streets, no shops or cafes open for business, no MacDonalds, no WalMart. But this is no hippie commune; Bodie is a ghost town, and perhaps the defining example of the genre.

Named after a gold-rush prospector, Bodie was a mining town, with fortunes made from the gold placer-deposits of the area. Fortune came at a human price though, and Bodie was widely known as a hell-hole where the lawless would gather and where life expectancy was measured in months, not years. The gold eventually ran out, and while the Standard Mine carried on operations well into the twentieth century the town was in terminal decline and eventually abandoned to the tender mercies of the Californian weather.

If these are not sufficient reasons to make Bodie an interesting place to visit, I offer two more:

The town was the first place where electrical transmission over longer distances was attempted, with cables linking the generator in town with the out of town Standard Mine. Both still exist, as does the cabling, and of note is that the cable runs in a perfectly straight line. According to the documentation of the day, there was considerable uncertainty as to whether corners would prove a problem to transmission of electrical power, and the 'safe option' of a straight line was considered a good idea.

And for anyone wanting to take photographs of a real Gold Rush town, or to get the best remaining impression of what life in the early west was like, Bodie is certainly the place to go. The ruffians may have left, but the mine, the boardwalks, the sun, and the tumbleweed are still there, and if you take an appropriate hat you can still feel quite the part.

Arctic Circle, Karelia, Russia

I was lucky enough to visit Karelia in the company of a number of extremely hospitable Russians, and to visit one of the most inaccessable areas at perhaps the most beautiful time of year - the Arctic Circle in midwinter.

Travel to Karelia is itself an interesting adventure; one may choose between a flight to Murmansk or a flight to Moscow to begin with, the former being the less interesting option as it is followed by a long car journey. The latter is followed by a midnight departure on the 'Arctic Express' from Moscow, a fascinating sleeper train in true Soviet style.

We were accompanied by Dimitri (Dima) Zhadan, a professional diver and academic at Moscow State University, who arrived at the station with a large bag of diving kit and two further bags of skis and snowboards. Fitting all this, along with the diving kit that I and my group had brought, into the four-berth Spalny Wagon sleeping compartments was a feat in itself. On the stroke of midnight whistles blew, flags were waved, the conductors in their heavy grey coats and badged fur hats climbed aboard, and the Arctic Express pulled out of Moscow with screeches of frozen brakes and the bangs and crashes of the loose-coupled coaches lurching into motion.

There is a restaurant car on the train, but this is apparently only for the uninformed. Those in the know buy food from the Baboushkas on the station platforms during the carefully timetabled longer stops, a buffet service which appears to be a thriving local economy. As the train pulls up and passengers start to disembark they are met by the smells of freshly smoked fish, hot potatoes in bags, and other traditional Russian food which is sold at a brisk rate. Foreigners hardly ever take the train, and when they do they tend to eat in the restaurant car, so the presence of such curious people who don't understand Russian evokes much interest in the local population. Once bought, the potatoes and fish are carried back to the train and a friendly Russian pulls out a large hunting knife to cut up and fillet the excellent trout. There is the taste of adventure in every meal.

The journey from Moscow to Karelia is via St Petersburg and Petrozavodsk, and takes no less than twenty seven hours, arriving at the small station of Chupa a little after three o'clock in the morning. This is no comfortably lit station with the train stopping for long enough to carry bags off one by one - the timetable is strict, and Chupa is a one minute stop beside a couple of snow-covered sidings. The tactic, therefore, is to have all bags ready by the door, and as the train crashes to a halt half the group leap off and the other half throw bags out to them. When the train makes its inevitable creaking start after a minute with half the group still onboard and the conductor still on the platform, the emergency stop cord is pulled by whoever is nearest. Finally everyone disembarks, the conductor gets back onboard, and the Arctic Express continues north to Murmansk.

Chupa is not the final destination, just a stop en-route to the Arctic Circle dive centre, and the next phase of the journey takes place by heated offroad truck, a vehicle which looks like a combination between prisoner transport and refrigerator van. The passenger compartment is a large heated box on the back of the truck in which kit and people are piled before the truck sets off through the forest. Once the ice has been scraped off the windows a view of two hours' winding forest tracks are seen, which end at an extremely picutesque frozen bay of the White Sea where the dive centre is located.

The corner of Karelia we spent a week in is one of the most beautiful places I have ever lived. This end of the boreal forest feels somehow wilder than the far end in Quebec, the warm and luxuriously appointed wood cabins of the dive centre feeling particularly decadent in the midst of the wilderness. Walking from cabin to cabin in the arctic winter with air temperatures down to -35C is not undertaken lightly; forgetting hats and gloves leads to the first hints of frostbite. The Russians take the cold very seriously and regard heat as a measurable commodity - lose some during the day and you have to sit in the banya (sauna) in the evening to warm up again. The banya is not for the faint of heart, with an inner room at 100C and snowdrifts to leap into outside at -30C, not to mention wolves howling in the forests around the dive centre.

There is a magnificence in the forest's wildness, in the thought that very few people have seen the sweeping curves of the White Sea bays, in the islands which turn into hills rising from the frozen sea, and in the dark skies over which a glittering curtain of stars and aurorae are drawn. The Russians looking after us were some of the warmest and friendliest people I've had the pleasure to spend time with, and took pleasure in introducing us to their culture and history. I went to Russia with the westerner's view of a land of peasants thrown into poverty by an oppressive communist regime and came back from Russia with the view of a vast country with a rich and ancient cultural heritage, a tremendous sense of national pride, and, although there were very mixed reactions to the Soviet era, many people who relished the future and the opportunities available to them.

Penarth Fawr, near Chwilog, Gwynedd, Wales

Penarth Fawr is one of the few places I've ever visited where I was taken out of the modern world and dropped back into the 1450s when the building was constructed. It's a Medieval hall-house which has a great number of original features still visible. Of particular note to me was the wear on the floor stones, showing the passage of feet over the centuries. It's rare that I see this kind of wear pattern so strikingly; the other notable example was an iron age hillfort where the stone doorsill showed similar wear.

At Penarth Fawr you can stand in the middle of the hall and let your mind drift back into imagining you're actually six hundred years in the past. There's little more I can say on a webpage other than that to encourage you, the reader, to pay the place a visit.

There's a page all about Penarth Fawr if you fancy visiting or want to learn more.

Roosevelt Island Tram, New York

Aside from a brief glimpse in 'Spiderman' I knew nothing about the Roosevelt Island Tramway before some expat friends in NYC recommended it to me. Indeed, if I had heard of it I had imagined it to be something akin to the street trams in San Francisco. The reality proved rather different, as any New Yorkers reading this will know - it's a public transport cable car (or, rather, pair of cable cars) which crosses the East River next to the Queensboro Bridge, and costs no more and no less than a bus or subway journey.

The tramway is, from my very limited experience of it, magnificent to ride at dusk as the light is fading from the sky and the lights of Manhattan are starting to blaze forth. Starting from Manhattan, the views along the Avenues are spectacular and give a sense of the linear layout of the city (yes, this seems unusual to us Brits!), then give way to a magnificent view up and down the East River with the impressive steelwork of the cantilevered Queensboro Bridge in the foreground. A short pause on Roosevelt Island gives excellent views back to Manhattan, and the ride back in between the now blazing lights of the Manhattan towers is just exactly how I imagined New York would be. More than any other trip it made me feel I was in the Big Apple.

And for the price of a couple of bus journeys (or covered on your Metro card!) it has to be worth half an hour of your time.

Website: http://www.ny.com/transportation/ri_tramway.html

Sir John Soane's Museum, London

London has many large, famous, internationally renowned museums in monunental examples of metropolis architecture. This is not one of those museums, but is no less fascinating. Indeed, I'd contend that this little museum made up of three houses at Lincoln's Inn Fields is one of the most interesting and absorbing visits available to a London tourist or resident.

The collection housed by the museum is notable for many reasons. There are items of particular antiquity, of particular artistic value, and of particular architectural significance. There are very esoteric items, particularly the drawings of an 'alternative London' suggested by Soane to redevelop the city as one much more akin to Paris. There are strange and wonderful architectural twists and turns in the building itself, which both confused me (into thinking it much larger than it was) and delighted me.

If you fancy something quintessentially British, have an afternoon to spare in London, and haven't been to Sir John Soane's museum, I highly recommend it.

Website: http://www.soane.org/

Schoolhouse, Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Kansas

Before visiting Kansas with time to travel around I had a vague impression of a quite picturesque but not terribly tourist-occupying part of the USA. I was wrong; with a little research, Kansas is full of interesting places to visit, particularly those linked to the period of early European settlement of the west.

One location that stood out for me was a restored schoolhouse at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. It's not a particularly impressive building in any architectural sense, but has been very sympathetically restored in the middle of a well preserved area of Prairie such that, standing at the door and touching the handle you can almost believe you're back over a century earlier, the children and teacher having gone home and the warmth of the spring day cooling into evening as the sun drops towards the prairie horizon. Looking in through the windows and seeing the neat rows of desks give a similar feeling to that of visiting Bodie (see above) but with the sense that the people who were in the building only left a few minutes before.

A fascinating place.

Title photograph © 2005 James Clark, Dory Productions
All other photographs © 2005-2008 Timothy M Bond

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