Story of Great Kindness

It is not often that a complete stranger does something so unexpected that you wonder how you managed to be on the receiving end of such kindness. I recently had an experience of this when visiting Mallorca in June 2009. Mallorca is well known for it’s beautiful beaches, but this story relates to one of the cave attractions, Coves de Campanet.

While there I went round the Coves de Campanet which contain some beautiful stalactite and stalagmite formations. The next day I returned to shoot this Coves de Campanet 360 panorama, taken inside the Romantic Chamber of the caves. It had taken about half an hour to do in the low light levels.

Coves De Campanet

Then I mad a huge mistake. Having put the camera gear back in the hire car I closed the boot. Only to then realize that I had left the car keys inside. Along with all my money. And all documents.

The staff at the caves were very helpful, contacting the hire company, asking what could be done. The hire company insisted that I had to go to Palma Airport to pick up spare keys. A bit difficult with no money and no public transport!

Then the amazing happened. One of the workers simply handed over her car keys and allowed me to take it to the airport and back. And she had only known me for about half an hour. I mean, how often does that happen? Thanks to her kindness, this total nightmare was quickly turned into only a mild inconvenience and a bit of an adventure.

I very much doubt that I would have the same help from any of the larger caves on the island. Nor could I have wished for a better traveling companion, who considered the whole thing quiet exciting!

Snow Stops London February 2009

360 panorama taken from Westminster Bridge

panorama (c) Peter Watts – all rights reserved

Second of February 2009 and London came almost to a standstill. Snow had fallen and with it came the collapse of most of the public transport network, airports and closure of schools. Once again the people of England were advised to stay at home. And so many Londoners headed out for the parks and hills of London for a spot of snowman building, tobogganing and snow fights.

Taking pictures in Regents Park, London, after snow.

I took the opportunity to walk around parts of the city with a camera in hand taking some 360 panoramas of some rare London snow scenes. This started in Regents Park in the morning with most of the soft snow still untouched and fluffy. About a couple of centimeters rested on top of the tree branches, making the pictures look like some black and white study. The water in the Boating Lake had partly frozen over and St John’s Lodge Gardens looked a dream.

Later in the day a group of three of us headed off for the West End finding Chinese Lanterns in China Town each capped with a dusting of snow, still up after the recent Chinese New Year celebrations. Yet more snowmen waited for us in St Jame’s Park, and various snowball fights ensued. The walk then progressed onto Westminster Bridge (see the picture at top of post) before retreating to a coffee shop as the cold evening closed in.

They promise more later in the week, so maybe there will be another chance at London snow scenes. In the meantime, a number of 360 panoramas from the day have been loaded up onto Panoramic Earth and can be found in the London Panorama Index.

Keeping up to Date

I have just found a couple of tools that will allow people to keep up to date with what I am doing. These are RSS feeds. My new panorama feed lists all my new 360 panoramas that I add to Panoramic Earth. There is also a Panoramic Earth site feed which lists all new panoramas added by all users to the site. In addition to that I have added two feeds to the sidebar of this blog. One is my own new panorama feed, which just gives the titles of the new images I upload, simply click on them to be taken directly to the right pages. The other is from another relevant blog about panoramic pictures.

So now you can keep up to date in yet another way with what I am doing. I guess it would be possible to create a feed of even this blog to put somewhere else and keep the chain going.

Visiting the Googleplex

It was not possible for me to stay in Palo Alto, home to the Silicon Valley, and not visit a couple of the local ’shrines’. One of these was Google HQ, known as the Googleplex as it is a conglomeration of separate buildings on a couple of blocks. Strictly this is in Mountainview, which is just south of Palo Alto itself. I took a couple of panoramas from there, which can be seen by following the links to the Googleplex HQ Panorama and the Beach Volleyball at Googleplex. In the latter one you may just about be able to make out the Google Dinosaur, a model of a T.Rex skeleton (or is this now the G.Rex). One wonders whether this is a warning to all the workers never to stand still and thus become extinct, or a subversive view that Google has of it’s competition.

The other is the Hewlet-Packard Garage, which stands on Addison Avenue, not far from Stanford University. The garage was set up by a Stanford Professor, Dr. Frederick Terman, who conceived the ‘Silicon Valley’ concept as a means for graduates to set up their own hi-tech companies in the area instead of leaving to go elsewhere. Little did he know…Or perhaps he did.

Ten Thousand Black Needles

panorama (c) Peter Watts – all rights reserved

I spent 2 weeks on the Fijian islands of Vanua Levu and Viti Levu islands taking 360 panoramas of Fiji. The one shown above comes from a lagoon on the coast of Vanua Levu between Savusavu and Ngigi.

There are many things to say about the time I spent in Fiji in early February. It was the rainy season so there was a lot of, well, rain. Short showers that at times extended into whole days of dripping greyness. So dripping that standing out for about 5 seconds would provide a reasonable shower. Dirt roads turned to mud layered on ooze and deep holes hidden by pools of brown water. Paved roads fared no better, being either washed away in some cases. They are full of potholes that, in some cases, become reasonably sized paddling-pools. I could have titled this ‘Ten Million Raindrops’ and would probably only have underestimated the number that hit me during the time.

There are the roads, whose condition has been alluded to above, that mean travelling 30km in 3 hours is an achievement, which I did one day with members of the Rotary Club of Savusavu to fix a water system at a school in the village of Vunilagi, which is shown in the panoroama below. Yet the local buses continue to plough through where lesser mortals would fear to slide, often the only link between remote villages and the outside world. You know the conditions are bad when the buses stop. This is the point at which the government normally decides something ought to be done and carries out temporary repairs.

panorama (c) Peter Watts – all rights reserved

Then come the mosquitoes. While Fiji does not have any poisonous insects or reptiles, it simply makes up for this as the numero uno production plant for one of the few creatures I would like to ask God, ‘So what was that about?’ Any statement that they only come out at dusk is, well, simply wrong (maybe because with that much rain cloud it always looks like dusk). They come in the morning, they come in the night.

There are small, fast black fighter mozzies that home in silently and are gone again with a fresh payload before you can blink, leaving small, itchy marks as a departing gift. Then there are larger critters, bomber mozzies with long, curled tail feelers striped black and white. These move more slowly, and are slightly easier to splat, but carry a much higher payload, so squishing them on departure is likely to result in a bright red smear. However, worst of all is the sound, the deathly silence mocking in the darkness. It comes just after the high pitched ‘nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn……’ around your ears and leaves you just knowing that somewhere on your body…another of the ten thousand black needles has been artfully inserted.

The people of Fiji are, in spite of all the difficulties they face, very helpful, friendly and resilient. If it is golden sand round a beach resort you are looking for then head for the Yasawa group of islands and you will find it. But you will miss the genuine Fiji, full of fantastic people, small villages and tonnes of fresh fruit straight off the tree. This is the part of Fiji I really enjoyed, and would go back for. I got some interesting photos, and had interesting times getting them. Lets finish with a classic Fijian scene, a sandy beach, blue skies, palm trees and an island, though in this case the nearest resort was about an hour away.

panorama (c) Peter Watts – all rights reserved

Seals at Shag Point

First of all, a shag is a sea bird and Shag Point is a place in New Zealand where they are found in large numbers. It is on the South Island, just north of Dunedin. Of course, in NZ terms ‘just north’ means about an hour or so away. Here is a 360 panorama of Shag Point, the seal in the photo above can be seen in the panorama watching me watching it.

Shag Point is, thankfully, a little off the beaten track, where you can find nothing and everything depending on what you are looking for. If you interest is shops, clothes and a Starbucks then don’t bother. However, if you like rugged, exposed and windy coastline packed with local wildlife then this is the place to come. Shag Point is known locally for three things (apart from the cold wind) – shags, seals and penguins. Here colonies of seals bask on the rocks and at dusk penguins come up onto the beach and waddle to their burrows in the hillside. Shags are often seen holding out their wings to dry out their feathers after a fishing expedition.

Goodnes Gracious Green Specks of Light

New Zealand is famous for many things, and one of them are the caves of glow worms. Green glow in the dark spots, tiny pin pricks on the cave walls. While there is not enough light to light up the cave, there are often enough of them to define the shape of the rocks. So the challenge was to find and photograph them. Never done that before, but it was worth a go. A cave in Waipu, North Island of New Zealand provided the opportunity. This is not a ‘tourist cave’, stuck about 20km from the nearest town down a windy and steep dirt track, with no guide or laid out path inside. But with camera, tripod and a brand new head torch brought an hour before we set out.

Down a muddy path into the darkness and through and along a stream to the glow worm chamber, with only our torches picking out parts of the cave as we made our way along. Then about 30 minutes playing around with different conditions to try to photograph them while standing in the same stream trying not to either slip over or knock the camera into the water. The result:  A panorama of Glow Worms.

Well take a look and decide if it was worth it. I said before that the worms do not provide enough light to show up the rock face. The images taken for this had a 30 second shutter delay, and I played torchlight over the walls of the cave to begin to pick out the rock, while it remained dark enough for the glow worm’s glow to still show through. I am pleased with the results, I think it is a pretty unique image, and not bad for a first time effort. Maybe one day I will get a second shot at it…

To Surf a Couch

2 months on the road so far and only 2 hotel nights used. Quite amazing really. Some of this has been through friends, but a lot has been with total strangers through www.couchsurfing.com – a site that links travellers with people who open up homes and allow them to stay. This is an amazing travel resource, and can lead to quite amazing experiences. Here are some of the highlights I have had:

* Staying on a farm in the Hunter Valley region of Oz where the ‘roos came onto the lawn at dawn and dusk, there were fantastic night skies and a barbie was duly turned on and a bear opened on my arrival. Great place to relax and unwind at the end of a day.

* Staying with a marketing manager in Hong Kong who is also a stand up comedian at nights in the middle of Central, a fantastic way to get a taste of this highly paced city. To get there took 20 minutes on a series of escalators to ‘Mid Level’ which only go down in the morning and then up in the afternoon.

* A wooden hut on a hillside in North New Zealand with a self sufficient family with almost 10 children who had built their own home, were upgrading to another they were in the midst of building, had built their own hydro dam and to practice a stone wall building method, made a swimming pool. Another world. Kept ‘company’ by a possum that insisted on dancing on the corrugated roof for the night.

* A gypsy caravan on the west coast of South Island owned by a couple from Cambridge (UK) who had moved out to set up their own self sufficient area. Shared with dogs, cats, chickens and other assorted. Fantastic place.

* A home made sailing boat built by hand by the person living on it over a 2 year period in Lyttleton harbour. What a great  last night on South Island. Would love to have had the time to spend a few days there.

And that is just a few of the fantastic shows of hospitality I have received over the last 2 months from various people in various places. So, with all my limbs still intact I am about to finish New Zealand and head for Fiji.

Sitting on a Brick

The modern world is an amazing place really. I type this sitting on a brick on a pavement in a suburb of Melbourne ‘borrowing’ someone’s internet signal. Sadly there is no street light nearby, so this is liable to be full of a number of typos as it is really quite dark. Thankfully the temperature has now dropped a little from the 42C it was earlier in the day.

It is now 2008, so Happy New Years to one and all. How did you spend yours? I had fun being taken to a party and knowing only one person there. We were provided with fantastic food, which continued to pass before us on a never ending conveyor belt as the hostess continued to circle with numerous changing plates of snacks.

First there were home made mince meat rolls with fine, flaky puff pastry and spiced meat, followed by samosas exquistetly filled with more spiced fillings. All was home made. Tiny bisquits with cheese and smoked salmon then paraded round the room. Next came tiger prawn tails fried in a variety of spices, oozing flavour and succulent. Small pita breads home baked with a ricotta cheese spread followed by fried BBQ style lamb cutlets and chicken wings. Then came the deserts… I think we managed to finish eating just in time to pop the poppers as midnight rolled by.

And throughout the evening the ladies experimented with a variety of cocktail recipies. Truly an evening to remember, let alone a New Years to remember. I have had a fantastic time in the last few days, seeing the Great Ocean Road and topping it off with this.

Just 2 more days and then off to New Zealand.

Christmas Eve in Brisbane

It is now the 24th of December and I have been in Australia for alomost a month. The family I am staying with have finished most of the preparations for tomorrow, the kids are in bed and I have sent emails back home to the family.

So far I have been to Sydney, Perth and Brisbane, and for at least 50% of the time have had rain in each place. Seems everywhere I go I am told that it is unseasonally wet at the moment. I feel like hiring myself out as a rainmaker, cause it is following me around! The last two days were spent watching puring tropical rain in and around Noosa, usually the sun and holiday spot for people from Brisbane to visit for the holidays, though at the moment seems to have the potential to become the local swimming pool. It definately had the potential to be beautiful with forests and beaches galore. Had the sun come out. But, alas, this was not to be until sat on the train on the way back to Brisbane.

I am also in for a traditional Christmas here, which includes ham and turkey, though there may be a suprise appearance being made by some shrimp. Not exactly a BBQ on the beach, though both the ham and the turkeys were cooked on a Webster BBQ unit. Have to say they smell good.

So, 2 days of food and visitors and then off to Adelaide followed by a 2 day drive down the ocean road to stay with a friend in Melbourne before heading over to NZ. It could be worse!