Left Toronto on Saturday night and after a two hour delay while Air Canada fixed a technical problem, we left at about midnight for Frankfurt. A/C couldn’t be turned until after we were airborne and in the midst of our current heat wave we all, passengers and cabin crew, were a sodden lot when we finally took off.
Arrived in Frankfurt an hour after my Amsterdam connection had left but was re-scheduled on a connection that left at 17:00 and arrived at 18:00 in Amsterdam. Have been in A’dam a number of times before, but always in winter and it was remarkably beautiful to fly along the Dutch coast and over the countryside in the bright evening sunshine and see endless electric green fields and the North Sea, kept at bay by dikes, patiently waiting to regain its loss. (more…)
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In my last post I tried to cover some of the more important general points that have made our travels successful and which were particularly useful on our SA trip. In this post I’ll cover a few of the key photography concerns that we dealt with. I will be adding to this list as more thoughts occur to me, but this will get the ball rolling.
In all of our previous travels we have always taken photographs, after all, who doesn’t? As skills developed and as I actually began to generate revenue from my photography it began to take on an increasingly larger role in the trip planning, culminating in the SA trip.I have always packed a reasonable amount of camera equipment, but usually limited to one body and 3 or 4 of lenses as well as all the associated bits to make it all work. When we went to Bhutan in January of 2010, I had just purchased a Leica M9 and decided that I’d use the trip to learn how to use it. Which leads me to my two of my most important learnings:
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We’ve been home for 10 days, and I want to try and sum up all of our learnings from this trip while they are still fresh in my mind. The trip had two broad categories of learnings for us, general travel stuff and photography related stuff.
First of all, general travel stuff and much of this is not necessarily brand new learnings but more in the category of things that you want to make sure you always keep in the back of your mind so that they are handy to the front of your mind when you need them. I should also preface this by saying that in the last 20 years we have always travelled as a couple and not part of a tour or group, with the mild qualifier that we have taken 4 or 5 shared trips with our friends from New York, Jane and David. I’m not sure our learnings would be useful for anyone who wants/needs to travel with a larger group, but relate only to the two of us, travelling on our own.
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Our last 5 days were spent in Cape Town. It felt very strange staying in one place, figuring out where to eat our next meal, and sleeping past 6:00. I think that we were more than a little spoiled.
Not sure if our reaction to Cape Town, CT, is skewed by our previous three weeks of gracious living, but did feel that it did not quite live up to expectations. Nice city, very beautiful and interesting architecture, but no chemistry for us. We spent lots of time poking around the city, spent Saturday morning at the Old Biscuit Mill and had a wonderful pizza at a new restaurant called Burrata. Thin crust, but with a bite and texture, not like many of the thin-crust pizzas that we get in Toronto that taste more like a toasted flour tortilla, well worth the visit, and in its own small way, one of our better meals.
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Slept in ’til 7:30 this morning after 9 days of 5:30 wake-ups and started the day in a very groggy fashion.Today the weather is once again clear with brilliant blue skies so drove over Chapman’s Peak to Noordhoek where we had a lunch reservation at The Food Barn.
Amazing drive and views as anyone who has driven it can attest. Many racing team bikers to be seen on the ascent and descent as Sunday is the Cape Argus bike race, and these guys are clearly practicing. Some with team cars drafting for them and some in packs doing a fairly intense climb and descent. The Argus is, apparently, one of the top half dozen sporting events in the SA annual sporting calendar. Like the NY Marathon, it has a large number of entrants, about 35,000 and everyone gets a finish time, not just the elite racers at the front. There are teams from around the world here, with team cars, live helicopter feeds from along the course and the whole city turned out to watch. Many closed roads along the 90k course which starts at the V&A waterfront, loops around the Cape Town peninsula, climbs Chapman’s Peak from the Noordhoek side, and descends into Hout Bay and so on through Cape Town to the Start-Finish line.
Going to be very exciting and we’re going to be there when the elite guys come down the mountain, cameras in hand for what, I hope, will be some pretty spectacular shots.
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Last game drive before we leave for Cape Town and we finished on a high note. We were trying to get back in time for breakfast and the massages that we had arranged on the previous day to set us right after our horse ride. Because of time constraints, no major projects planned; we were going to check on the pride that we had seen the day before. (more…) -
Magic morning. Went to section of the reserve where some cheetah tracks had been found the previous evening. Got to see Sammy at his best, as he worked the small dirt tracks and took us off road around a watering hole just a 1/2 kilometre from a series of rocky, shrub-covered hills. He finally found fresh tracks and we worked our way though the tall grass in a wide field just at the foot of the hills, when Sammy signalled Marco to kill the engine; he listened for a few minutes and even though none of us could hear anything, he whispered, that they were under some brush about 100 metres away. We chugged our way though the tall grass and sure enough, in regal splendour, stretched out under the shade of a scrub camel thorn were two magnificent, male cheetah, one wearing a leather collar with a radio tracking device attached. (more…) -
This morning is meerkat day. Left by 6:00 and followed some cheetah tracks to a waterhole near the meerkat colony. Hope was to track them after we saw meerkats, but a troop of baboons had been by in the early morning and messed up cheetah tracks so won’t be able to follow them later.
Got to the meerkat colony at 6:45, just before sunrise, and spread ourselves out about 3 metres from their burrows. As the sun rose, (more…) -
Sun seems to rise a little later here than at Mala Mala; farther north? Wakeup at 5:30, off at 6:00 and drove through the opening dawn chorus in search of lion tracks. Beautiful sunrise, but alas few tracks. Bounced around the country for a couple of hours looking for signs and not finding big cats but lots of different varieties of antelope, kudu, springbok, nyalla, oryx and duiker, as well as many gnus both large territorial males and many females; some wonderful shots. (more…) -
Had expected the cyclone to land overnight and bring heavy rainfall which was a worry if it prevented us from making our flight to Jo’burg and picking up our plane for Tswalu, but still no storm so our guardian angels are working overtime. Easy flight to Jo’burg and met at the plane by someone from Anglo American, who would be flying us into Tswalu. Car over to their hanger where we waited for an hour or so then into an 7 seater exec turbo-prop for the 90 minute run to Tswalu. Very hot, sultry weather so lots of turbulence and V had a rough time; dug out the Gravol but after we levelled out at 26,000 feet, all smooth the rest of the way until our landing approach, when we had the same problem. (more…)
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