Category: travel

Day 512 – Rotterdam to Amsterdam

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Not me, of course. I’m not allowed in other countries and this is very much in other countries.

No, this is a timelapse shot in 2013, but which (mysteriously) “couldn’t be published right away due to restrictions”. There’s no indication as to what those restrictions are or were, but at the end of last year they were either lifted or ignored and now we have a 10 minute trip through the flat lands of Holland The Netherlands (happy now, TA?).

In 2013 a special transport over water left from Rotterdam to Amsterdam. A timelapse camera was installed at 30 mtrs high. The resulting film gives a unique and stunning view of the old Dutch waterways, in 4K. And, you will pass a few dozen different bridges that all open before your eyes. Images were shot with a Canon 550d at an interval of 3 seconds, totalling around 30.000 pictures taken.

A couple of notes here: the camera appears to be attached to some sort of kite or balloon. And if the camera wasn’t attached to the boat in question, it would be able to get through a lot of those bridges a whole lot more quickly.
BUT SEE UPDATE BELOW

There are a lot of places along this route that, should you find yourself on the wrong side of the canal, you’re staying that side for a while. I was quite surprised about that in a country as small as Holl… The Netherlands.
Anyway, this video has made me want to go and do a European canal trip again:

But that would also mean traveling to another country, and as I mentioned above…

UPDATE: Thanks, Dave.

It’s a piece of equipment for (Royal Dutch) Shell, apparently.
That’s my balloon theory blown up out of the water then. (see what I did there?)

Day 511 – Animal pics

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I promised a while back to get some more photos edited and uploaded and lawd bless ma soul, I have done it.

Here they are! Yes, mainly animal pics because we were very much there (which was here) to look at animals.
Some animal pics are better than others; some really good, some not so good, but these are the ones that I liked.

Inverdoorn is a private game reserve in the Karoo. It’s not deepest, darkest, wildest Africa. But it does offer the opportunity to see – and get close to – some really amazing animals that you might see in DDWA. They also do a lot of rehabilitation work, especially with their cheetahs, and with really good deals for locals (no, this isn’t a sponsored post) at the moment, it’s a whole lot cheaper (and a whole lot less hassle) than heading up north.

But of course, up north has its benefits too and personally, I think it’s unfair to compare this with a Kruger trip (and they probably shouldn’t try to on their website), but as a really easy standalone weekend away from Cape Town, with good food, good drink, great accommodation and the chance to see some big animals, I’d totally recommend it. Covid protocols were really well-observed, too.

But you weren’t here for my thoughts on the place. You just wanted to see the animal photos, right?

Right.

Day 509 – Recent photos

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OK. The first half of the photos from our recent (ok, not so recent now, but I have a decent excuse) trip away are now edited and up on Flickr. Truth be told, I’m a little disappointed with the overall quality. That said, it was a really hard job packing all the sheer scale of the landscape into a camera, and we were there for family time rather than photography time.

And there are one or two of them that I still quite like:

Moody stuff. Go full screen for more effect.

The second part of our trip was less landscape and more animal. But it also makes up about 80% of the photos I took. I’m on it, but with energy and concentration at a premium right now, it is going to take some time.

Please bear with me.

Day 504 – Getting stuff done

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Since I can’t do much of anything that requires energy at the moment, I’ve been tidying up some stuff on the computer and the internet. My Flickr page is now looking much neater and tidier, with all the images assigned to groups and albums so that they’re easier to find, enjoy and share. So go and do it!
And I have high hopes that (at least some of) my photos from the Matroosberg and Klein Karoo (remember that pre-covid trip?) will be edited, uploaded and equally well categorised by the end of the day.

Possibly.

In other news, we had a further disaster last night as the recently repaired living room roof, beneath which is the even more recently replaced living room ceiling (literally last Friday), decided to allow another several (or more) litres of water through during the frontal rain in the late evening. Those litres missed the furniture completely, because the furniture isn’t in the living room at the moment, because now that the roof is repaired and the ceiling is replaced, the new floor is being installed.

You know: now that everything is all watertight and stuff? Mmm.

I’m so very, very tired of all this now.

Other things you might also like to know:

Yesterday’s post was very popular. Go and have a look if you haven’t already.

And, this:

Remember when BA brought their A380 over to Cape Town? Just after the Germans had left their towels on the metaphorical sunbeds? [Flickr]

I know that this announcement gives us 2½ months notice, but with SA very much on the UK’s reddest of red lists (and with every good reason right now), I can’t quite understand why BA would be taking this step unless they know something that we don’t – or unless they’re just going to cancel it when nothing new happens, of course.

Watch this space [gestures generally at the sky above Cape Town], I guess.

Day 469 – Blue

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There’s little point in me writing an essay on any given subject while I’m away and unable to discuss my thoughts on that given subject. And so that’s why I rely mainly on short posts and quota photos*.

Like this one from September 2017.

This was an art installation called Waterlicht, in which a certain pass in the Peak District National Park in the UK was flooded with blue laser light to represent rising ocean levels and general panic. To be fair, if the sea gets there, we are going to be in a lot of trouble, given that it’s about 300m above (current) sea level.

The project hadn’t been well advertised or attended on its first two evenings. But this particular night was chaos, with 6km tailbacks and lots of walking along dark country roads with traffic everywhere. Was it worth it? Probably not.
But it was an experience.

You might think from my flippant attitude just beneath the image above that I’m some sort of climate change denier.
Not so. Obviously not. I recognise that things are changing, and not in a good way. And because it’s a gradual change, rather than one specific moment in time, it’s being overlooked by many people as far less of a problem than it actually is.
I do think that we would all be better served by less sensationalism around the subject, though. Good science is still just science. It isn’t compatible with sensationalism, and I do completely understand people’s scepticism when they have been fed ridiculous headlines of doom and gloom by celebrities and newspapers for years and years, only for those predicted timelines to be wholly unfounded.

Those individuals and publications sowed the seeds of doubt; they have made the bed upon which we now lie. And yet, science still gets the blame. Regaining the trust of the public on this subject is something that we will probably never be able to do.

* this one seems to have gone on a bit though.