Although it appears to be one of the scariest sports in the modern world, land sailing (or land yachting) has apparently caught on in a big way on this beach in Malo Les Bains, near Dunkirk, France.

The premise is essentially the same as water sailing – except there are wheels, speeds of up to 70mph, and a harder surface to fall on! Participants sit or lie in a kayak shaped hull, and use pedals or levers to control the sail. Ironically, right next to the water appears to be the best place to do this!

There are multiple size classes, with the most powerful being Class 2 (which boast 8 metre sails), progressively getting smaller and less powerful.

Also hoping to take advantage of the favourable wind conditions are some kite buggies. These are similar to land yachts, but using a power-kite to propel you along the ground, instead of a sail, and can also reach speeds of 70mph.

For more on parasailing, check out Wikipedia, as well as the Dunkirk landsailing club’s website, where there are plenty of photos!

Thanks: James

As 2007 draws to a close we present our choices for the best posts of the year.

Best Mystery

There were numerous contenders for the most confusing or bizarre images, but our pick is the Mystery Plane Outline, as even the generally accepted answer, that these are small rocks arranged in the shape of a plane, still begs the question: “But why bother?”.

Best personal project

In February we were impressed with one man’s attempt to single-handedly recreate a cruise ship in his front drive.

Lamest World Record

The Largest Wooden ship in the world from April easily wins this prize, due to having a less-than-exciting title and the fact that the specially built ship has never even been in the water!

A special mention also goes to the German towns squabbling over who has the most unintentionally leaning building.

Our Brains Hurt Award

Getting our heads around the Island and Lake recursion from September’s Island Week 2 was almost too much, but I think we get it now…

Best Smallest Thing

We loved the idea of the world’s smallest parks from January, but the world’s smallest municipal park was just too darn small to see from satellite! Fortunately, Google now have a street view shot of it.

Best World’s Most Enlarged Thing

In the last year we’ve featured many, many sights that claim to be the “World’s largest something” but our pick for the Best Largest something is the World’s largest fingerprint.

Best Imagery

Undoubtedly the most amazing images to be found in Google Earth are the African Megaflyover project aerial shots, and the best of these images were highlighted in November’s Google Sightseeing Safari.

Best Blurry Pictures

Some of the aerial images in Google Earth are amazingly high resolution, but not high enough for our tour of miniature parks across the globe, which ended up as a list of blurry blobs that sort-of look like the Eiffel tower.

Best Landart

The ancient Incan geoglyph of a cat is fantastic, and much more intersting and attractive than kfc’s logo stunt.

Most Ignored Warning

A few days after we posted this year’s April fools joke: “Live Satellite Images in Google Earth” we updated the entry with a banner warning users that it was a prank and there are no live images to be seen. Did anyone read that? Of course not! We still get a new message almost every week from someone who fell for the joke and wants to know where the live images are.

Most In-Depth Post

For a long time it had no decent imagery, so during Island Week this year we really went to town on our Easter Island post, and managed to condense 2,000 years of history into a mere 600 words.

Best Large Type

The rooftop message “Welcome to Cleveland” isn’t very interesting at first glance, until you realise that the message is over 400 miles away in Milwaukee!

So that’s our picks of the year, but with over 250 entries in 2007, what were your favourites?

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2008 – see you all next year!

Here we see Germany’s Burgplatz, which is absolutely swarming with people. Or, more specifically, very orange people!

The overwhelming orange-ness of the crowd can only mean they are fans of the Dutch football team, who were gathered in the square during last year’s World cup.

The Netherlands national team was knocked out in the second round by Portugal, so this Dutch celebration probably coincides with their one-nil win over Serbia and Montenegro in the nearby Zentralstadion on June 11th, 2006.

Thanks to McMaster_de

These are the famous white cliffs of Pamukkale, Turkey. Literally meaning “cotton castle”, this natural phenomenon is a result of earthquakes here which created a number of hot springs – the waters of which are extremely rich in many minerals, particularly chalk. These minerals have been deposited on the cliff face over the centuries, creating something like an enormous, gleaming-white frozen waterfall, 2700 meters long and 160m high (you can see the effect in these bizarre ground level shots).

Despite a period of abuse by hoteliers and tourists, this has been a popular destination for those seeking to utilise the supposed medicinal properties of the waters ever since the ancient city of Hierapolis was founded on top of the white cliffs by the Phrygian Greeks, probably in the first half of the third century BC.

Hierapolis became part of the Roman empire around 190 BC, and the Hellenistic city was slowly transformed into a Roman town – complete with two Roman baths, a gymnasium, several temples, a main street with a colonnade and a fountain at the hot spring. Eventually Hierapolis became one of the most prominent cities in the Roman empire in terms of the arts, philosophy and trade, and consequently it grew to be wealthy – and at the height of its popularity, home to 100,000 inhabitants.

In 60 AD an earthquake destroyed the town’s theatre, so a new one was built into the hillside, and in the 1534, another earthquake destroyed the remains of the ancient city, and the ruins were slowly covered with a thick layer of limestone.

Today the whole town is undergoing extensive reconstruction, and the theatre is the centre of the activity, which remains to this day as one of the finest examples of original Roman theatre decoration.

Read more about Pamukkale and Hierapolis at Wikipedia, check out some fantastic ground level shots at Flickr, or you can even read a great description of many of the features of Hierapolis at The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites.

Thanks to Tom Heisey, Simon Cope and Jane Turnbull.

When it was opened in 2001, Rockingham Motor Speedway was Britain’s first purpose built racetrack in almost a hundred years. On the day the Google Earth photograph was taken the stands are all empty, so we can see who sponsors the stadium.

However, there may be no spectators, but there is a car on the track. Well, there was a car on the track!

It would appear that this blue car missed the turn and had to hit the brakes. The car has then turned around and is heading back for the road.

Wikipedia: Rockingham Motor Speedway