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South Africa 2011: Kruger National Park Photo Report 3 – Other Animals
Following on from my last two photo reports from our Kruger safari (see “The Big Five” and “The Birds”) I will close off the animal-based photos with, well, everything that isn’t a “Big Five” or a bird. This menagerie includes a wide variety of wildlife, from the ever-present (Impalas) to the tiny and rare (dung beetle).
Giraffe
Wildebeest
Zebra
Hippos and Crocodiles
Reptiles and Insects
Leopard Tortoise
Dung Beetle
Warthogs and Hyenas
Antelope
Kudu Bull
Impala Ewe
Impala Ram
Male Steenbok
Well, that’s it on the wildlife photography front from our Kruger trip. Next up will be a few landscapes from the Kruger Park, and then a selection of shots from our trip to New York last weekend. See you soon.
South Africa 2011: Kruger National Park Photo Report 2 – The Birds
On our self-drive safari adventure in Kruger National Park (see previous entry on the “Big Five” here) we were amazed at the sheer variety and exoticism of the birds we saw. Apparently over 400 species (resident and migratory) call Kruger home, at least for part of the year. The park is really well set-up for birdwatching, with many hides set up next to waterholes and so on, and while I would not in any way call myself a twitcher, I did at least take an interest in what birds crossed paths with me, which is more than I can say at other times in my life.
In any event, we were lucky enough to encounter these fellows during our time in Kruger:
Scops Owl
Common/Steppe Buzzard
Goliath Heron
Cape Glossy Starling
Southern Masked Weaver
Southern Ground-Hornbill with Scorpion
Common Bulbul in a Bird Bath
Lilac Breasted Roller
Martial Eagle in Flight
Crested Barbet
Guinea Fowl
A few more bird shots can be found on my Flickr set here.
Next up: some more of the fantastic creatures lurking around the Kruger…
South Africa 2011: Kruger National Park Photo Report 1 – “The Big Five”
Following on from our brilliant time exploring Cape Town and its beautiful surroundings, we hopped a plane to Johannesburg, picked up our soon-to-be-abused rental car (a miniscule VW Polo we nicknamed “Egbert”) and headed west-northwest towards the Kruger National Park. What attracted us to Kruger was not only its reputation as a game-spotters paradise or its size (think Wales), but primarily we liked the sound of a self-drive safari. Yes, that’s right, instead of having to squeeze into a ruggedized Land Rover with ten random fat tourists, we were free to explore the park and get up close to the animals as we saw fit. As a photographer this is a blessing. Of course, next time I would have chosen a slightly bigger / higher car, but I still preferred it to being subject to the whims of over-excitable children (“LOOK! AN IMPALA!” for the 80th time) or, worse…. birders. 🙂
“THE BIG FIVE”
Ever since Victorian times, there have been five animals in Southern Africa which have been known by this collective moniker. This is not because these are the five biggest species around – no, it’s because, back in Victorian times, these were the five animals most likely to turn around and make a run at you if you missed them with your first shot. We managed to see four of the Big Five, only missing out on seeing leopards, who are very elusive at the best of times, but in the 35-42C heat we experienced (early November) the leopards were well-nigh invisible. But we had many, many consolation prizes…
Lion
As mentioned above, the daytime heat, even in early morning / late afternoon, was pretty staggering – so the lions we saw were generally interested in one thing only: sitting around and panting. This had plus points and minus points. The minus point was the obvious lack of “action” shots. The plus point was that, once you worked your way through the scrum of cars angling for a look, it was generally safe to stick your lens out the window from a distance of down to 10 feet / 3m and shoot away without fear of losing a limb. So, out of a wide variety of sitting-around-and-panting shots I have chosen these three:
Adult Male Lion (who was just sitting outside the gate at Skukuza Camp….)
Buffalo
I have to be frank here and say that, despite their fearsome Victorian reputation, I did not find the African Buffalo to be particularly captivating. I suppose they must suffer a lot for this, as many people can name four out of the Big Five and then stall when trying to remember the poor old buffalo…
Rhino
One of the first encounters we had with a rhinoceros was at close range, as it was ambling along the side of the road, grazing on the fresh green grass to be found there. We were one of only a couple of vehicles and for a time we were able to almost idle alongside it and snap away. It might have been the heat, but almost every time we saw the rhinos I did not feel the slightest hint of threat. It was great as well to get up close to a creature that has essentially not changed for millions of years. Our only regret was that we only saw white rhinos, not the much rarer black rhino.
Elephants
Elephants were byt far the most numerous of the Big Five we encountered, which was lucky as we were so enamoured of them. They are the real deal, by turns majestic, powerful, slightly menacing, and – would you believe it – playful. Once we got over our initial nervousness of how to manoever around the big bulls (in short: do what they want and be ready to run like hell) we really got to enjoy just sitting and watching these giants do their thing, which is primarily running ravage over the countryside, leaving a trail of shredded, snapped and denuded trees in their wake. And you haven’t lived till you’ve been in the middle of a herd of 30-40 elephants as they cross the road in front of and behind your car…
We were very happy to see quite a few instances of play-fighting by the younger elephants, usually in and around the water. On our last day, when three separate herds totalling over 70 animals had shown up at a watering hole below our picnic spot, we watched amused as the elephants played tug-of-war with their trunks, splashed about in the mud, and in one instance, even cheekily mock-charged a pod of hippos hanging out nearby.
More Shots from my Big Five collection may be seen here.
Next installation of photos from Kruger will be…. birds. After that I will move onto some other critters we encountered on our safari. Stay tuned!
South Africa 2011: Photo Report from Cape Town
I’ve been clocking up the miles lately. For most of October I was away with work, first in Dubai, then Turkey, and finishing up in South Africa. Fortunately, when my work was done in South Africa, I was able to kick back and relax a bit, and Nicola flew down to join me for a 10-day trip combining a bit of a a sun-and-fun city break in Cape Town with a magical 5 day safari drive through the Kruger National Park up on the borders of Mozambique / Zimbabwe. But I am getting ahead of myself…
CAPE TOWN
We started out in Cape Town, a fascinating city with much to recommend it: from the amazing geography of the place – all views dominated by Table Mountain looming above – to the diverse and vibrant population (somehow not bitter after all their potted history), it was a great start to our trip. And the Capetonians sure know how to eat, drink and be merry. We based ourselves just on the other side of the mountain from downtown, in a swish beach resort suburb called Camps Bay. From our 1 bedroom flat overlooking the ocean we set out each day to get to know the town and the surrounding area, including the Winelands, the Cape Point, the Kirstenbosch gardens and of course Table Mountain itself. We had very full days punctuated by some of the finest meals we’ve had in ages. A great start to the trip.
Around Cape Town
Houses of Bo Kaap
The Victoria & Albert Waterfront
The Victoria & Albert Waterfront
Camps Bay
Camps Bay and Table Mountain (Panoramic) – click here to view this in a large format
Boy on the Rocks, Camps Bay
Camps Bay and the Twelve Apostles
Sunset on Camps Bay Shoreline
Kirstenbosch and the Winelands
Kirstenbosch Gardens
Kirstenbosch Gardens
Kirstenbosch Gardens
Franschoek Countryside
Franschoek Countryside
School Bus, Franschoek Countryside
The Cape Peninsula and False Bay
The Cape of Good Hope
Cape Point Lighthouse
Cape Point
Ostrich at Cape Point
Penguin at Boulder Beach, Simon’s Town
Beach Huts at Fish Hoek
40 Winks, Fish Hoek
Surf off of Hermanus
Table Mountain
Table Mountain Cable Car
Abseiling Table Mountain
Top of the World
Atop Table Mountain
Fynbos Flowers on slope of Table Mountain
Cape Town from Table Mountain (Panoramic) – click here to view this in a large format
Of course, these and other Cape Town shots can be found over in my Flickr set here.
Stay tuned – in the not too distant future, I will post select shots from the second half of our trip – our safari through the Kruger National Park…
Dubai Desert Safari
I realised that I haven’t posted anything new on here (or Flickr) in about a month. Unforgiveable, I know. So here is a little bit of a photo-taster before some upcoming trips which are sure to result in a deluge of photographic main courses….
In any event, last Thursday I followed tens of thousands of tourists into the deserts outside Dubai.
A small set of other photos from this expedition can be found over on Flickr.
More to come as I have trips upcoming to Turkey (on business), South Africa (business and pleasure) and New York (pleasure)….
Photos from Barcelona and Alt Emporda
As a once-resident of Barcelona I return from time to time to reacquaint myself with the city and with my good friends who still live there. We were able to have a small visit last month and enjoyed sauntering around the Barrio Gotico and Barceloneta, including a visit to my favourite cava bar, Can Pejano.
After a few days we moved on to the countryside, to a tiny village called Montiro in the Catalan area of Alt Emporda, where a friend’s family had a welcoming holiday home. Montiro is surrounded by lovely apple orchards and fields of straw grass, rolled up into bales.
TIME Lightbox: Tourism in Southeast Asia
A great photo essay about the joys, heartache and hypocrisy of the Asian backpacker “scene” from Jörg Brüggemann. I am well aware of this “scene” having done a few backpacking trips in the region, but I don’t feel part of it any more. I was pretty unpleasantly surprised at how over-touristed and well-trodden Vietnam was when we went earlier this year but I still enjoyed it nonetheless.
(Image copyright Jörg Brüggemann)
Photographer Jörg Brüggemann joined the backpacker trail in South and Southeast Asia: a stretch of turf that has been densely charted already by Lonely Planet, that is lined with tours and scams ready to swallow up the unsuspecting, and that is trod over by millions each year. Many of these tourists are young people on gap years or study abroad, journeying ostensibly on latter day quests of self-discovery, financed on a shoestring. But, according to Brüggemann, what were once whimsical, individual explorations have turned into banal spectacles of packaged mass tourism. “Thailand,” he says, “is already like Mallorca.”
His photos from Thailand, Laos and India capture the backpacker experience in its ironies and idiosyncrasies. Young Western kids smoke hash, ape the meditation of holy men, pad around hostels, get drunk. Throughout Asia, it seems tourists are rarely engaging in the country they visit on its own terms, but rather, on the hackneyed ones manufactured by the whole backpacker tourism industry. In his seminal work Orientalism, the great, late, humanist intellectual, Edward Said, described how many Western scholars of the East—the Orient—treated it not as a real place but as a “theatrical stage affixed to Europe.” In a different context, the backpacker circuit achieves the same effect.
Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2011/08/24/same-same-but-different-tourism-in-southeast-asia/#ixzz1W3CiRLqp
Vietnam Trip Photo Report #5: Hà Nội and Hạ Long Bay
As promised, I present herein my final photo report from Vietnam, finally, nearly eight weeks after we returned. I always forget how much I get carried away with travel photography and how much time it takes to process, curate, tag, group and upload the photos when I get home. I suppose it doesn’t help that I’ve been on 3 separate trips out of the country since then… But I digress. The main thrust of this post will be to present a small selection of photos I took in Hanoi (Hà Nội) and Hạ Long Bay.
Hanoi
We really liked Hanoi and found it to be a charming, bustling, intense, quirky and friendly capital. Hanoi (and especially the Old Quarter) provided a compelling peek into the past – once you got past the teeming hordes of motorbikes. Hanoi really tested our road-crossing mettle but we applied our hard-earned experience and were moto-dodging like old hands around the merchant lanes (Undertakers Lane, Blacksmith Street etc). At least we never succumbed to the cyclo touts – we saw more than one organised mass cyclo tour with bored-looking tourists stretching off down the street and wondering what they had agreed to.
We used Hanoi as a bit of a home base as we made tracks for Sapa and then Hạ Long Bay, returning to the city twice, and appreciating it more every time. We even made it out to the Hoan Kiem lake three separate times before 8AM to observe and participate in the morning exercises around the lakeshore. These exercises were often comical to watch, with people seeming to see Tai Chi more as an inspiration rather than something to be adhered to, and we saw more than one elderly Hanoian vigorously punching themselves in the stomach/head/crotch. We even saw the same chap furiously shadow-boxing his way around the lake every morning. All that exercise made us even more keen to dip into Hanoi’s famous street food scene, and we ate very very well indeed…
We did do a bit of sight-seeing, visiting the beautiful Temple of Literature and the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum.
But the true experience of Hanoi is always going to be wandering through lives lived mostly on the street, from the roving portable kitchens and merchants to the unbelievably cute kids who always mug for the camera with the biggest shit-eating smiles they can muster.
I look very fondly on our time in Hanoi and hope to return here again someday. For more Hanoi photos, please see my Flickr group here.
Hạ Long Bay
Next it was on to a fabled destination: Hạ Long Bay, the jewel of the North, the fairytale of limestone karst islands and languid journeys on a faux-“junk” (really a party boat with a sail whacked on top for show) around cliffs and visited floating fishing villages – and even the odd cave.
In truth I was looking forward to Hạ Long Bay with a bit of apprehension as my research indicated that the bay, while magnificent to the naked eye, tended not to come across so well in photographs, as the vast majority of photos were taken from sea level and lacked perspective. So I made a point of asking our tour boat if it was possible to include a trip to somewhere with a vantage point and they obliged.
My final image of this post (and indeed my Vietnam trip) will have to be of the sunrise I captured by rising at 5:15AM onboard our boat. I had the deck – and seemingly the world – to myself, and I was happy as I could be.
There are quite a few more photos in my Flickr set of Hạ Long Bay here.
Next time
Well, it is with relief that I can say that this is the last of the Vietnam photos (for now). We did visit Kuala Lumpur for a while and I did take a boatload of videos on the Canon 7D, but both of those will depend on further review and quality and/or time issues. But never fear, I have a few more posts on the boil:
- Dubai
- Catalunya: Barcelona and Alt Emporda
- And I am sure I will have a London post brewing before too long…
Welcome to new visitors
Due to a welcome surprise of being linked from the WordPress.com home page, one of my recent posts about Vietnam has received a mini-flood of Likes and comments (not to mention views). So thanks to WordPress for featuring this post and thanks to you for coming if you’re visiting the blog for the first time.
Do come back and visit (or just add this RSS to your news reader of choice) because coming up in the next couple of weeks will be photo reports from:
- Vietnam: Hanoi and Ha Long Bay
- Dubai
- Catalunya: Barcelona and Alt Emporda
Thanks again for having a look!
Vietnam Trip Photo Report #4: Huế and Sapa
In an effort to speed up my faltering photo posting progress from this trip (which was finished over a month ago, mind) I am combining two cities into one post again even though they are miles apart, both in terms of disposition and in terms of geography.
Huế
We were led to believe by a couple of people that Huế was the less touristic, more “authentic” and historically significant alternative to Hội An, but I would be the first to admit that we struggled there. Despite staying in an excellent hotel, we found the actual city to be imposingly big and hostile to pedestrians, with some of the most persistently annoying cyclo touts (I recall beginning to wince at the approaching shout of “HELLO!”) and moto drivers around. It didn’t help matters that on the first day we slogged through a couple of miles of this annoyance to cross the river to the Imperial Citadel in oppressive jungle heat. Think Adrian Cronauer’s forecast of “continued hot and shitty” and you’re there.
But we got to the Imperial City and the Forbidden City within and were impressed by the old buildings and the new – some of them restored to former glories after pesky bombings by the Americans in the 60s. We chanced some fairly dodgy street food (congealed pig’s blood, anyone) and dodged yet more cyclo drivers. On the second day we battled through small intestinal distress and retook the city, this time on a smarter conveyance: bicycles. This was a much more pleasant way to see the city as it precluded the cyclo touts approaching and also cut the city down to a manageable size, allowing us to get around to the central market and the surrounding canals.
Sapa
Half a country away on the Chinese border is the former hill station of Sapa. Whereas we had been wrongfully advised of Huế’s “authenticity” and lack of tourists, several fellow travelers had shared horror stories of the tenacious hill tribe touts of Sapa, so we arrived expecting the worst. As it turned out, aside from an initial encounter with a gaggle of Black H’mong women swarming our bus on arrival, and a bit of a rip-off tour booked from our hotel, most of our time in Sapa was copacetic and we found Sapa quite relaxing even as it was touristic.
Our time in Sapa was mostly visiting the surrounding countryside of steep rice terraces, villages, parks, and the odd waterfall. It was on one of our excursions over into the village of Cat Cat that I decided to lay down on my back to get a beauty shot of a water buffalo and did my back in, a condition that has only exacerbated over time and is still affecting me over a month later as I type this in Nigeria. But we continued with our hike and our overall experience of Sapa was a positive one which made me want to come back and get a bit more off the beaten track next time.
I couldn’t resist including the shot below, which I forgot I had captured. These two German girls were the two biggest marks in Sapa, by which I mean that they had developed no defenses against people approaching them on the street. Every time a H’mong woman came up to them, for instance, they would stop and chat and check out whatever she was selling. Except that this always drew a crowd of other H’mong merchants, so that wherever these girls went, they always had a convoy of hill tribe women attached like lampreys.
That’s all from Sapa, well of course apart from the rest of the photos over on Flickr (and more photos from Huế to boot).
We are into the home stretch now, in the next post or two we will cover the buzzing capital of Vietnam, Hanoi, as well as the beautiful karst wonderland of Ha Long Bay. By which point I will well and truly be ready to change tack onto other destinations… Barcelona awaits.
Mortal Coil 