Hong Kong

Night time photos of Hong Kong

What with being on a rather tight schedule, and also at this time of the year the weather is not very good, the only time I got to take photos in Hong Kong was the first evening I was there. Since it was dark, thats all I got.

More pictures of Hong Kong

More of my pictures

Around the world in less than 5 1/2 days

Graphic from the Great Circle mapper.

In a bout of total madness, I agreed to a schedule that required me to go round the world in 5 1/2 days.

On the Sunday evening I flew from Heathrow to Hong Kong, arriving Monday late pm. Then on Wednesday evening (it was midnight when we pulled back and its a looooong taxi now at HKG) I flew to San Francisco, arriving Wednesday evening (due to the magic of crossing the International Dateline).

Stayed in the Bay Area a whole 2 days until Friday pm, and then back to Heathrow, arriving lunchtime. Madness!

I now have a carbon footprint the size of Germany, having flown about 18288 miles.

The shortest way - updated

In a previous post I was looking at ways to minimise flight distance, using Great Circle routes. One could argue that actually if you are in a frequent flyer program that you don't care about flight distance, only flight time.

It seems from the various online booking sites, that only www.expedia.co.uk allows you to sort by flight duration.

If I try a notional trip from LHR to ABQ it tells me that the shortest duration is actually via Denver. Great Circle mapper shows this as 5019 miles:

The shortest way between 2 places

Ever wondered what is the shortest way between 2 places? The answer is a Great Circle. There's an online Great Circle finder here at gc.kls2.com.

Its really useful if you need to fly somewhere, but there are no direct flights. You can look for intermediate stops close to the Great Circle route, and this will minimise your flying time. Of course you need to check on the schedules to minimise the holdover time.

For example, say I want to fly to Albuquerque from London Heathrow. This is the Great Circle route and is 4994 miles long:


There are no direct flights, but I can see from gc.kls2.com that my best best is going through Minneapolis St Paul to give a total airborne mileage of 4995 miles:

Now I could go via Washington Dulles, but thats 5304 miles ie about an extra half an our airborne:

Hong Kong - new country visited

I've come to Hong Kong , so my visited countries needs updating. It was previously

correct April 2 2008

Pictures to follow, in the meantime here's my updated world66.com profile.