While over in Italy for our Honeymoon back in 2010, I used my trusty G1 for all our navigation. Â Two years later, I finally got around to uploading the GPS tracks into Google Maps. Â I had to use a trick to get the map into one page (typically, Google Maps tends to split the tracks over several pages, so you don’t see the whole view), but phew, I finally did it. ...
A long time ago in a land far, far away, Adriana and I caught up with family and friends. And then I fell into some sort of Internet coma. I showed some signs of consciousness with Frex (still working on it), and now here I am with another post. So, Australia. We went to Oz back in May. I’d never been to Uluru before, even though I’d been to Alice Springs for a wedding (it’s not really that close to Uluru, but while you’re in the general area…), but at the time I was a university student with no money, and getting a day trip to the rock was well out of my price range. This time around I wasn’t going to miss it, so decided that a 3-day camping tour out of Alice Springs would be the ticket. We had a couple of days in Alice Springs to catch up with friends I hadn’t seen in yonks, acclimate (that is, let all the Florida humidity I’d acquired over the years evaporate), and try and sync up with the timezone. We also accumulated enough red dust to last us till we returned to Florida. ...
Adriana and I (way back in February now) spent a week in Costa Rica, dividing our time between the Arenal region (to see a volcano that turned out to be camera shy) and Quepos, a town on the southern area of the West coast. Hiring a car turned out being incredibly expensive, mostly due to the mandatory government insurance that can nearly cost as much as the rental itself. We found car hire necessary however, although we did not get a 4WD but instead opted for the cheap Toyota Yaris. For the one place that required a 4WD for access, we got there via a tour bus. ...
From Arequipa we went on a guided tour of the Chivay/Colca Canyon region for a couple of days. The canyon is approximately four kilometres deep, making it about twice as deep as that of the Grand Canyon, so I was pretty excited about seeing that and possibly a Condor. The small tour bus took us around the extinct volcano Chachani towards the town of Chivay where we’d be staying the night. We went past a huge processing plant, which I could only guess was some sort of cement factory. The landscape at this point was a contrast of pale grey dust, green valley and man-made structures: ...
Arequipa is the second largest city by population (approximately 900,000), and is located in the Andes in the southern part of Peru. It’s up fairly high, at an altitude of about 2300m, although taking the whole trip to Peru into account, that’s about half of the highest altitude that we reached. It has a nickname, “La Ciudad Blanca” (The White City), due to the fact that many of the buildings are constructed of a white volcanic rock. ...
This is the first of three parts of the photos from Peru. I think I honestly spent more time reworking my Lightroom to Flickr workflow (I’ve reuploaded photos to Flickr several times working it out), so now I should be able to get photos up online a lot faster. This is going on the assumption that I *feel* like doing it immediately after taking photos, which has always been rather hit-and-miss with me (ask Adriana). I guess I also spent a bit of time working on my new website, so if you went to the old daecks.blogspot.com and ended up here (you should have), welcome! ...
I’m finally getting around to uploading the Peru photos to flickr. If anyone reading this (people do?) is friends with Adriana on Facebook, you’d have seen some of the photos. For some awesome reason, Facebook mangles some of the photos to appear grainy… not like Facebook is a great photo sharing site anyway (it’s fine for drunk or phone photos). Having said that, some of the sets are on flickr already, but I’m re-doing my Lightroom workflow and so they’re going to be updated with more info and some calibration edits, so I’m not ‘publishing’ them here yet. ...
This last post regarding the honeymoon covers the couple of days we spent in Venice, and the subsequent drive down to Perugia via Bologna. We found Venice to be amazing, and loved wandering around the maze of buildings and water, not really caring when a dead-end was encountered. One of the very first things we checked off the list of things-to-do was a gondola ride: ...
The hire car (a Fiat Punto) really got a work-out on this stretch of the trip. Driving from Florence we arrived in Pisa, walked to the Leaning Tower and saw this: Now, I get enough of that sort of stuff with Wii Fit at home, so Adriana and I got a very creative photo taken, and I think you’ll agree: ...
About an hour’s drive north of Pisa is Cinqueterre, or “The five lands”. This national park protected area consists of five ‘preserved’ towns situated along the west coast: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso al Mare. All are connected by train and walking paths (you can walk between all of them in a day), and most are connected by water ferry. We spent two nights in the area, giving us a whole day to explore the towns, starting with Monterosso al Mare: ...