Finding a dream on a map
A few days, a friend reminded me of a screenshot I had on my phone of a dreamy landscape, and the incredibly nagging but tantalizingly simple question: where is this?!
"I wanted to throw in my 2 cents- I think it's a beach in Russia." Instantly, the memory of the many frustrated hours of Googling I spent months ago hid behind a renewed determination to figure out the answer. I had given the photo some over-the-top sentimentality even back when I had initially taken the screenshot, back in February 2018, to the point where I felt my life wouldn't be complete unless I knew the answer. It seemed like a delightfully magical place, but I could just never find it. This time, with large swaths of the world, and especially New York, playing a massive game of "the floor is lava," pinning down the location seemed like a perfect stay-at-home activity.
Really, the story starts even earlier, with baby Kevin.
Back when my parents had the decency to provide me with such impeccable style, inevitably ruined when I began dressing myself, my big brother was my primary role model. He was about five-and-a-half years older, which was more than my entire life for a about five-and-a-half years, so whatever he liked, I automatically liked as well. When he bought his first pack of Pokémon cards in 1999, I was right there with him. When he hooked up the Nintendo 64 to the TV for the first time in 1996 to play Mario Kart 64, I was just as entranced as him. But nothing quite hits the nostalgia button for me quite like the Rockapella theme to the Where in the World is Carmen San Diego game show, which my brother would watch religiously. I was really really young when that show was on, so some of the details sit in my memory like fingerprints on an abandoned handrail, but my love for maps and geography certainly stuck with me for a long time afterwards.
I never quite rose to a geography bee level of knowledge, but I do know enough geography to frustrate a friend or two. In fact, a British friend once bet that I couldn't draw a map of all the US states from memory. He lost.
So geography has obviously served me well. It's no wonder that when GeoGuessr became a thing, I was all over it. The idea of GeoGuessr is simple: you're dropped off in a random location in the world and you're only allowed to move via Google Street View. The goal is to pinpoint your starting location on the map, and you earn points based on how far away you are. It's surprisingly fun, and I think it's a neat way to learn about what different parts of the world look like! And even if you don't think so, you should check out the YouTube channel GeoWizard, which has produced some of the most incredible content over the past few months (see especially Mission Across Wales and How Not to Travel in Europe).
So that brings me back to that photo. I had a knock-off version of the GeoGuessr game as an app on my phone, which I would play whenever I felt that transporting to a random fjord in Norway might be a decent way to pass the time. Highly recommended for an indoor activity, if, for example, some pandemic is going on outside. But on February 16, 2018, up popped that beautiful pink sunset from the vantage point of a serene shingle beach. I found it mystical, almost like the alien beach from the movie Contact, and immediately, I wanted to know where it was, so I could travel there. "I'll take a screenshot," I thought.
Taking a screenshot may sound like a pretty innocent activity to you, but for me, it's frightening. It feels to me like I'm being too touchy-feely with my phone, pressing two buttons at once in a sort of awkward way. If you couldn't tell, I'm not a very good millennial, and taking a screenshot is an extremely rare occurrence. And although the landscape was successfully seared into the memory of my phone, it wasn't without a severe casualty - I had accidentally exited out of the game. The one time I ever thought a landscape from this game was worthy of a screenshot, I now had no way of knowing where it was. I literally paced around my room for a good 10 minutes, somewhat pissed off at myself.
Since then, I've told a handful of people about the photo, but I've had no real leads. I'd be embarrassed to share how many hours I've spent searching through shingle beaches and pebble beaches and rocky beaches with no luck. That is, not until a few days ago.
Before I tell you the resolution, let me tell you a different story. In part I do this because this post will end with a certain level of embarrassment, which I'd like to counteract now with a more impressive anecdote. On very rare occasions, I allow a friend to play GeoGuessr with me. (If ever you play GeoGuessr with me, you've reached a very special level of friendship.) Anyways, we were playing, and immediately we thought we were probably in middle-of-nowhere Russia. After about ten minutes of roaming around, we found a major road, and a few more minutes in, a useful sign:
If you're Russian, you immediately know why this is helpful. I told my friend that about a month earlier, I had learned the Cyrillic characters, and I immediately recognized the city Yakutsk on the sign, 792 kilometers away. And of course we both knew where Yakutsk was from having played the board game Risk. So all we had to do was go into the app's map and pinpoint our starting location. But the map on the app didn't have any sense of scale, and if you have to zoom in pretty far to find a small town like our starting point, just south of the town of Berkakit. The map on the app didn't have a ruler like Google Maps, so with no sense of scale, it would have taken ages to find the town. For this problem I had one more trick up my sleeve. When I was young, every so often I would go on a trip which would take us on I-80 through Pennsylvania. Once, when I was on such a trip, I noticed that the exits went by mile marker, and concluded that Pennsylvania is about 300 miles, east-to-west. Putting on my handy "multiply by 0.6" conversion, I also knew that 792 kilometers was about 500 miles. We simply scrolled on the map to Pennsylvania to get a sense of scale, and scrolled back to Russia. We zoomed in on a point one-and-a-half Pennsylvania widths south of Yakutsk, and wouldn't you know we were right in the town of Berkakit! The whole thing was the most randomly impressive thing I've ever done in my life.
Alright, so back to our picture. It was frustrating me that it had been over two years and I still hadn't figured out where in the world that darn picture was taken. Feeling defeated, I switched to Facebook to try to outsource the search, figuring that other people who have locked themselves indoors during this pandemic might find searching for a random idyllic beach a welcome challenge. Suddenly, as I cropped the picture, I noticed a clue which had eluded me for a whole two years.
I searched for Evgeny on Google and found the picture in less than a minute. So ended my two-year torment, with the sudden realization that I was being absolutely daft for two years.
Really, the story starts even earlier, with baby Kevin.
Back when my parents had the decency to provide me with such impeccable style, inevitably ruined when I began dressing myself, my big brother was my primary role model. He was about five-and-a-half years older, which was more than my entire life for a about five-and-a-half years, so whatever he liked, I automatically liked as well. When he bought his first pack of Pokémon cards in 1999, I was right there with him. When he hooked up the Nintendo 64 to the TV for the first time in 1996 to play Mario Kart 64, I was just as entranced as him. But nothing quite hits the nostalgia button for me quite like the Rockapella theme to the Where in the World is Carmen San Diego game show, which my brother would watch religiously. I was really really young when that show was on, so some of the details sit in my memory like fingerprints on an abandoned handrail, but my love for maps and geography certainly stuck with me for a long time afterwards.
I never quite rose to a geography bee level of knowledge, but I do know enough geography to frustrate a friend or two. In fact, a British friend once bet that I couldn't draw a map of all the US states from memory. He lost.
 |
| Sorry if you're from one of the states that ended up very distorted... |
So geography has obviously served me well. It's no wonder that when GeoGuessr became a thing, I was all over it. The idea of GeoGuessr is simple: you're dropped off in a random location in the world and you're only allowed to move via Google Street View. The goal is to pinpoint your starting location on the map, and you earn points based on how far away you are. It's surprisingly fun, and I think it's a neat way to learn about what different parts of the world look like! And even if you don't think so, you should check out the YouTube channel GeoWizard, which has produced some of the most incredible content over the past few months (see especially Mission Across Wales and How Not to Travel in Europe).
So that brings me back to that photo. I had a knock-off version of the GeoGuessr game as an app on my phone, which I would play whenever I felt that transporting to a random fjord in Norway might be a decent way to pass the time. Highly recommended for an indoor activity, if, for example, some pandemic is going on outside. But on February 16, 2018, up popped that beautiful pink sunset from the vantage point of a serene shingle beach. I found it mystical, almost like the alien beach from the movie Contact, and immediately, I wanted to know where it was, so I could travel there. "I'll take a screenshot," I thought.
Taking a screenshot may sound like a pretty innocent activity to you, but for me, it's frightening. It feels to me like I'm being too touchy-feely with my phone, pressing two buttons at once in a sort of awkward way. If you couldn't tell, I'm not a very good millennial, and taking a screenshot is an extremely rare occurrence. And although the landscape was successfully seared into the memory of my phone, it wasn't without a severe casualty - I had accidentally exited out of the game. The one time I ever thought a landscape from this game was worthy of a screenshot, I now had no way of knowing where it was. I literally paced around my room for a good 10 minutes, somewhat pissed off at myself.
Since then, I've told a handful of people about the photo, but I've had no real leads. I'd be embarrassed to share how many hours I've spent searching through shingle beaches and pebble beaches and rocky beaches with no luck. That is, not until a few days ago.
Before I tell you the resolution, let me tell you a different story. In part I do this because this post will end with a certain level of embarrassment, which I'd like to counteract now with a more impressive anecdote. On very rare occasions, I allow a friend to play GeoGuessr with me. (If ever you play GeoGuessr with me, you've reached a very special level of friendship.) Anyways, we were playing, and immediately we thought we were probably in middle-of-nowhere Russia. After about ten minutes of roaming around, we found a major road, and a few more minutes in, a useful sign:
 |
| In the game, I don't think it even displayed "A-360" on the road. |
If you're Russian, you immediately know why this is helpful. I told my friend that about a month earlier, I had learned the Cyrillic characters, and I immediately recognized the city Yakutsk on the sign, 792 kilometers away. And of course we both knew where Yakutsk was from having played the board game Risk. So all we had to do was go into the app's map and pinpoint our starting location. But the map on the app didn't have any sense of scale, and if you have to zoom in pretty far to find a small town like our starting point, just south of the town of Berkakit. The map on the app didn't have a ruler like Google Maps, so with no sense of scale, it would have taken ages to find the town. For this problem I had one more trick up my sleeve. When I was young, every so often I would go on a trip which would take us on I-80 through Pennsylvania. Once, when I was on such a trip, I noticed that the exits went by mile marker, and concluded that Pennsylvania is about 300 miles, east-to-west. Putting on my handy "multiply by 0.6" conversion, I also knew that 792 kilometers was about 500 miles. We simply scrolled on the map to Pennsylvania to get a sense of scale, and scrolled back to Russia. We zoomed in on a point one-and-a-half Pennsylvania widths south of Yakutsk, and wouldn't you know we were right in the town of Berkakit! The whole thing was the most randomly impressive thing I've ever done in my life.
Alright, so back to our picture. It was frustrating me that it had been over two years and I still hadn't figured out where in the world that darn picture was taken. Feeling defeated, I switched to Facebook to try to outsource the search, figuring that other people who have locked themselves indoors during this pandemic might find searching for a random idyllic beach a welcome challenge. Suddenly, as I cropped the picture, I noticed a clue which had eluded me for a whole two years.
I searched for Evgeny on Google and found the picture in less than a minute. So ended my two-year torment, with the sudden realization that I was being absolutely daft for two years.
 |
| 55°38'05.5"N 109°54'49.4"E PS: Weirdly, all of my geo-guessing stories involve Russia. Berkakit is just south of Neryungri. |
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