fivemack contradicts himself

[fivemack]

On one side of the screen, I am writing comments in a LJ discussion of climate change and what is to be done about it.

On the other side I am trying to find the cheapest way of getting to Almaty this Easter, returning from Bishkek. Looks like Turkish Airlines via Istanbul, two four-hour legs in a 737-800 with a five-hour wait at Ataturk airport in the middle, both ways. I think the steppe, Issyk-Kul and the Tienshan mountains are worth two and a half books of mild inconvenience.

I suppose four hundred pounds would buy me an awful lot of travel books about Central Asia which I can read while sitting in Cambridge, I could cycle over to Willingham if I wanted to see hunting with raptors, and Scotland has no great shortage of snow-caps, but I can't convince myself that the fens are a substitute for the steppe.

Comments

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile, I'm considering that if there are protests against another runway at Heathrow, it will be terribly convenient for me to drop in on for a day on the way to various business destinations.

*sigh*

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Fundamentally, you're incredibly lucky to be rich enough to have this dilemma.

I'd love to do a cycle trek around the world, as some people of done.

[(Anonymous)]

Have you looked into train travel?

Seriously ...

http://www.seat61.com

(seriously good website).

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've looked at the train timetables and everything. The problem is that I have two weeks of holiday (336 hours), and it takes 115 hours each way to get from Cambridge to Almaty by train, at least eighty of them after the Russian border. I could leave tomorrow morning and be in Moscow for Tuesday lunch, Sverdlovsk for Wednesday tea, and into Almaty in time for an early supper on Friday, if I happened to have Russian and Belorussian transit visas already arranged. I'm travelling on my own, I read fast enough that enough books for 230 hours would be really prohibitively heavy, and my conversational Russian is only enough to say 'your child is very pretty', 'excuse me, I want to sleep' and 'the samovar over there does not work'.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

E-books! :-)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

That's a bet with quite high stakes on the ubiquitous availability of power points on Russian and Kazakh trains - though I suppose that's also required for being able to take photos out of the train windows.

I suppose one Anathem-weight of NiMH AA batteries is 51 batteries or over 130 amp-hours @ 1.2V = 165 watt-hours, which might be enough if only ebook readers used less than 700mW of power and ran on AA batteries.

An eee battery is 4400mAh and 7.4 volts (so corresponds to twelve standard AA batteries) and runs the eee for nearly three hours, so I'd need something a lot lower power than an eee.

The Sony Reader supposedly runs for 6000 page-turns (thank you e-ink) off a single charge, which might actually be enough assuming I can recharge in Almaty itself. Whilst it charges its custom battery over USB, I have a wall-power-to-USB widget which came with my iPhone, and I'm sure someone makes a box with lots of AA batteries providing 4.8V to a USB connector on the front - in a pinch this is a level of electrical engineering I could run to. I can't find the Sony Reader battery capacity in real units anywhere.

There is of course the availability issue for ebooks; there's an awful lot of Project Gutenberg, but to read the complete works of P G Wodehouse, mingled with nineteenth-century travel writing, on the way to Kazakhstan and the complete works of Dickens mingled with early twentieth-century popular science on the way back would be at least eccentric.

[htfb.livejournal.com]

You only get PGW up to the copyright limit, though. There's plenty still in copyright. Not that your suggestion sounds like a bad use of time.

[naath.livejournal.com]

http://www.seat61.com/SilkRoute.htm (NB: Moscow to Almaty takes 5 days; London to Moscow 2) :-)

[naath.livejournal.com]

Perosnally I don't think Almaty is likely to be worth 2 weeks (3 if you want to see it...) vacation time. Then again I'm not sure it's worth *any* vacation time really... why do you want to go? Scotland is very pretty.

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

I was going to say something like this too. Lots of places much easier to get to are very nice, and bet you haven't been to them all.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

I don't find there is any substitute for being there, as places are more important to me than books. But are you sure that either 1) it won't get more economic/green to go there at some point in the future, or 2) VR technology won't advance far enough to give a convincing simulacrum eventually?

(Personally I think travel won't get better, and VR shows no sign of advancing over the last 10 years, but I've considered it before setting off on trips)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Given really good sales pitches by Alstom and two decades of economic growth, I could just about imagine the trains getting by the time I retire to the point that it's a three-day rather than a five-day train journey; Almaty is 5553km from Cambridge as the plane flies, almost exactly the same distance as New York, and Russia is the kind of endless flat terrain across which civil engineers lay ruler-straight TGV lines in their dreams.

But by that point Kazakhstan will be a reasonably wealthy bit of Chinese hinterland.