Photo diary - Costa Rica
December was a month of rushed through countries, experiencing cold and word expensive again, sliding through jungle in Costa Rica, hunting (not actual hunting...) sloths along the Caribbean coast-line and finally leaving Central America through San Blas paradise islands and arrive in Colombia which I already feel will be one of the best countries we will visit.
Here are memories from a quick visit in Costa Rica. Monteverde is the place everyone goes to and we are not that keen to be different and followed the crowds. Zip-lining, Tarzan swings, night tours in the jungle, day tours in the jungle bridges and a lot of home-cooked pasta (thanks Nadine for being the sauce-master!) because eating out was just out of the budget. It's called a cloud forest for a reason - you could just watch clouds rolling in and out in minutes. Wake up an you can see hundreds of meters away and ten minutes later the whole town of Santa Elena is covered in clouds.
We also did a quick pit-stop at the Capital San Jose and at this point I was getting a fever.. made the bus rides to Puerto Viejo so much more enjoyable! 4 days at Puerto Viejo were spent inside, sick, but luckily the weather was bad so we did not miss a lot.
Bridge walking in Monteverde, Costa Rica
Jungle layers
Monteverde, Costa Rica
And then we have Richie on a bridge
aaand Heini on a bridge (We held out a massive crowd of German tourists taking these "oh I'm so alone" photos. We were not alone.)
Casually walking in the jungle.
Richie and a ficus tree
Happy climber
As we just went through the second season of Stranger Things, this really reminded me of the Upside Down..
Hiking essentials: Kindle and Valium
Hello, it’s us, the hiking couple again. Only that from know we should come up with new attributes to define us because we are done with hiking. For a while. Or at least hiking volcanoes. “Temples in Asia”- limit has been reached and we need to look for new ways to spend our days.
The laziness (or total lack of) planning our steps further than next day has led to some inefficiencies during our travels. Now this meant four nights in León. León is a nice enough place but after you have toured all the cathedrals, done tens of takes on the popular blogger-pose known as “look what I dropped” and ate all the bagels at El Desayunazo- restaurant there is not that much to do. In order to kill a Sunday we opted in getting a hungover from Saturday’s drinking and watched way too many Game of Thrones-episodes.
Most people come to León for the volcano boarding adrenaline experience. Our minds still thought also that we love hiking and thus we signed up for an overnight trek to El Hoyo, “The Hole” which included the volcano boarding, climbing up another volcano and camping there and swimming in a crater lake. Sounds like a piece of cake after all the kilometers and climbing we have done so far, let’s go!
Volcano boarding was something I almost did not want to do with my injured shoulder. I’d rather not roll down a rocky volcano slope with a dislocated shoulder, it’s just not something I would call fun. But after talking to a lot of people it became obvious that you can come down really, really, really slow. If you want to (and sometimes even if you didn’t).
And now I can say it’s not scary or dangerous at all! Unless you clock 70km/h. When you get to the bottom of the slope, you just want to go again, and faster.
When all the other groups headed back to León to start drinking, we picked up our backbags carrying 10 litres of water and food (which included a massive pumpkin, damn that thing must have weighed tons!) and set off for our second volcano climb. Hiking in Nicaragua is quite different to Guatemala in one aspect – heat. When it’s at least 30 degrees it’s not that fun to climb up carrying all your water for the next days. Luckily I was the one carrying Day 1 lunch so I got rid of couple of kilos right away!
Best part about this hike was our camping location. Beautiful area with beautiful views. If you don’t mind couple of horses and cows who might come in to your tent or even being trampled by cows (as had happened to one British teens group earlier) it’s a perfect setting.
Our spot for the night
Sunrise at the top
Company at the top
Since we are already somewhat experienced trekkers and have accumulated some equipment in terms of boots, pants and poles, it’s time to move on to some expert recommendations on what to bring with you on a hike. For us the first tips are a Kindle and Valium if your body does not think waking up at 6am and hiking all day is enough reasons to go to sleep. Not in every man’s backpack you say? Well, there’s a lot of free time during these hikes, especially if you are fast and reach the campsites early. Instead of being social and getting to know your fellow hikers, a Kindle will always offer something to do. And help you (me) to reach your reading goal for the year. And where wouldn’t you bring Valium really? Just joking, maybe.
Dinner preparations
The next day we woke up to some delighting sounds of nature – 18-year-old British girls screaming “wake up, wake up” at 4am – and watched the sunrise over the Lake Xolotlán.
Not bad
Descent and walk to the crater lake for a swim wasn’t as easy as I thought and running into the lake was a welcomed break after 3 sweaty hours in the jungle and sun.
On our way down, lake waiting for us
Finally here!
In summary, this was a nice hike but nothing I would call a “must-do” and hiking in the heat is just not something I like very much. We have packed our hiking gear to the bottom or our bags and doubt it’ll be taken out in a while. Time to do what I do best which is:
A) Reading at the beach
B) Reading in a hammock
C) Reading at the pool side
D) Checking our budget (we are under budget, yay!)
Hiking saga continues
The hikey people are back! We were almost lost roaming empty Western Australia beaches and flat-bottomed gorges where hiking boots, not to mention hiking pants, became obsolete and turned into space-wasting items I did not wish to carry anymore.
After a devastating realisation (panting during salsa classes) of how out of shape we truly were the hiking adventures started to scare me. What if climbing Acatenango is a repeat try from 8 years ago in Bali where we set out to climb Gunung Agung during the rainy season and I was not exactly fit for it after weeks of partying in Kuta? Me and my friends still refer to this adventure with disgust and resentment because after climbing three hours in pitch black dark, heavy rain, holding onto a torch while trying to climb vertical rocks we had to turn back. Because it was dangerous. Because “we don’t really recommend doing this during the rainy season” (after they took our money). Screw you Agung.
Luckily Acatenango could not have been more different. Good paths, sunny weather and professional hiking gear got us to the base camp in about 4 hours. Steep climb and definitely not an easy one, not sure if the Bali-me would have made it so effortlessly.
Approaching our base camp
The only thing left to do at the base camp is to look at the Volcano Fuego and take photos. Sometimes I wish I’d have more patience to figure things out well before I have an actual need for it and this time it was my precious camera. I sat on our hostel googling “how to take volcano photos” and a staff member was happy to show me couple of things. And only this way, 7 months after buying the camera, did I found out that my camera actually has shutter speeds up to 60 seconds (I thought 1 second was the longest..). Now I mourn for all the amazing starry sky photos I could have taken in Western Australia!
So, considering I just learned this and never actually experimented with longer exposure times I’d say couple of these volcano photos turned up quite nicely. Of course I missed at least five massive eruptions that would have made even greater photos but then again I heard some people going up there multiple times and before getting the money-shot. I don’t think I have the patience to become an actual photographer, too much waiting around with your thumb on the launcher. Although this part got much comfier when I discovered I can actually use my phone to take the pics remotely. No more sitting on the ground finger placed on the shutter! Downside was that campfire chats distracted me from the volcano and thus I missed many of the opportunities Fuego offered us that night.
The moneyshot!
Second part of the Acatenango-trip is to wake up around 3.30am to hike to the top (3,973 m) to watch the sunrise. Climbing volcanic sand should be familiar to us after Mt. Doom excursion but doing it in the dark without snow adds some excitement to it.
We were able to see Lake Atitlan from the top (for 2 seconds before the clouds rolled in)
When you finally make it to the top, you freeze your balls of. I brought all the warm clothes I have with me and got a proper jacket from the hostel and I was still struggling at the top. Wind makes -2 C feel like – 15 and taking photos is another type of challenge when you don’t want to take your gloves off. The views are definitely worth all of the suffering and I am just glad we got to see so much as some groups only see clouds or even worse, they get rained on for two full days in addition to not seeing anything..
Walking cinnamon bun at the top wearing everything she owns
All the roads are gravel
Driving around New Zealand does not always make sense. Our previous spot, the Mt. Cook village, was just on the other side of the mountain range and in the West you’d have the famous glaciers – Franz Josef and Fox Glacier - where we would be going later after a looong detour on the East coast.
The east coast in our dreams meant animal encounters – penguins, seals, maybe dolphins and even whales.. but of course all these are season dependent. As we have learned many times by now, it is not the penguin season. Apparently, no-one knows what penguins do or where they go after they have raised their babies at the shore. One sign said they sleep in the ocean. The theory of relativity was finalised 101 years ago but we still don’t know where the penguins go!
We didn’t spend a lot of time in Dunedin, just enough to drive through the city twice as I missed a well-hidden turn to a super cheap auto store and we had to go all around again. Now we don’t need to try to sneak into hostels to charge our electronics as we have a power inverter. Unfortunately this has meant that as the Mac is always charged, we can spend way too much time watching shows during dark nights at the camping grounds since there is nothing else to do.. (Read?! I think I had to read a lot this year. Next night then.)
Tunnel Beach near Dunedin was our first stop and since it was already 10am, it was more than appropriate time for ice cream! There are small shops selling real-fruit ice-cream scattered around NZ and it is delicious.
This day was meant to be one of those ones where you drive a bit and stop a lot. My planning notes said we could do everything from Tunnel Beach to Slope Point with multiple stops in between in a day but as we have learned, my planning can’t always be trusted.
Drive to Nugget Point Lighthouse takes up surprisingly lot of time as you need to drive there and back on a slow curly road. But it was worth it – we saw sea lions! About 300m away and they were mostly brown lumps that moved a bit… but still!
Someone is extremely happy after our first animal encounter!
Now the time was already past 2pm and it wasn’t long before dark. So we decided to skip both Purakaunui Falls and Cathedral Caves and drive straight to somewhere near Slope point to camp. Only to be tempted to drive 25km one-way on a gravel road for the possible promise of close-by sea lion encounters at Jackson Bay. We walked the whole beach, almost lost Richie in the fog, saw some monstrous sea weed trunks but no sea lions.
Now we were kind of in a rush and the gravel roads just continued. To add to this, destiny threw another obstacle on our route – bridge renovation and a detour. We were directed to drive through the middle of the thick Catlin forests and I don’t think any other backbacker has driven through that Fanghorn-type of silently threatening forest. The thickness of that jungle-like view was astounding and it would have been quite an adventure to go and wonder between the trees. Only problem is that I’m not sure if you could get in, the green walls surrounding us were so thick.
Catlins forest
After a very long time we finally got out and were approaching Slope Point camping area, now we just had to navigate based on the map as there we hadn’t had phone service in the past 3 hours. That was also awesome because I had no idea what there was at Slope Point because my plan notes did not say anything else than “Slope Point”. Luckily we found the camping spot and asked other smart people around who enlightened us that is the Southernmost part of New Zealand we could visit the next morning.
And so we did!
Photos of waterfalls because there's not enough of those in the world
Looking for Tasmanian waterfalls, failing and succeeding on photographing the magnificent streams of water.
What would be better timing than crisp autumn to embark on a waterfall hunt around Tasmania?
Summer, of course.
We didn’t have the option to choose between summer and autumn so this round of waterfall chasing was only meant to be a feast for the eyes and mind, not splashing around and enjoying the purifying feeling of a nature’s greatest shower options.
Also, since I got the new and shiny camera I have to learn how to use, waterfalls were an exciting opportunity to practice everything I have read about photography. And since that consists of approximately 5 blog posts and 2 YouTube videos, there wasn’t that much to practice really.
Luckily for us, many of the Tassie waterfalls are easily reached, only 20-30min walks away from a car park. That also means very early wake-ups though as it is very easy for thousands of tourists to reach the same pristine waterfall.
First waterfall on our route was Russell Falls. As we spent the night just a 15-minutes drive away, we were the first ones at the waterfall around 8am.
One can continue the walk from Russell Falls to Horseshoe Falls and see surrounding views from higher up.
View from the top of the Russell Falls, Tasmania
At Horseshoe Falls I discovered that I had my camera on automatic settings and all those shutter-speed tests changing the angle with my awesome Joby tripod did not actually do anything. I had 20 photos with the exact same settings. I wouldn’t quit my day job for photography yet, only that I’ve already done it so this better work around if my writing sucks and no-one buys my book.
Horseshoe Falls before discovering everything was on automatic settings..
Now that I was actually able to change the shutter speed and get the water to turn into a soft flow I was ecstatic – I can take photos! With custom settings! See the results yourself:
Of course, I had to re-photograhp Russell Falls on our way back with this new magic. At this point, Richie’s patience started to crumble and I started to fear for my camera’s life so it was better to pack up and leave.
Russell Falls with the soft water everyone likes
Next waterfall we run into almost by accident. I had put it on our list of things to do and very conveniently it happened to be located on the curly roads to Queenstown and we needed a break. Again, shortest of short walks through a paved road and you got the Nelson waterfall to yourself.
At this point I was already almost a professional on waterfall photos and took a whole two photos when the battery ran out. Didn’t remember to bring my spares that were happily sitting in the camera bag back in the car park.
Only presentable photo of Nelson Falls
As this trip seems to be about learning lessons, I have listed the ones for photography I discovered with waterfalls:
- Go as early as possible
- Bring your spare batteries
- Check for the big red A sign that says your settings are on automatic, very hard to miss
- Give Richie a sandwich and go alone
Looking forward for my next waterfall photo opportunities in New Zealand!