Matryoshkas, or Russian dolls, are sets of wooden figures of decreasing sizes placed one inside the other. With a Russian name and a long Russian history, you might be slightly surprised to discover that the world’s largest Russian doll, is in Manzhouli, China.

This 30m high replica Matryoshka was built in 2007 to act as a tourist attraction. It features pictures of Chinese, Mongolian and Russian girls to reflect the ethnicities of the region. The plaza also includes 200 smaller dolls decorated with famous people from around the world.

This Inner Mongolian city is China’s busiest land port of entry, handling 60% of imports and exports to Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as trains between Beijing and Moscow. The huge train yards and station indicate the importance of rail in this region.

The border between the two countries is marked by another impressive plaza, gates and the usual posts of officialdom.

Photos of the doll and other areas of the city can be seen at Panoramio.

Thanks to Micradott.

Yes, we’re finally back, and as to be expected, we missed some great Google Earth-related news while we were off.

Firstly the story that seems to have sprung up everywhere is (of course) a Street View one. The garage419 site posted images from a high mountain road in Colorado, where the Google car supposedly took some spy-shots of a fleet of top-secret, as-yet-unreleased Porches!

This is actually the Mount Evans Scenic Byway, which is the highest paved vehicle road in North America, and apparently the only place in the world where car manufacturers can test their vehicles at altitudes of up to 4,306 metres (14,127 feet). Looks like those clever German engineers don’t leave anything to chance, eh?

Next, the Daily Fail tells the story of a “Lost World” discovered with the help of Google Earth. Our satellite sightseeing friends at Kew Gardens spotted an unexpected patch of green forest in the mountains of Mozambique, and when they paid the area a visit, were rewarded with the discovery of a new species of adder, three new species of butterfly, a rarely seen orchid, giant snakes, and colonies of rare birds.

Of course the country’s crappest newspaper failed to include a link to said unspoiled paradise, so it was up to the always reliable Stefan at Ogle Earth to come up with the goods.

Stefan points out that the most interesting thing about the area from up here is that even when viewing it with the enormously comprehensive Geonames.org database loaded, there are still no place names to be seen. Which suggests to us that anyone could find their own undiscovered paradise, simply by looking for places that aren’t marked in Geonames or any of Google Earth’s own databases! Fame and fortune awaits, clearly.

Finally, we come to the story of an American “treasure hunter”, who has gone to court to try to win the right to excavate a sunken ship, which he says he discovered using Google Earth. Mr Nathan Smith reckons the ship ran aground and sank in the mud near the Mission River, Texas, in 1822 while trying to avoid a hurricane. Mr Smith claims that half the crew died during the voyage and those remaining were killed by a local cannibal tribe. He also believes that the ship contains $3 billion in buried treasure¹.

Of course Mr Smith isn’t telling exactly where this sunken treasure is, only that it’s somewhere around here. However sources that have seen the Google Earth image in question describe it as looking “something like a shoe print“, so maybe we could beat him to it!

So, what else did we miss?

Here’s a fairly long train travelling through an icy Moldova, eastern Europe. A train is hardly an uncommon sight on Google Earth – but this particular train will travel from one side of Moldova all the way to the other in an incredible two minutes flat.

The train has just left neighbouring Romania and is passing through Moldova on its way to Ukraine… but as you may have guessed by now, this train passes through Moldova at the exact point where the three countries meet. If the train had been just a little longer, it could have actually straddled all three countries at the same time!

Elsewhere in Europe, we find the Belgian town of Baarle-Hertog – which is in the Netherlands.

Baarle-Hertog is made up of twenty separate Belgian exclaves in the Netherlands, and three other pieces on the Dutch-Belgian border. Even more confusingly, there are also seven Dutch exclaves within the Belgian exclaves!

The Dutch parts of the town are called Baarle-Nassau, and the border is so complicated that there are some houses that are divided between the two countries. Allegedly there was once a Dutch law which required restaurants to close earlier than those in Belgium, which for some restaurants simply meant that the clients had to move tables to the Belgian side.

Read more about Moldova, Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau at Wikipedia. BLDG blog also has an excellent article about Baarle-Hertog.

Thanks to Eric Hagerman and Nev Stokes.

Scraping the bottom of the “world’s largest” barrel¹, it’s the awe-inspiring (former) World’s Largest Dump Truck!

Built as a prototype and dubbed the “Terex Titan”, the 20m long truck can carry a payload of up to 350 tons.

The manufacturer came up with loads of possibly untrue facts about the truck, such as being able to hold “2 greyhound buses and 2 pickup trucks”, or “1,000,000 golf balls”.

However amazing these facts, by 1990 the Terex Titan had outlived its useful life and was purchased by the town of Sparwood in British Columbia to be put on permanent display.

Read more on the Terex Corporation and the Terex Titan on Wikipedia, or watch an overly dramatic video of the truck on YouTube.

For more large trucks see our previous post on the Bingham Canyon Mine.

Beaufort West is a town in South Africa, which must be the only town in the world to claim that it has a prison in the middle of a roundabout.

The town lies at the intersection of the N1 and N12 highways (two of South Africa’s busiest roads), and it’s the N1 that splits around the buildings. The prison was established in 1873, so presumably the road was divided to avoid the building, rather than this being some sort of primitive escape-deterrent!

Of all the people who drive around this roundabout every day, I wonder how many of them even realise they’re circling a prison?

Thanks to Fraser (again), via magnumphotos.com (which has some more information on the troubled town as well as an excellent, if not entirely SFW photo gallery).