Paris

 

 To be honest, I've been a bit stuck on what to write about Europe, I mean, what can you say that hasn't been said more eloquently and artistically by someone with actual writing chops? This goes a thousand times over for Paris - a place which haunted blokes like Hemingway, who has been known to turn out a decent sentence or two.

Travel Photography Calendars

Well it's been a bit quiet around this blog of late and that probably because the last 6 months have been anything but quite in our offline worlds.  We are hoping that we can inject a few more posts into the blog during some summer down time soon however I wanted to share with you a little product of my recent busyness and the trip...

The 2016 Travel Photography Calendar!

For those that don't know I've been putting together calendars pretty much every year for a while now however with all the travel this year trying to narrow it down to 12 photos was quite a challenge but I think the result is pretty darn good.  It features a mix of landscape (mostly natural) and wildlife photos from across three different continents so has a travel theme more than anything else.

This year I have also gone with a different printer and ordered in advance.  It was a bit of a scary process to go through for the first time but I think the end result was worth it.  The print quality is fantastic and it means it means I can sell them at a substantially lower cost.

The date pages are set-up with Australian public holidays and school term dates for all the states and territories, however I can ship them anywhere in the world.  Plus I'm pretty sure the moon phases are the same everywhere...

You can order them from my web site: 2016 Calendars
Or if you are not in Australia from my Etsy store.

Reims - It's French for Champagne! (well, not actually)

Deep beneath the town of Reims in France, about 2000 years ago, before it was called Reims and before there was such a thing as France, Romans were digging chalk mines (actually probably they had other people do it for them). Someone was digging chalk mines for the Romans. I'm not sure why they needed chalk, they hadn't invented blackboards yet I'm pretty sure. Maybe teachers still liked to fling chalk at children, even when they didn't have blackboards? But I digress. The Roman chalk mines left big holes in the ground, holes that were cool in summer and big enough to store lots of stuff. So the French came up with something to put in the holes. Champagne! Lots and lots and lots of champagne. So we went there. And we drank some. It was nice. We went to the Taittinger Champagne House and they took us on the tour of the aforementioned cellars. Between the Romans being there and us being there, there had also been monks there who left carvings and such around the cellars, as well as random staircases that originally would have led up into their monastery but now lead nowhere. I love being in a place where you can (try to) imagine all the people who have been there before you. Then they gave us champagne, and that was also nice.

Photo Tips: Wildlife Photography

I'm not an expert photographer but I've had a bit of experience with wildlife photography in Australia, North America, Southern Africa and Europe now so I thought I'd go through my equipment for this trip, how I shoot & process and add as many tips along the way as I can.  While I'll try and keep it fairly general I'll probably be focusing on our African Safaris.

Freiburg and Triberg

The view from our accommodation...

If there’s one thing I love about the Germans (and to be honest, there are lots of things I love about the Germans), it’s the way they utterly embrace and celebrate whatever season they find themselves in. I think it comes from living in a country where the seasons announce themselves to much more definitely than Australia. When I’ve been there at Christmas time in the past, every house is adorned with traditional Christmas decorations – not the neon-lights-you-can-see-from-space kind (though those can be fun too) but carved wooden candle-holders in the windows and evergreen wreathes and beautiful old nativity scenes and gluhwein drunk in the snow at little stalls at the Christmas markets. This time we were there for spring, and Freiburg was going to be ready! Every window was decorated with traditional wooden eggs with delicate painted designs and spring flowers were growing in profusion in every garden. My prevailing memory of our visit to Freiburg, a university town in the Black Forest, was the market that was on around the church at the centre of town, where the locals (and tourists) had gathered to buy fresh, seasonal fruit and vegetables, local meat, wooden toys and flowers – lots and lots of flowers. We wandered there quite happily for quite some time, also popping into the church, which had some pretty stunning wood carvings to see.

On to Europe we go - Munich and Neuschwanstein

Two continents down, one to go! We sadly bid farewell to Africa after some R&R in Johannesburg (seriously, we didn't do one touristy thing. We hung out with a friend, did some shopping and went for coffee). We were also meeting Will's sister Fi in Munich so, as I said to my friend Tara at the time, finally I had someone to tell my travel stories to without them saying, "Yes, I know, I was there. And you made that last part up." Hooray!

Okavango Delta and Morami, Botswana

The Okavango Delta is somewhere Jackie and I had been looking forward to for a long time and was actually the primary goal of time in Africa. However things didn't quite turn out the way we had planned...

Our African safaris were one of the first parts of this trip that we found and booked in so that we could time our flights properly, which was great, till our Botswana safari fell through.  This resulting in much scrambling and searching while we were away in North America till we found another group safari on dates that fitted with our flights and was within our budget (which was, admittedly, not very high).  As it turned out, we were the only ones on the trip which was a little weird but also had some perks.

Chobe National Park, Botswana

Chobe is a national park in North East Botswana (and the name of a river on its border) that is world famous for amazing wildlife.  We stayed a couple of nights in Kasane and were lucky enough to have three trips into Chobe, two as game drives and one as a boat trip.  We saw heaps of amazing wildlife but here are a few highlights.

Victoria Falls the Second

Important things first. This is where I was finally reunited with my bag 10 days after arriving in Africa. There was a hairy moment when the place I was picking my bag up from said 'Bags, no, we haven't received any bags...' but it turned out that bags always get sent to their other office in town (they couldn't have said that first???) Ah, that sweet reunion! Imagine me spreading all of my belongings out on the bed and wallowing in the glorious variety of it all. I didn't actually do that, but you can imagine it if you want.

So our amazing time in the national parks of Zimbabwe was at an end and we were back where we started, Victoria Falls, albeit on the Zimbabwean side now. We went back to the falls to see them from this side and I personally think the view from Zimbabwe is better than the view from Zambia. Feel free to contradict me - you'll have to travel to Zambia and Zimbabwe to be able to so I reckon that would be worth it. And while we had other close encounters with baboons, these ones at least kept their hands to themselves. Also, we didn't get quite so wet. That's not because we actually stayed dry, just because it would be scientifically impossible to be any wetter than we were on the Zambian side.

Bomani Tented Camp, Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe

Bomani Tented Camp is in the south of Hwange National Park, and it is remote. To get there, we had to take a their tram, which they run on the colonial-era rail tracks built by some bloke with a great vision of trains running from South Africa to Egypt but who didn't count on the post-colonial administration taking the particular turn that it has done so the tracks are not in great shape now. Useful for us though!

More early mornings, more safari drives, more lists with lots of commas or again I could just tell a couple of stories.

The Hide, Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe

Elephant: "Hello!"

Okay, so this is where the blog posts have the potential to get really boring. You see, I could tell you about how we got up really early and went for a drive, had a siesta, then went for another drive. I could write a really long list with lots and lots of commas (and I do like commas) with all the animals that we saw. But really, you just want to scroll down and see the photos (in fact you might already have done that).

Before you do though, let me tell you just a couple of stories from our stay at The Hide in Hwange National Park.

Chundu Island, Zimbabwe

Chundu Island is a little (very little) island in the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe. They run on solar power and tank water. They have no internet. There is apparently one spot where you can sometimes get phone reception if you hold your phone up in the air. And somehow, from this island, a lovely couple, one Zimbabwean, one originally British, run a lovely safari camp.

Victoria Falls the First

If you ever find yourself at Victoria Falls in Zambia in late February on a beautiful sunny day, and you see the men renting out raincoats and you think, 'That's silly, why would I need a raincoat? It's so sunny!' then you are a fool who deserves everything that you get. I rented a raincoat from them - I did pack a raincoat but then my bag didn't make it to Zambia so that was totally worthwhile - and it's a massive, made-of-some-kind-of-reinforced-canvas monstrosity poncho of a thing. Plus, you wear a plastic bag raincoat underneath. And you still get soaking, hair dripping down your back kind of wet, should have worn a shower cap and swimsuit kind of wet, glad I'm wearing Will's thongs (flip flops for the Australian-challenged) kind of wet (which meant Will didn't have thongs, which meant that he wore his hiking shoes which he tells me 'filled up with water'). There's a lot of water going over them there falls!

New York

If you're reading this, then you have almost made it to the end of the North American portion of our travels, as New York was our last stop before Africa. We had two days in the city and spent one of them sightseeing, then spent the other running general errands like posting home extra winter gear, getting haircuts and repacking for flying (had to find all those pesky gels and liquids that make their way into your handbag). I don't think you particularly need to hear about the errands day, but here's what we did with our sightseeing day (and the night before).

Boston

Boston is very proud of its history, particularly its history as regards the American Revolution, so not surprisingly most of what we did while we were there related to that. The rest of what we did involved snowbanks taller than me, but that was the less fun part of the visit so we won't talk about that (just a lot of frustration involving traffic, no carparks and general difficulty getting around). Here's the highlights of what we did in Boston.

Where in the world: Blog Map!

Ok, so we are actually in Trondheim in Norway staying with friends when we started trying to figure out just how far we had driven in North America which is apparently pretty close to the distance from Melbourne to Trondheim!  That's a long way.

Nova Scotia - Halifax, Peggy's Cove and Lunenburg

If you read the last post, you know that we had to skedaddle from Prince Edward Island because there was a storm coming in. This meant that we spent a day in hibernation in Halifax, Nova Scotia while some kind of horrible rain/snow hybrid fell. However, we did have to eat, so we ordered Chinese food from a local takeaway and then went walking to collect it (they normally deliver but couldn't because their driver hadn't made it back from one of his deliveries...). It's only a couple of blocks away, we thought, how bad can it be (and what choice do we have)? Turns out, not so easy. Let me tell you about what happens when it rains on snowbanks (Canadians and other people used to snowy winters, you can probably skip to the next paragraph). So it snows. Unless the weather clears enough for someone to come out and clean it up, you now have a layer of snow on the roads and the pavements - plus gargantuan snow banks everywhere they don't need to clear. Then it warms up enough for it to rain. The rain and the melty snow make puddles in the still frozen snow. The snow gets churned up all day by people walking by and the rain falling on it, so when night comes and it is cold enough to freeze again, it tends to freeze in horrible tyre-rut type formations, rather than a smooth walking surface. Put enough pressure on the surface (say, a human being walking on it) and the surface breaks and you find your feet in freezing cold puddles of water. So we ever so gingerly made our way (uphill of course, in the dark and walking in the middle of the road because it was the clearest) to get our Chinese. Bit of an adventure to say the least!

Prince Edward Island

Oh how do I love thee Prince Edward Island! I have dreamed of your gilded shores since first reading Anne of Green Gables as a girl and despite your potential busloads of Anne-obsessed tourists I have longed to see you. Turns out, winter keeps the busloads away but does not diminish the joys of Prince Edward Island at all. Green Gables itself is closed, but you can go in guerrilla style (if the PEI Tourist Board calls, it wasn't me...) Unfortunately, the storm to end all storms was descending on Prince Edward Island when we were supposed to be there. After some anxious discussion about whether to cancel and go to Nova Scotia earlier, we decided instead to cut PEI short (so sad) so we had one night, then one day to cram every single PEI thing into before we fled the island in the afternoon. Good thing we did too, they were apparently digging themselves out for a week and we would have been completely stuck. Okay, so maybe that wouldn't have been such a bad thing except we had a schedule to stick to!

Quebec City

After the terrors of a very cold and snowy Montreal, we came up with a cunning plan. The only plan that tourists in a cold city can come up with. When walking around town, one must stop constantly for food. It's expensive, and hard on the waistline, but it's pretty much the only way you can linger indoors in warm places (art galleries and museums excepted - though they're not always warm). So I came up with a walking tour of Quebec City which included multiple coffee/ hot chocolate/ snack stops. Luckily, though it was still cold as a frozen-over version of hell, it was sunny in Quebec City when we were there too. I always think everything is easier to cope with when the sun is out, even the cold. Another advantage Quebec City has over Montreal is that Quebec Old Town is quite compact and easy to walk around, and most of what we wanted to see was in Quebec Old Town. Easy.

Photo Tips: Yosemite National Park

I'm by no means an expert on Yosemite, we spent a grand total of two days in Yosemite Valley but here are a few tips I can offer you.  If you want to read about what we actually did when we were there you can check out the blog here with lots more photos.

Early mornings and late evenings

Plan to get there (your photo location) at least 30 min before sunrise and to leave at least 30 min after as the light begins long before sunrise and finishes long after sunset.  It is also the time when the contrast between the sky and the land is lower so it fits within the cameras dynamic range better and when you get the best light on the clouds.  It is also worth noting that the gate western entrance gate is a long way from the Yosemite Valley and the road is quite slow and windy which adds to your drive time (probably in the dark).

El Capitan and Half Dome from Tunnel View Lookout well after the sun had set