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

[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.