Vacation!
- Thread starter Quaoar
- Start date
We reached Novosibirsk now:
It's my first time being here, and I did not see the city as we arrived late in the night. That's quite a city though, well-known as a Siberian capital and a scientific center. Coming back to CAD, one pretty visible company is located here, it's LEDAS (https://ledas.com/). They are known for their LGS solver and other software components they developed. It's them who implemented constraints in Catia as far as I know. Will try to take a photo of their office in Akademgorodok tomorrow or the day after.
The road was fine. As it appears, Russian roads till Novosibirsk are pretty good and I've seen plenty of foreign cars driving their way somewhere to the east (to Altay maybe?). My car managed this part of the trip quite well, although it's 7 years old and made 150k km already. The only thing that broke was/is the speedometer, and I think it's the speed sensor to blame. The car is UAZ Patriot 2013.
It's my first time being here, and I did not see the city as we arrived late in the night. That's quite a city though, well-known as a Siberian capital and a scientific center. Coming back to CAD, one pretty visible company is located here, it's LEDAS (https://ledas.com/). They are known for their LGS solver and other software components they developed. It's them who implemented constraints in Catia as far as I know. Will try to take a photo of their office in Akademgorodok tomorrow or the day after.
The road was fine. As it appears, Russian roads till Novosibirsk are pretty good and I've seen plenty of foreign cars driving their way somewhere to the east (to Altay maybe?). My car managed this part of the trip quite well, although it's 7 years old and made 150k km already. The only thing that broke was/is the speedometer, and I think it's the speed sensor to blame. The car is UAZ Patriot 2013.
By "lucky chance" I broke my smartphone with a decent camera right the day before our trip started! The whole weekend was a shitty show actually. Now we are equipped with another cell phone whose camera is way worse and another reflex camera with broken autofocusLooking forward to see some pictures! Make sure your engine oil is topped of!
But definitely, some photos will follow. One should never give up!
So we reached Gorno-Altaysk after fighting some minor (I hope) problems with the car. Here it is, waiting for a doctor:
He will discover that some water found its way through a corroded hole (yeah, there are quite some) right into the spark plug and that the steering tips are almost dead (could not fix that right away though). Also, wheels were balanced a bit but that did not help much :-\
Novosibirsk is huge. We managed to see just a couple of things. One of them is the Museum of USSR (yeah, after 30 years passed, tons of our familiar stuff became museum things). Here's a poster teaching regular polygons:
Soviet cars:
Akademgorodok in Novosibirsk is a nice place to visit. And we managed to find the campus where LEDAS company is located. Here's their building (as far as I know, they occupy one floor). I could not get inside as I'm not affiliated with this company anyhow, but they are not the last guys in our CAD industry.
Altay is real. The mountains are here, and so far it looks like it is worth driving 3.5k kilometers one way. The city of Gorno-Altaysk is calm and small. It's actually the only city in the whole Altay Republic and there are about 65k citizens here (30% of them are Altaians). By no means it looks like a resort, maybe all resorts are lurking down below in the mountains. But the very fact that this city is so calm only makes it a more pleasant place to stay. We'll be here for only 1 night. I don't have any good photos of its landscape though.
He will discover that some water found its way through a corroded hole (yeah, there are quite some) right into the spark plug and that the steering tips are almost dead (could not fix that right away though). Also, wheels were balanced a bit but that did not help much :-\
Novosibirsk is huge. We managed to see just a couple of things. One of them is the Museum of USSR (yeah, after 30 years passed, tons of our familiar stuff became museum things). Here's a poster teaching regular polygons:
Soviet cars:
Akademgorodok in Novosibirsk is a nice place to visit. And we managed to find the campus where LEDAS company is located. Here's their building (as far as I know, they occupy one floor). I could not get inside as I'm not affiliated with this company anyhow, but they are not the last guys in our CAD industry.
Altay is real. The mountains are here, and so far it looks like it is worth driving 3.5k kilometers one way. The city of Gorno-Altaysk is calm and small. It's actually the only city in the whole Altay Republic and there are about 65k citizens here (30% of them are Altaians). By no means it looks like a resort, maybe all resorts are lurking down below in the mountains. But the very fact that this city is so calm only makes it a more pleasant place to stay. We'll be here for only 1 night. I don't have any good photos of its landscape though.
Just come! You'll have a place to stay in Nizhny Novgorod
The trip approached its zenith, and I was offline for a couple of days. The reason is that there's no such thing as the Internet in the south of the Altay mountains. It's hard to share all the impressions in a brief post, but I'll try to capture the major things.
1) Altay is full of contrast. If you are not far away from the main road (which is full of amazing views), you can have a luxury hotel room served with breakfast, wi-fi and all these things. But if you drive further, you'll get into small villages located somewhere in really wild places. Altay itself is a place to move across, not to stay at a single spot.
2) We had a chance to use a tent a couple of times, but the weather here was quite unexpected for us. Nights are cold and we were not prepared for that. And, surprisingly enough, it's impossible to buy sleeping bags and all these touristic things right here. Altay is still quite a wild place, so you need to bring all stuff with you.
A view from Gorno-Altaysk: the only city in the whole republic and the center of civilization there.
That is a cinema building (quite an unusual one)
Just a random view with mountains (not with the highest ones though):
A little bit of offroad classical thing:
The Altyn-Kel lake is best to be approached from the south, but the road there is quite extreme.
A tent here is the only option:
A good option was to cross the lake by ferryboat and get back to the main road this way. It takes more than 5 hours though (still, way faster than moving around by car).
The remaining part of the trip is mostly driving back home. However, we're planning to visit the city of Tomsk which is quite to the north and not really on the way. It's the border between civilization and taiga as far as I can characterize it. Therefore, it feels like a special place.
1) Altay is full of contrast. If you are not far away from the main road (which is full of amazing views), you can have a luxury hotel room served with breakfast, wi-fi and all these things. But if you drive further, you'll get into small villages located somewhere in really wild places. Altay itself is a place to move across, not to stay at a single spot.
2) We had a chance to use a tent a couple of times, but the weather here was quite unexpected for us. Nights are cold and we were not prepared for that. And, surprisingly enough, it's impossible to buy sleeping bags and all these touristic things right here. Altay is still quite a wild place, so you need to bring all stuff with you.
A view from Gorno-Altaysk: the only city in the whole republic and the center of civilization there.
That is a cinema building (quite an unusual one)
Just a random view with mountains (not with the highest ones though):
A little bit of offroad classical thing:
The Altyn-Kel lake is best to be approached from the south, but the road there is quite extreme.
A tent here is the only option:
A good option was to cross the lake by ferryboat and get back to the main road this way. It takes more than 5 hours though (still, way faster than moving around by car).
The remaining part of the trip is mostly driving back home. However, we're planning to visit the city of Tomsk which is quite to the north and not really on the way. It's the border between civilization and taiga as far as I can characterize it. Therefore, it feels like a special place.