A travel journal
Monchique, Portugal – High in the hills above the sun and wind blasted Algarve coast is Monchique, a chilled mountain town with an apparently great spa, friendly barmen and some great views. It’s also home to the unique wooden ’scissor chair’, apparently left over from Roman times.
Hossegor, France – This is for my friend Ben, who expressly asked me for photos of the waves.
He didn’t particularly care about pro surfers with their stickered surfboards, he just wanted images of the line ups, of the French beach breaks in all their different shapes and sizes and flavours. Here you go mate.
Plage du Port-Vieux
Camera tag
Le Grand Plage
S-turns
Museum of the Sea
Djemaa el Fna at night
Marrakech, Morocco – Sunday, 6.49pm: For the second time today I’m back in my room in the riad, psyching myself up to go back out into the city. This time its dusk and I want to check out Djemaa el Fna at night.
7.00pm: The square is now filled with dozens and dozens of food carts, more fortune tellers, musicians, tourists and thousands and thousands of Moroccans here for a night out. I take a bench at a cart and for 50DH (about £4) I fill up on kefta (meat) skewers, salad, flat bread and fries.
7.29pm: I get talking to Andrew, sitting opposite me at the food cart. He arrived in town today from the UK. We go out into the night determined to try anything that looks interesting. We try a bowl of snail soup each for 10DH. It’s a bit like eating salty boogers. To wash it down we first try freshly squeezed orange juice (3DH) and then stop by a tea stand for mint tea (5DH).
The ruins of Palais el Badi
8.02pm: I figure because I am a customer the chances of being allowed to take a photo of the stand are good. I ask permission from the owner and he says yes. I snap off a few frames. “Dirham for photos!” He demands.
8.10pm: We stop by several of the fortune tellers and musicians, who all have large crowds gathered around them. Andrew holds his camera up to snap a frame. As soon as the flash fires he has demands for dirham from half a dozen people who claim they were in the photo. He deletes it instead.
Monday, 9.01am: Morning and I’m on my way to the Palais el Badi, enormous ruins to the south of the main square. On my way a Moroccan man approaches. “Palais el Badi?” He asks. I nod, more in vague agreement than anything. He takes it to mean he is now my official navigator charged with showing me the way to the palace and walks the last 50 metres with me to the entrance. He then demands dirham.
Deep in the souks of Marrakech
10.44am: I’m back in the souks one last time, stocking up on spices and presents. I’ve struggled to get a decent photo that really captures the atmosphere down here in the narrow lanes . Finally I spot an alley with beams of white light shining into the gloom. I shoot off a frame and keep walking.
13.30pm: My bus south to Agadir, and the surf, is an hour late. I end up spending 25 hours in total in Marrakech.
Travel – I’ve been quite suprised in the ease with which I’ve been able to log on, update Backpack Storybook, manage my photos and generally keep in touch with the world while on the move through SE Asia.
Internet speeds have ranged from adequate to quite quick across Bangkok, Cambodia and now Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. I’ve had no problems uploading posts and images to the blog or emailing friends. Drop outs are rare.
Cambodia was the big suprise in this regard. In Siem Reap or Sihanoukville they may not have basics like sealed roads or garbage collections, but they have very reliable internet services.
Dealing with all the photos I’ve been taking hasn’t been as hard as I thought. If we have a TV in our room Jacq and I will have a mini slide show and watch the days images with the D70s hooked up to the set with an AV cord. I usually delete the obviously crap ones, which means a 1GB memory card might be good for a week or so.
Every major city and town so far has offered memory card to CD burning services. Here in HCMC it cost $3 per CD. I usually burn one copy for the backpack and a back-up to send home. I get a little nervous about losing any images so I don’t always wait for a full memory card before burning. But I do always check on a computer that the CD works before deleting from my memory card.
Getting the images onto a computer is a little trickier, depending on the internet cafe. On a USB drive I have a copy of Irfanview, a freely downloadable photo editing program that takes up little space.
Most cafes don’t seem to mind when I load it onto their computers. Then I hook the D70s up via the USB cord and copy across any images I’ll need for this blog or email. At around 3MB per image they’re too big for uploading so I downsize them with Irfanview. Then I plug in my USB drive and save them for later use.
Most computers so far have only one USB connection, usually at the back. And they don’t always recognize the USB drive or camera. But for the most part its been suprisingly easy.
I’ve had several combinations of lenses since beginning my adventures. As of May 2007, three lenses are in the backpack:
- Nikkor 18-70mm 3.5-4.5. For general scenes, landscapes, wide angle
- Nikkor 50mm 1.8. Portraits, low light photography
- Nikkor 70-210mm 4.5-5.6. Sports, some portraits
A range of accessories are also used, including polarising and UV lenses and a remote release for night scenes.
Photo map
Flickr has an awesome Geo Tagging function which allows viewers to see photos taken from a specific place in the world. Don’t have time to read the blogpost but want to flick through the pics?
Check out Backpack Storybook’s photo map.
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