offpeakfang

East Anglia is a very flat part of the UK, and Ipswich is accordingly a very flat town - so what are the highest points of the town?  A look at a topographic map of Ipswich and the surrounding area doesn't show very many hills. There's a plateau around RAF Wattisham that curves around to the Newmarket area containing the 136 m Great Wood Hill, the highest point in Suffolk. It lies on the same fold of hills that eventually becomes the Chilterns around London, but Wattisham is well outside the Ipswich town boundary.  Within Ipswich itself, the highest point is at the Park Road / Elsmere Road reservoir and water tower, just at the top of the Constitution Hill road and just north of Christchurch Park. It lies at the great altitude of 57 metres.  57 m, at the base of the water tower. The 1924 water tower is now disused.  It's not much of a mountaineering achievement, but it's at least nice to know that I've cycled up to the top of the town. Water towers form a common pa...

In this age of social distancing, towns and cities all across Europe are making changes to their local roads to help encourage active travel such as walking and cycling - makes sense, given that the roads will simply clog up with congestion even worse than in normal times if more people are driving, as well as all the savings to the NHS when people exercise more (especially within the context of obesity-related health conditions).  Suffolk Highways has made a small number of changes to the roads around Ipswich, with several more planned   [PDF] , but how useful are they in practice? I went cycling around them to find out.  Ipswich Waterfront Less space than in April/May, but still better than in the before-time.  The shared-space byway along the waterfront was never particularly busy with car traffic anyway, but for a while during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown it was completely closed off to motorised vehicles to maximise space for walking and cycling.  It...

Ak Orda ("white horde") presidential palace, Nur-Sultan Nur-Sultan, formerly Astana, is the capital of Kazakhstan. I spent a day visiting the city while transiting through the airport on the way between Beijing and London in July 2019. It was an interesting day, though mildly unnerving - it was almost completely devoid of people.  There was quite a large set of people transiting between the same flights that I was taking, so when the airport staff at Nursultan Nazarbayev International Airport gathered us all and funnelled us through immigration control together, we organised ourselves into smaller age-based groups to go around the city - I went with two students going the the UK to study. They were very friendly and it was nice to have company while visiting a strange, unfamiliar city, even if I'm probably never going to see them again.  We each changed some money into Kazakh tenge (KZT) at the airport. While airport exchanges are never good value, we couldn't find ...

Kazakh flag display, Nur-Sultan Kazakhstan isn't a very common tourist destination. It didn't really even cross my radar until I noticed that the cheapest flight back to the UK from China was with Air Astana, the national airline of Kazakhstan, with a 8 hour flight transfer in the national capital, Nur-Sultan. As price is essentially the only factor that decides which airline I fly with, I therefore returned from my couple of weeks in East Asia via Kazakhstan.  Check-in at Beijing Capital airport, even more chaotic than normal The flight from Beijing airport (PEK) was timed to leave at 0255 local time, with a flight duration of 5h55. First, though, came check-in: most of my commercial flying these days is with Ryanair, so it's now rare for me to check-in at a physical desk with hold baggage. I've got used to the ruthless efficiency of low-cost airlines, so the check-in experience with Air Astana was particularly unusual: nearly all the Kazakhs on the flight were checkin...

Belarusian Railways runs several firmeny (higher-quality) international sleeper trains to neighbouring countries. One is the "Beliy Aist" - the "White Stork"  - from Minsk to Kiev.  The departure board in Minsk railway station, including trains to Moscow, Kiev and Riga. The display cycles between Russian, Belarusian Cyrillic, and Belarusian Latin script.  Minsk railway station has two ticket offices, one either side of the main entrance. The one on the left of the entrance is the long-distance ticket office, where we had bought our tickets to Kiev a couple of days before. International cards are accepted.  There was no ticket barrier or check on the station concourse and no queue or crowd waiting to get on when the boarding time came - only an announcement in Russian without much actual movement of people in the waiting room. When it was time to board, we simply walked down the bridge to the platforms where our train was waiting. We were in the last carr...

When we arrived into Minsk from the airport, the airport bus dropped us off at the main train station. We bought our tickets to Kiev for two days later while we were there, but by then it was late in the evening and we needed to go to our hotel. We went by the Minsk Metro, which became one of the first sights we saw in Belarus. The 0.60 BYN (£0.21, €0.25) flat ticket price was the second best thing about the metro; the best of all was definitely the socialist-realist design and architecture. Not a sight often seen any more - completely preserved from the opening of the metro system in 1984 The main train station is served by "Ploschad Lenina" metro station, meaning "Lenin Square". Well, it certainly made a strong first impression. Bust of Lenin, in Lenin Square station Our visit in Minsk only began in earnest the next day, where we walked around the city centre. We did, however, take the metro to the national library - which involved going through th...