Monday, 23 October 2017

Armchair Tourism,

has come of age,


take this picture, taken in Quttinirpaaq National Park in the Canadian Territory of Nunavut is that country’s second-largest national park, but chances are slim that you or anyone you know will ever visit: around 50 people per year make it out to the remote park on Ellesmere Island, approximately 600 miles from the North Pole, but now you can visit without investing in mukluks or a polar bear gun, over the summer, Google Streetview teamed with Parks Canada to hike the park, recently, GooglStreetview added the remote location to their map, making Quttinirpaaq the northernmost area documented by the project so far, reports CBC News,
 

Quttinirpaaq, pictured above, is a massive 23,463 square mile swathe of high Arctic landscape including mountains, glaciers and thermal oases. Just getting there is an adventure, requiring a flight to the remote village of Resolute, population 198, before taking a charter flight to the park at 81.4672 north, even if you had the $10,000 Canadian dollars (or about $8,000 U.S. dollars) for the trip and made it that far, the large distance, iffy weather and lack of roads means you might not get a glimpse of the park’s highlights,
 

luckily, Bob Weber at the Canadian Press reports, the Street View hikers had sunny days in July to document the area, Quttinirpaaq National Park manager Emma Upton and a colleague were trained in using and carrying the unique 50-pound Streetview Trekker Camera, which took 360-degree images of the park as they hiked roughly 19 miles over five days, capturing some of the parks highlights, including the eight-story Air Force Glacier, Tanquary Ford and the MacDonald River, the team also collected images of Resolute and Grise Ford, the most northerly settlement in Canada,

but that is not all, with Google Street View, you can literally view the world, from the places where Game of Thrones was filmed,

to the colourful Oceans of the World

and some of the remotest islands in them,

including the Galapagos Islands,

to the heights of Machu-Picchu,

to the worlds highest peaks, everywhere you can think of is here, just click on to street view, scroll down and chose your area, click on to it, then click the arrow to give you a number of places to start from, click on the scene you like and enjoy a 360 panorama of the view, it sounds complicated but it is so easy, armchair tourism has certainly come of age.


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