Imagine having a quiet afternoon’s topless sunbathing on your private, secluded, back patio – and then one day discovering that your nearly naked body has been posted all over the Internet!

Whilst this isn’t the first time someone has been caught with their kit off in Google Earth, to my eye, it seems that what little clothes are actually being worn, are… ahem – the kind most commonly worn by the fairer sex, shall we say?

Thanks to Romanov.

Thanks to this weekend’s Google Maps image update, we can now see the whole of the Netherlands in high-resolution. That’s everything in the whole country covered. Everything!

Including these floating brothels on the river Vecht, Utrecht.

This is the infamous ‘Zandpad’, one of the legal prostitution areas of Utrecht, where we can see a line of cars parked opposite the boats (whose owners are presumably in flagrante), several people out of their cars, and you can also see the many planks that connect the boats to the road. I’m assuming there’s one plank per lady.

There’s a ground-level picture and some further info at Wikipedia, but I’m not sure if it’s interesting or not – it’s in Dutch

Thanks to Arjan.

Mumbai’s most famous monument, the Gateway of India was traditionally the first thing visitors arriving by boat would see of the city. The Gateway is 26 metres high and was built to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary (although the city was called Bombay back then), and fittingly, it was through the Gateway that the last British troops passed as they left India for good.

You can see there’s lots of tourists milling around here, and you can also see the boats which might to take you to the famous caves of Elephanta Island – which were hewn from the living rock between the 9th and 13th centuries and contain many magnificent carvings.

There’s also thousands of other cool things to look at around here (Mumbai has the highest population of any city in the world after all) – so why not take a wander and send us what you find!

Wikipedia: The Gateway of India and the Elephanta Caves. Thanks to Kim Singh, Rushikesh Jukar and Shreeraj Doshi.

We feel sure that the undoubtedly great, and now very sadly late Steve Irwin wouldn’t blame the stingray that brought about his untimely demise for a single second. In fact we reckon that Steve probably wouldn’t want these normally very passive creatures getting a bad reputation, as he was one of only a handful of people who have ever been recorded as being killed by one.

So in Steve’s honour, we’d like to welcome you to the Cayman Islands very own Stingray City, a series of shallow sand bars where stingrays are found in abundance and visitors can feed, pet, and swim with these incredible creatures. Around each of those boats, you can clearly see the dark shapes of their bodies as the rays congregate to be fed by tourists.

This post is dedicated to Steve, his wife Terri, and their young family.

More on Steve Irwin, Stingray City, the Cayman Islands and of course Stingrays, at Wikipedia.

Many places around the world hold kite-flying events, and here in Italy our trusty satellite has captured Cervia’s annual International Kite Festival in full swing. There’s all sorts of wonderful inflatable kites visible from up here, and the distinct shapes of their shadows should make it possible to identify which exact kites these are by comparing them to ground-level upward-looking photos.

Thanks to Adi Shavit