Street View guy travelled 500,000 km to capture Thailand's countryside
For over two years, Google has been sending people into further flung places to capture as much of the earth as it can for its Street View service.
Not everywhere can be captured by car, so intrepid trekkers are sent out on foot with a special backpack with a 360-degree camera.
In Thailand, the fruit of that labour has largely been thanks to work of one guy, Google tells Mashable.
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On Monday, Google added 150 new places of interest in the Land of a Thousand Smiles, including the Sukhothai Historical Park and ancient temples at Ayutthaya.
In order to capture these places, a Thai triathlete named Panupong Luangsa-ard strapped on the backpack and trudged through rolling hills and forests.
"While collecting just the tea plantations and strawberry fields, he burned through four pairs of shoes," a Google rep said.
Panupong travelled an estimated 500,000 km using a mix of transportation methods, and walked about 500 km of it.
The entire quest to capture these sites took the team two years, with breaks on rainy days because the camera needs fair skies to get a clear shot.
The Trekker backpack weighs about 18 kg, and extends about 2 ft above the operator's shoulders. Its battery lasts around six to eight hours on a full charge.
In addition to the new sites in Thailand, Google's Street View has already been extended to exotic locations like coral reefs in Indonesia, Dubai's Burj Khalifa and the pyramids in Egypt, to name just a few.
CORRECTION: March 31, 2016, 9:46 a.m. SGT An earlier headline noted that Panupong walked the entire way. Google has reached out with an apology for the error, saying it calculated the distance walked wrongly.
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Topics Google
Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
