Sunny Beach (Bulgarian: Slanchev bryag) is a Bulgarian resort community located in the southern end of the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast along a semi-circular bay. Known locally as Bulgaria’s Beverly Hills, it is the country’s largest resort boasting 800 luxury hotels with 300,000 beds. Incidentally, it is also the funny-shaped pool capital of the world.¹

Construction on the town began in 1958 during the Soviet occupation. It has a very small permanent group of inhabitants and stays almost completely empty for most of the year. However, during the summer months the resort’s population can swell with many thousands of tourists from Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Aerial views of Sunny Beach reveal the sheer number of unique pools that dot town. Actually, it seems a distinct possibility that rectangular-shaped pools might have been made illegal at some point.

Exploring Sunny Beach’s many pools is rather like picking shapes out of passing clouds. Each one seems to be unique with some having some interesting resemblances to other objects. Here’s one that looks like Mickey Mouse’s head:

And here’s another that looks like…well…you get the idea:

You can learn more about Sunny Beach at the official website and on Wikipedia.

Thanks to Capital C.

In the north of Vietnam, a few hours east of the capitol, Hanoi, lies a beautiful area known as Hạ Long Bay. Hạ Long, which can be directly translated as “Bay of Descending Dragons”, comprises just under 2000 islands, only half of which have been named.

Other than the truly spectacular scenery which features some absolutely amazing caves, some of the most impressive sights in Hạ Long Bay are the local communities. With a population around the same as the number of inhabitable islands, many of the locals live on floating villages, and some of these small communities are like little towns - complete with banks and schools. Most of their income comes from local fishermen, but tourism also plays a part.

The bay gets its name from an ancient legend which tells of how, during a Chinese invasion, the Jade Emperor sent a mother dragon and her children to aid the Vietnamese and prevent them from facing defeat. The dragons shot from their mouths around 2000 stones which immediately transformed into the jade islands seen today.

The dragon’s defenses supposedly blocked the Chinese ships and gave the Vietnamese the leverage needed to gain victory.

For more info check out the Hạ Long Bay official website, or the Hạ Long Bay Wikipedia page.

Unbelievable, but today is the 4th anniversary of the launch of Google Sightseeing! We shan’t bore you with a potted history - instead we’re revisiting a couple of sights from this day in 2005 to see how things have changed.

Back in 2005, Google Maps’ satellite imagery was barely 24 hours old, and restricted to North America, when we linked to our very first sight - this Mickey Mouse-shaped lake at Disney World, Florida. Interestingly, other than a change in the projection of the images¹ (which stopped everything looking squished), the imagery here hasn’t been updated since then.

In a poor reflection on our imaginations back in 2005, the second sight we posted was even more stereotypically “American”. We think we’ve come a long way since we posted The Hollywood sign, as the entire post simply consisted of the words:

Only just legible, but very cool, the Hollywood sign. Now I don’t need to go there to see it.

The imagery may have been updated since then² (and we’ve gotten a lot more wordy), but the sign never really changes much. However, thanks to Google Street View, we can now get an even better view from the ground.³

Google Sightseeing has come a long way since 2005, and we’re very much looking forward to improving and expanding the site even further in the future. Later this week we’ll be announcing the results of our recruitment drive from a few weeks ago, so there’s going to be lots of new Google Sightseeing to be done over the next four years.

Thanks for reading.

Tied up in Tilbury Docks, we find the MV Ross Revenge, home to Radio Caroline and one of the last surviving pirate radio ships.

For many people in the UK and Western Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, pirate radio was the only source of good music - an alternative to the staid and strictly controlled national stations. Radio Caroline was the most well-known, and the longest running, of the pirate stations. It operated from a succession of ships that ran aground, sank or were impounded.

The Ross Revenge started life as a fishing vessel, and spent time as a diving support ship. After being fitted with 90m high antennas (the tallest mast on any ship) it took to the North Sea and started broadcasting in 1983. The masts are vaguely visible in Live Maps, but are best seen in this Panoramio image or historic photos.

The crews and DJs survived with clandestine deliveries of supplies from small or remote ports as supporting such operations was illegal. Similarly, most advertising originated overseas.

The ship weathered the dreadful storm of October 1987, a collapse of the mast, surveillance by government vessels and even a police raid of questionable legality. Despite surviving all these difficulties, the station closed in November 1990 due to a lack of funding and supplies. A year later a storm washed the ship onto a sandbank and the remaining crew was rescued.

After salvage and several relocations, the ship now rests in Tilbury docks, with volunteers working on restoration. Radio Caroline, now a legal satellite station, occasionally still broadcasts from the studios onboard.

Thanks to the excellent high-quality imagery in Google Earth, some “scientists”¹ claim to have discovered a 1,000-year-old forgotten relic of the fishing world.

Just off the coast of Wales they spotted this large v-shaped row of rocks beneath the water - which looked like a traditional British fishing weir. This was a fishing method whereby the tide would bring fish through the gaps in the rocks, which would then be blocked by wattle fences when the tide turned to flow out again.

The only problem with fishing in this way was that it was far too effective - this was so well known that the Magna Carta, published in 1215, actually includes the following clause:

(33) All fish-weirs shall be removed from the Thames, the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea coast.

So our intrepid “scientists” actually took a trip to Wales to check out in person what they had found, and sure enough, one underwater scuba adventure later, they emerged smugly from the water like some sort of Internet-savvy Indiana Jones’.

How would “scientists” cope these days I wonder, without Google Earth to help them do their research?

Thanks to Frank at the GEarth Blog and Jason Kottke.