A ship built 102 years ago in Germany is the main ferry on a big African lake today. The MV Liemba has a fascinating history. Kigoma is a small port town in Tanzania, East Africa. More than 1,000 km away from the ocean, it lies on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, the longest fresh-water lake …
TGO Challenge 2015 – Preview
It is another twelve weeks until my coast-to-coast adventure in Scotland begins. I will be part of the ‘TGO Challenge’ this year! My route is planned and I am in the middle of training for two weeks of trekking through the Scottish Highlands. TGO Challenge The Great Outdoors Challenge is an annual event for self-supported …
Kokoda Track
The Kokoda Track is a great example of how a historic route can be meaningful for people today. Site of a decisive jungle campaign in the Pacific War, it is a place for both commemoration and personal challenge today. Every year several thousand people travel to Papua-New Guinea to walk a jungle track across the …
Nilgiri Mountain Railway
The Nilgiri Mountain Railway in the jungle of Southern India has the steepest slope of any railway in Asia. What is the reason that a railway line was built through such difficult terrain? As the name suggests, the Nilgiri Mountain Railway connects Mettupalayam on the plains of southern India with Ooty (or Udhagamandalam) in the …
Kumano Kodo
The Kii Peninsula in Japan is the location of a remarkable network of old pilgrimage trails known as the Kumano Kodo. Apart from the Camino de Santiago (St. James Way) in Spain, these are the only pilgrimage routes that received World Heritage status. History of the Kumano Kodo pilgrimages The hilly area of the Kii …
The Marathon Route
42.195 km or 26 miles and 385 yards. Those numbers are familiar to the hundreds of thousands of people, who take up running as a sport. It is the distance of a Marathon Race. Many runners know that it commemorates the Battle of Marathon in ancient Greece. However, there are some surprising facts, when …
Sandridge Line – The First Railway in Australia
Melbourne was neither the biggest nor the oldest city in the Australian colonies in 1854. Yet on 12. September of that year the inhabitants gathered to watch cutting edge technology in their town. The opening of the first railway line in Australia. Let’s take a closer look why modern transportation made its way to that …
Chicago Portage
A continental divide or watershed does not have to be a place somewhere high up in the mountains. One of the most important watersheds in North America is near downtown Chicago, Illinois: the Chicago Portage. It is the main reason the third biggest city in the United States was built. History of the Chicago …
Isthmus of Panama
In Panama, the shores of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are only about 60 km apart. This makes the isthmus a truly strategic location for global transportation. A hundred years ago the Panama Canal was opened and since then allows ships go directly from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific. This obviously was not possible …
The Berlin Wall
November 2014 saw the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. To celebrate the event, light bulbs were placed along a 15 km stretch of the former border in the heart of Berlin. For a whole weekend 8,000 of these lights showed where the city had been divided by the wall for almost …