I love these slice of life walk videos around the world – most of them are aimed at tourists, but this one is much more local. It’s a walking tour of …renewing a passport!
The traffic in Bangui also looks challenging but not insurmountable – seems like you just gotta be confident and aware of your surroundings. (As opposed to Dhaka, last month).
I love these casual, no-talking walking tours – it’s immersive, like you’re there yourself. This one is of Dhaka – I’ve also found some cool ones of San Salvador, Porvoo and Tel Aviv.
Of note is just how bonkers the traffic is, and that doesn’t even seem like a bad day! Dhaka has some of the worst traffic congestion in the world – infrastructure is totally overwhelmed, and there’s basically no public transit. There’s a really good documentary about Dhaka’s traffic from 2010, including what it’s like to drive a rickshaw, below.
It hasn’t gotten any better in the last decade – I saw a Bangladeshi news articles from this year lamenting the lack of progress on traffic and the wasted opportunity during the pandemic lockdowns. It’s so bad, in fact, that researchers estimate that 6-10% of Bangladesh’s GDP is lost indirectly to traffic.
There’s really good streetview coverage on Bangladesh – I went down an absolute rabbit hole poking around, there’s religious and historic sites, weird borders, stunning natural beauty and massive urban sprawl. Here’s some neat ones I liked:
In Sylhet, up in the far northeast of Bangladesh, is the Tomb of Shah Jalal. Shah Jalal was a Sufi saint and leader involved in the both the Islamic conquest of Sylhet from Hindu rulers around 1300 and the spread of Islam to the population. Ibn Battutah sought him out on his travels, and found Shah Jalal in his later years living as an ascetic.
This Shaikh was one of the great saints and one of the unique personages. He had to his credit miracles (karamat) as well as great deeds, and he was a man of hoary age.He owned a cow with whose milk he broke his fast. He stood performing prayers throughout the night, and he was thin, tall and scanty-bearded. The inhabitants of these mountains had embraced Islam at his hands, and for this reason he stayed amidst them.
From Ibn Battutah’s Account of his Meeting with Shah Jalal of Sylhet
Much more recently, Bangladesh and India finally settled their really wonky borders, transferring dozens of enclaves (including second- and even third-order ones) in 2015. Only one enclave still exists, a community called Dahagram–Angarpota, that’s a small piece of Bangladesh surrounded by India. This enclave is in spitting distance of Bangladesh, and it connected by the Tin Bigha Corridor, stretch of road that’s less than 200 metres long. The land belongs to India, but is leased to Bangladesh – but there’s still border control, and it was only in 2011 that the corridor was opened for 24 hours a day. Previously, it was only open 12 hours a day, which caused understandable hardship on residents, since there were no hospitals in the enclave at the time.
On the other side of the country, down in Chittagong, there’s what looks like a possible standoff between the Google Car and security staff at the gates of a shipbreaking yard. Note the “no child labour” sign on the gate.
A dizzying drone shot of a hazy morning in Dhaka – look at that urban density!
And more serenely, a floating night market pier in the Meghna River delta. Look around behind you for a bonus beautiful sunset.
Our in the far east of Bangladesh is the Kaptai Lake – in contrast to the massive urban density, this area is remote, sparsely populated, and largely only accessible by boat. There’s stunning natural sites, including the Shuvolong waterfall.
Back in Dhaka, I was looking through the planes at the Bangladesh Air Force Museum, and this old DC-3 caught my eye – I love these old planes. They were introduced in the 1930s, and were built until the 50s, but they’re such successful planes that many are still in active use today (like for cargo flights in the Canadian Arctic). This specific DC-3 was a gift to Bangladesh from India. It had been used to drop paratroopers during the 1971 Independence War and is one of the founding planes of the Bangladesh Air Force.
And tucked away on a side street, the oldest surviving mosque in Dhaka – the Binat Bibi Mosque, built in 1454. It’s pre-Muhgal, erected during the Bengal Sultanate. There’s an inscription dedicating the mosque to Bakht Binat, the daughter of Marhamat – it’s unclear if she funded it or if it was dedicated in her memory, but it’s likely she was part of a local wealthy family.
The streetview is from 2013, and the mosque has been in pretty poor shape, despite it’s historic value. Since then there’s been some renovations and restorations, including a beautiful new minaret. It’s hard to see updated photos, but hopefully they’ve restored and kept the two starry domes.
The Horodecki House (also known as the House with Chimaeras or the Gorodetsky House) is an incredibly fanciful building that sits across from the presidential palace in Kyiv. There’s so much going on here with it – to start, it is essentially a Ukrainian response to Gaudi. Art Nouveau, multi-layered and designed, with animals, plants, and other organic elements merging with busy rococo-ish elements.
The history of this building is also incredible – designed in 1902 by Władysław Horodecki, a Polish architect, it was intended to be sold as luxury apartments. Horodecki’s debts led to changes of ownership, including by a sugar factory, and during the Communist era, the building was carved up into smaller communal apartments, used as a refuge for evacuated actors, abandoned during WWII, and used as a medical clinic until 2002. The building had almost split it half at its foundations by that time, and the restorers had to threaten to board the medical clinic in to obtain the space for restoration. It eventually was fully restored to Horodecki’s original plans, and is used today for presidential and official capacities.
It came back into the limelight this spring during the Russian invasion, with Zelenskyy using it as a background in his videos announcing he was staying in Kyiv and calling on Ukrainians to resist.
You can walk through it on streetview, and I’d really recommend taking the time to look at the details – the frogs lining the rooftop parapets, or the flowers and tentacles emerging from ceiling chandeliers.
St. Sophia’s Cathedral, Kyiv, 2016
Donetsk Art Museum, 2016
National Preserve of Tauric Chersonesos, Sebastapol, Crimea, 2011
Mariupol Beach, 2018
Aviation Museum, Luhansk, 2017
Rym restaurant, Bucha, 2017
Kharkiv, 2020
And some celebratory girl guides in Kyiv from January of this year.
I’m adding to my list of DJ sets in unusual locations – first up a mountain in winter in Finland, then by a lake of liquid asphalt in Trinidad, now at an abandoned castle in Ukraine! Pidhirsti Castle dates back to the 1600s when the area around Lviv was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. There’s some great drone shots of it in the video.
As for the set, it’s a really fire collab between Ukrainian DJs Nastia and Daria Kolosova – very heavy driving jungle / drum&bass, slightly industrial.
When you think of electronic music in Eastern Europe, hardstyle more often comes up (including hardbass, a subset that emerged in Russia, and is used in memes). Like metal, there’s fine-grained stylistic differences between genres – d&b is faster and syncopated, hardstyle is more harmonic and distorted, usually with vocals. Here’s a whole mix of hardstyle from Ukrainian musicians, in case you want to keep the dance party going.
Join me on a neat little trip by drone, starting in Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador and a major trading port.
Then the beautiful rugged Andes in the middle of the country, and Quito, located high up in them:
Then down past the volcanoes into the Ecuadorian Amazon forest of the interior:
And to come back as far as you can go in the other direction, and watch the sea turtles from above in the Galapagos:
I’ve been having fun poking through the streetviews of Gabon on Google – there’s hasn’t been comprehensive street-by-street coverage yet, so it’s just what individuals have uploaded themselves. There’s a total mix – some beautiful and scenic views and some very prosaic or random ones. One of the prettiest is this sunrise drone shot of Libreville.
Also on a quiet early morning in front of a fancy hotel in Libreville. It makes me feel like that first jetlagged morning on vacation when you wake up at an unholy hour and go out for a walk just as the day wakes. There’s also an nicely decorated mosque next door and flags of neighbouring countries in front.
A nice shot of the beach in Loango National Park, a large park with rare protected ecosystems and wildlife, including the famed “surfing hippos“.
A view from the top of the Kongou falls, way in the interior.
I like this one, because it not only gives you a sense of the thick forests around the country, but this one guy seamlessly getting three times in the shot.
There are lots of really random streetviews of offices, stores, and other buildings. I like this upstairs of a homegoods store mainly because I really want that multi-coloured square rug.
This one I like for no other reason that this random office in Gabon has the exact same colour combination as my own living room.
To wrap up this month on San Marino, a few interesting streetviews. First, a few from the historic sites / amazing views from the Città on top of Mount Titano:
And some interesting spots not on the mountain summit!
And clearly there’s a fair amount of Scandinavian tourists – “systembolaget” is Swedish for liquor store:
Just some beautiful shots of the Città and Mount Titano by drone.
Here’s also the view on a winter’s day of the cable car that runs from Borgo Maggiore at the foot of the mountain to the summit.
Locally Foreign 