Archive
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 Bestival 2011
This year’s Bestival (my third visit) had potential to be a washout as the weather forecasts leading up to it were less-than-encouraging (one site saying that Sunday was going to see extended periods of “torrential rain” and 50+ mph wind gusts). In the event it was not quite as bad as all that, and the worst of the weather was saved for the early hours of the last morning, with high winds and rain providing a suitable finale to the festival. We did experience the amusing sight of empty tents blowing and scraping along through the fields, and not a few gazebos flew away into the night.
We were lucky with the weather, then, and so managed to catch the Cure, Bjork, Public Enemy, Grandmaster Flash (epic set), Brian Wilson, the Urban Voodoo Machine, Toots and the Maytals, SBTRKT, Health, and a host of smaller acts dotted around tiny stages that we enjoyed despite not having a clue who they were.
This year’s fancy dress theme was Rock Stars and Divas, and there were plenty on show beyond the expected Slashes and Beastie Boys crews.
As usual there were a few quite random acts to see as well, from the “Wall of Death” motorcycle spectacular to the “Lords of Lightning” show featuring two men in chain mail, standing on two huge Tesla coils and fighting – with lightning.
As usual, there are a few more photos to see over on my Bestival 2011 Flickr set…
Photos from Notting Hill Carnival 2011 – Day 2
After our abridged visit to Carnival on Day 1, we walked down from Queens Park to Notting Hill on Monday psyched up for a full session at Day 2. The mood was slightly subdued by grey skies and unseasonably low temperatures (think 17C) and, I suspect, quite a few hangovers from Day 1. But you can’t stay subdued for long once you get sucked into a mas parade full of exhuberant, brightly attired dancers with ear-to-ear grins. This time we mostly hung around Kensal Road, Golborn Road, Portobello, Westbourne Park and, to finish the day off, Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues where we were treated to a somewhat ramshackle ska set by his band, The Trojans. As usual Day 2 was a bit more crowded and edgy than Day 1, but aside from a handbags-at-dawn flareup at one of the soundsystems we didn’t see any trouble to speak of. Biggest drama of the day was, as usual, where the shortest toilet queues could be found.
The photo below might be my favourite from Day 2 – two pirates from one of the mas crews did a double-daggering on a giggling bystander right in front of one of London’s finest – and the cop couldn’t help a fit of the giggles as well. (Generally daggering at Carnival is good-natured but I could see how it would get mightily annoying from a female perspective…)
That’s enough of Carnival for now, but if you’d like to check out the rest of my photos then head on over to my Notting Hill Carnival 2011 Flickr set.
A walk in the Cotswolds
Earlier in August I had the opportunity to join some friends on a walk around the Cotswolds, a lovely area of rolling green hills and chocolate box villages over towards Gloucestershire. While it was a lovely walk, the rolling green hills were a bit of a photographic challenge, it being the middle of the day when we had our walk. But I managed to snag one or two shots I was happy with.
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.
Great photo report from the London riots by AFP’s Leon Neal
I just wanted to share this post from AFP’s Leon Neal, a snapper I have been lucky enough to talk with on many occasions via Twitter (where he goes by @TabascoKid). Very scary stories (and brilliant shots) of what it was like to try and cover the London riots of August 2011 from a press photographer’s perspective:
http://www.leonneal.com/blog/2011/08/12/london-riots-august-2011/
It’s definitely worth a few minutes of your time to check this out.
All I saw was this pretty awesome rainbow…
Tonight, many neighbourhoods in London are on fire, and it seems more trouble is popping up all around, Harlesden being the closest to where I live in Queens Park. Most of the trouble seems to be in Hackney though, well east of us.
But when we looked over that way all we saw was a pretty wicked, horizon-to-horizon rainbow.
Guess there’s still stuff to be happy about in London, after all.
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 