Pin Your Pics…

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My year and a bit dalliance with Android concluded as of yesterday, when I took delivery of an iPhone 8. I’m going to start developing again [although I’m going to have to divide my attention with C#, which I’m learning at work].

I’ll need to dust down a couple of projects: I have a password manager which I wrote as an experiment to learn about the Touch ID back in the day. I also really need to update my apps on the App Store…

…All of which leads me in a round about way to Pin Your Pics. It’s had very modest downloads since I released it: very low hundreds. That was up until July of this year, when it appears to have been ‘discovered’ in some way. I’ve no idea why or how. Anyway, this is what the downloads look like for this month which, by comparison to before, is pretty interesting:

Downloads for Pin Your Pics

I’m sure there’s every chance that it will sink without trace again.

Regardless, at some point in the next few weeks I’ll have a look at screen resolution – when I wrote it, it was fixed to the 5S screen dimensions, I think. Also, there’s a perennial bug with the controller for launching the camera, which I’ll have another bash at.

Madagascar: Walking Flowers. Who Knew?

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I guess when The Beeb and Attenborough have made a series about a country, it’s a pretty safe bet that it’s going to be a humdinger of a place to visit. We got back from Madagascar on Friday afternoon, our tenth outing with the same company we’ve been using for all our long haul travel. I’ll cut to the chase: it was fabulous.

By the numbers:

  • Photos taken 1466 [me] and 683 [my wife]
  • Of which, keepers: lots. Seriously, if you can’t manage to get memorable pictures in Madagascar, it’s time to give up.
  • Kilometres covered by car: 1500.
  • Species of lemurs seen: 14.
  • Weight lost through illness: about 2kg.

I’ll start with that last point. Clearly, I upset some pagan poo gods by judging the phantom shitter on our Belize trip so harshly. I had the most sustained period of travel sickness that I’ve experienced to date. I only missed a day, but was under the weather from the third day and for about a week. My wife came down with it as well, but didn’t have it for quite as long as me. I jokingly put her stronger constitution down to her less literal enforcement of food best-before dates than me.

There were a couple of options for getting to Antananarivo [which, sympathetic to the world shortage in letter Ns, everyone calls Tana] but we ended up going via Paris. We had an overnight stay in a hotel about 10 minutes drive from the airport. The airport itself is pretty hectic: be prepared for enterprising ‘porters’ to descend on you and try to grab your luggage out of your hands – probably before you have any cash. While I think of it: there isn’t a great selection in duty free if you’re looking to get something last minute on the way back. It’s a similar sort of fare that you see in hotel shops. Oh, and if you’re transiting, be prepared to pay extra for a plastic bag that they staple shut for you – something I’d never come across before. As the 1 Euro represented 12% of the cost of the bottle of rum I was thinking about getting, I decided to skip.
Back to the itinerary. The next day we had two consecutive flights on the same plane – another first for us. First stop was Taolagnaro, and then we went straight on to Tulear, which is in the far south west corner of the country. We’d been warned by the travel company that there was a reasonable chance that our bags wouldn’t make the trip with us into Tana, and then that the internal flights might be rescheduled at short notice. Everything went really smoothly – in fact, the same could be said for the entire holiday. Every long haul trip we’ve had something has gone wrong. This was the first that the entire itinerary worked as planned.
We met our driver and guide for the rest of the holiday at Tulear [Yves and La La] who drove us to our next accommodation, called the Hotel Bakuba. It was a lovely place, something of an ongoing art project for the guy who runs it. That said, some of the features had practicality a little lower down the running order. Our room had a sunken seating area with a glass table in it, which I don’t think was really catering for the guest who might decide that a dozen postprandial Jager bombs are a good idea. It immediately made me think of this.

Mantrap

There was also a table with wildly splayed legs that we both stubbed our toes on every time we walked past it.

Fancy bed

It was undeniably top drawer accommodation but I couldn’t quite shake the sort of vibe you get in a bed and breakfast, because the couple who run it live there: you half-feel like you’re intruding when they are having dinner.
During our two night stay there we had a couple of outings, first to a spot called the Antsokay Arboretum, which was right next to the hotel, and then the Reniala forest. The Arboretum was an interesting enough hour but is really more for the gardening geek. Reniala gets you up close and personal to baobabs, which are fascinating.

baobab

From Tulear, we transferred to Isalo, and our next hotel, the Relais de la Reine, where we stayed for 3 nights. This, again, was pretty fancy: just the way the itinerary played out we had a gradual decrease in snazziness of accommodation.
It was in the Isalo national park that we had our first encounter with lemurs, specifically this little fella:

Hubbard’s  sportive lemur

Isalo is also one of your best chances to see sifakas doing their hoppity run along the ground – which brings me to another point. Travelling as we did at the start of July meant that we were right at the start of ‘shoulder season’ [which I’d never heard of before this trip]. It’s mid winter, so the animals are less active than pretty much any other time of the year. However, it also meant that the numbers of tourists around were very low. Probably the busiest of the parks that we went to was Ranomafana, where sightings are co-ordinated among the spotters and guides and so groups of people will coalesce when something interesting happens. I guess at one point we were up to about 15. Our guide said that during the high season, people are tripping over one another. We were told that the sifakas are most likely to hit the ground running in September to October but, given the propensity for the same ground to be covered with people, you’re extremely unlikely to see it.

Sifaka

The little bundle under this mum’s elbow is an infant:

Sifaka with infant

And another common brown lemur. I can’t help but anthropomorphise about this picture, that this guy is thinking ‘oh for God’s sake, get on with it, will you?’:

Grumpy common brown lemur

And so we get on to the title of this post: the ‘walking flowers’. I’d been ill for a couple of days by this stage and wasn’t feeling like the sharpest tool in the box. Our guide pointed a plant covered in white flowers and said, ‘have a look at these’. We’d never seen anything like them before and it took a while for me to notice that they were moving:

Flower bug

I’m not entirely sure which end is which. Needless to say, you don’t get them anywhere else except Madagascar.

Ring-tailed lemur

On our last full day we did a fairly long walk in the Namazaha Valley. It was supposed to be a 10km hike but my world was still being metered out in distances between toilets so we foreshortened it to about 6km in the end. Interesting spot, and a classic example of the arid environment in this part of the country.
The stones [centre left] in this picture are covering the entrance to a grave.

Isalo

On our last evening in Isalo, I was sitting outside the room when I noticed these weird shaped motes floating in the air. Given the recent experience with the flower bugs, I assumed that they were some sort of whacky insect, until one of them landed on me and I touched it with my finger:

Slash and burn

It’s hardly the most fascinating picture but it was quite a poignant one for me: it’s a piece of ash. ‘Slash and burn’ is a common agricultural technique in the country. We were told a fire got out of control a few years ago: it affected 60% of the Isalo park and killed all but two of the sifakas. You see a lot of fires as you are driving through the countryside.

We visited one other smaller reserve before we moved on, called Zombitse. It was ok: plenty of ring-tailed lemurs and chameleons in the mix but by this stage, unless the lemurs were species we hadn’t seen before or were doing handstands, it was time to move on. Despite the name, there were no zombies.

We had a long drive to our next venue, which was the Ranomafana national park and the Setam Lodge. We passed this along the way. I love this shot, which is pretty much straight out of the camera:

The sky from the start of the Simpsons

The change in the weather over the course of the day reflected our move out of the arid region and into rainforest. We had a very interesting night walk on the first evening with the highlight being a mouse lemur:

Mouse lemur

The guide got a banana and smeared it over the branch [which is the brown slimy stuff you can see in the shot]. You then hope that the smell attracts a lemur. It took a couple of goes as the first fishing expedition attracted a rat. Being Madagascar, you half expect the rats to have, I don’t know, wings and a handlebar moustache at the very least. Nope: they have plain old rats, just like everywhere else.

Anyway, the mouse lemurs are lightning fast: they run along the branch hoovering up the banana as they go. They are ridiculously cute. These and the bamboo lemurs look like the result of a conversation between a toddler and a cartoonist.

“Bigger eyes.”

“No problem.”

This is a baby long-nosed chameleon. It’s not a great shot but the conditions were pretty difficult: macro depth of field, at night, with the 2 inch long subject on a branch that was moving…

Baby long-nosed chameleon

The next day we had our physically toughest hike, which was about 8km over very hilly ground. Just on that point, in our experience I’d say it’s second only to Borneo, in terms of the physical demands of getting around in rainforest. That said, the temperature we had last week was low- to mid 20s. If you were covering the ground that we did in Ranomafana at the height of the summer, you’d have a real slog on your hands.

Ring-tailed mongoose

Golden bamboo lemur

Flat-tailed gecko

From Ranomafana we had another long drive to our final venue, which was the Eulophiella Lodge, next to the Andasibe national park. We broke the journey with an overnight stay in a guesthouse called the Maison Tanimanga in Antsirabe. That was notable for what I rated as the best meal of the holiday.

A quick aside about the grub before I get on to Andasibe. It’s French influenced, with every place we stayed in serving baguettes and croissants for breakfast.

  • Tulear had pretty decent food, but with the odd ‘miss’: like a zebu carpaccio starter which was frozen.
  • Relais de la Reine: very rich food, with lots of creamy sauces.
  • Setam Lodge: I’ve no idea. I was in full-on emergency mode and had boiled rice and vegetables for the entirety.
  • Maison Tanimanga: fabulous home-cooked French food.
  • Eulophiella: slightly simpler fare but still very nice.

Andasibe was the coldest of the places that we stayed, with the temperature down to 11C at night. I enjoyed this park the best, I think: it was slightly easier going and there was a fantastic variety of wildlife.

Velvet amity [I think]

Indri

Diademed sifaka

Nightjar [breeding pair – sleeping]

The last place we visited of note, which was on our way back to Tana was ‘Lemur Island’. It’s basically a mini-zoo built into the grounds of one of the fancier lodges in Antsirabe. Our guide was pretty diplomatic about it: it’s a for-profit affair, and the lemurs that are kept there don’t get rotated back into the wild. That said, where else in the world are you going to have a lemur jump on your head? They have 4 species: black and white ruffed, ring-tailed, common brown and bamboo. The ruffed and common brown like to get up close and personal, and the ruffed have particularly luxuriant fur. Once again, being out of season, we had the place to ourselves.

Golden bamboo lemur

Black and white ruffed lemur, and me. I’m on the right.

So that was our fortnight in Madagascar, and it really is an extraordinary place. You’ve got to hand it to that Attenborough fella: he really knows his onions.

Belize

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We got back from a fortnight in Belize on Sunday afternoon. It was, by my reckoning, the 38th country we’ve visited, on a trip we worked on with a well known UK long haul travel specialist. I say ‘we’: my wife did all the organising. I had almost no idea where I was going – this was a matter of choice, I hasten to add.

By the numbers:
– Photos taken: 580.
– Of which, keepers: 4.
– Wildlife encounters of the “you’ve got to be kidding” variety: 1.
– Arrests: 1.

A warning in advance: we had a scene play out on the way to the famous ATM Cave which was rather unsavoury, and which I can neither window dress [for reasons that will become very clear] nor skip, by virtue of being a significant talking point for a day or two for us. You might want to come back to this if you are having your lunch.

The default offering from the travel company is to fly in via Miami, which an overnight stay. That felt like a waste of time, so we asked if we could fly in via Mexico instead, as we’d be able to stay ‘air-side’ when we were transiting. This isn’t actually right, and made for a pretty tense return leg [which I’ll come back to]. Our agent also screwed up the booking and couldn’t get us on to the Cancun flight to Belize City, so we ended up having to stay in a Marriot just outside the airport anyway. This meant we’d have a pretty long drive to the Belize border on the first full day. In short, travelling via Mexico gained us nothing: if you’re thinking of travelling from the UK, just take the simple option and come in via Miami. Cancun airport is massive, and we had a chaotic 90 minute wait to get our bags. The refried beans we had at breakfast were fantastic but hardly enough to swing it.

We were dropped at the border and walked across the timezone [a first] and through passport control into Belize, sharing the queue with people who seemed to be taking little apart from vast quantities of toilet roll into the country. A short drive and boat journey later and we were at our first destination and highlight of the holiday, the Lamanai Outpost Lodge. Great food, lots of interesting things to do, great wildlife guides, and a really nice atmosphere: we couldn’t rate it highly enough. We were there for 3 nights, and had a nice mix of activities: a couple of wildlife spotting walks, a ‘village life’ tour [which involved making corn tortillas by hand. It’s pretty tough] and a standout ‘flashlight boat trip’.

As well as spotting a pretty interesting array of wildlife [including 3 metre crocodiles which, honest gov, don’t attack humans so feel free to take a dip in the river. Yeah right!], the guide used a laser pointer to talk us through various constellations. I’ve only ever seen the Milky Way as prominently once before and it was stunning: the guys turned the engine off, and left us floating in the middle of the estuary, with absolutely no visible sources of light to spoil the effect.

This little fella worked his / her way into our room, early in the morning of the second night, an encounter which had us carefully knocking out the contents of our walking boots for the rest of the trip.

Early morning visitor

We had a really nice morning looking round the Mayan temples at Lamanai. The lodge had timed it that, apart from one other couple and their guide, we had the place to ourselves.

Lamanai Mayan Ruins

If I had one minor criticism, it would be of this:

Lamanai Mayan Ruins – Big Head

…which has been plastered over to protect the original stonework from the elements. My gripe is that it wasn’t done very sympathetically.

This is the best shot of howler monkeys that I managed to get. They are tricky – by virtue of both altitude and contrast. They also sound… odd. Think Jurassic Park. I took this at the long end of my 100-400mm L, with the 1.4x extender, which meant manual focus…

Howler monkeys

…something I gave up on later in the holiday.

We woke a few times to find that it had poured overnight. This leaf, just in the garden of the Lodge, was so succulent looking I was tempted to take a bite out of it:

Yum

From Lamanai, we had a long trip [via the airport for some reason] to Black Rock Lodge. While this place has stunning reviews, and we enjoyed our 6 nights there, it didn’t quite have the same atmosphere as Lamanai: it had more of a hotel vibe. Then there were the seating arrangements: enforced nightly rotation of the cabin occupants at mixed tables. We aren’t unfriendly, and we met some interesting people but the daily procession of the same questions started to get a bit wearing. By the end of our time there, I was itching to find another IT type to speculate on why no-one was able to send emails [untested hypothesis: blocks on both the TLS and non TLS SMTP ports due to people sending bandwidth unfriendly photo attachments].

Anything but the dreaded ‘…and what do you do…?’ Me, I like to judge people from a distance, without the whole palaver of having to find out what job they do first :).

It was in a fantastic location – again on a river. There was a bird feeder that you could spend hours at:

My goodness, my Guinness!

OK, I don’t want to get too technical, but this is a green bird…

A bird. With another bird.

…which I’ve completely failed to identify. We saw a few of these over the course of the stay:

Agouti

This fella also put in an appearance on our second day:

Arizona unicorn mantis

What a fantastic name for a beastie!

We’d pre-booked a couple of trips and had the option for more, but I fell into my standard long haul holiday pattern of starting to feel off colour at the end of the first week, and had a couple of lazy days, including one where my wife went to the market at San Ignacio, which she enjoyed [possibly because she was on her own :)]. Our first big trip based out of Black Rock was to the ATM caves. It was a physically challenging, but fantastic day out. Right up until I saw the camera shaped hole in the skull of one of skeletons, I was grumbling under my breath about not being able to take my little sports camera [a GoPro wannabe, which I’ve got a waterproof enclosure for].

We had an interesting trip to the cave. We were travelling with the guide in a group of 6: a father and daughter, two women and ourselves. I was talking to one of the women who I thought was possibly drunk. Given that she was about 60, it was about 10 in the morning and we were about to ford a river, I thought she was pretty keen, but who knew, a little bit of Dutch courage might have been what she needed. We’d been walking for about 20 minutes, maybe half an hour, and were somewhere between the second and third river crossing when we noticed quite a distinctive smell. I, in my naivety, immediately thought that we might be passing near by some pecaris: our guide at Lamanai a few days before had pointed out that they have a pretty distinctive musky sort of smell. Looking back at this, I can just imagine my wife rolling her eyes at me; at the time I thought my jungle tracker super-skills had just landed. Anyway, about a minute later, we realised that the woman I thought had been drunk had suffered a spectacular sphincteral failure, and had pooed herself. Wearing shorts. In a group of people. Passing another group that happened to be heading to cave at the same time. And we’re not talking a little whoops-a-daisy squeak: there was poo running down the back of both of her legs to her feet.

It’s funny the way these scenes play out. Rather than sympathy, the group immediately regressed to the rules of the school playground. The only goal, and the one thing that was trying to jostle the smell from my brain, was the thought that we needed to cross the next river in front of her. The rest of the group was coming independently to the same conclusion and there was a not-quite-running foot race developing. Cue the Benny Hill music.

The woman cleaned herself up – probably launching an epidemic of dysentery in the otherwise crystal clear water of the river – and subsequently made it about 2/3 of the way through the cave – with no-one standing behind her at any point in time, I hasten to add.

So, as you might have guessed, my sympathy levels were pretty low. Yes, rather than drunk, she was probably medicating. But, what was she thinking? ‘I don’t feel well, but damn it, I’ve come all this way so I’m going to have a bash at this physically demanding day out.’ Or later: ‘OK, the gates have opened. Oops. I’m just going to try and brazen this bad boy out. Maybe no-one noticed’.

Really?!? I’m sorry, but either you don’t go – to the cave! – or, if it’s a super emergency, sprint off the path, drop your trollies and drop the kids. Fair enough, eye contact might be as light on the ground as waterproof toilet roll but people will understand: everyone has close shaves with the holiday trots. I remember one particularly tricky moment on my one and only diving holiday, struggling like mad to get out of a wet suit with the clock ticking down. But, back to the cave woman: to just try and walk it off? Or, if you are that ill in the first place?

Stay indoors. You know, next to the toilet.

The cave itself was, despite thoughts of poo-gate lingering over us like a green cloud, fantastic: just an absolute sensory overload of sights, swimming, sauna-like humidity and climbing. It’s not for the faint of heart.

We had another full day out to visit the ruins at Caracol. It was really good fun: a walk around the forest with the remains of houses and temples looming out of the undergrowth. We stopped off at a cave, called the Rio Frio, which was actually the highlight of the day for me.

This is an HDR exposure comprising 3 shots, bracketed around an exposure of f8, and 0.6 seconds:

Rio Frio

That was followed by the weird moment of the day: the guide set up lunch and then just switched off: not even an attempt at I-work-in-the-people-busines-so-need-to-try conversation, he just stared glassy eyed into the middle distance. Fair enough, I guess: after a few years in the job there’s probably little to distinguish one set of sweaty Europeans from another…

 

At least he didn’t shit himself.

 

This was one of the last shots I took at Caracol. It’s a bit of a daft composition but I quite like it. The ceiba trees, central to Mayan culture, are everywhere, and they are fascinating:

Ceiba tree

From Black Rock, we had another long drive down to our last destination, Placencia. It’s a quirky little town which, for me, didn’t quite add up. While we ate well and enjoyed our few days there winding down, I couldn’t quite see the draw to the location itself – bearing in mind that there was a huge amount of development work going on and our hotel was pretty swanky [the Chabel Mar]. The beach was… well, to be kind, just ok. It was a little too steep to be kid friendly, and there was a strong breeze for almost the entire time we were there, so the water was very choppy. Hardly surprisingly, we saw all of 3 people swimming in the time we were there. Thinking about the location of the town more generally, while there were plenty of day trips to be had, but they were all a long way from Placencia itself.

Brown pelican

We had a couple of stand out meals in town: Dawn’s Grill did a shrimp curry, which was my best meal of the holiday. Also worth an honourable mention was Rhum Fish where we went for my wife’s birthday. That turned out to be memorable for the wrong reasons. She hadn’t been feeling great earlier in the day – a combination of a dodgy tummy, the weather and a bad reaction to a couple of sandfly bites – but felt well enough to go out. She ended up fainting in the loo, and not being able to open the door to get out of it because her hands were sweating so badly. I was just about to go into panic mode – bearing in mind that the starters were sitting on the table – and met her coming back from the loo looking grey. She almost fainted again. The staff were fantastic: a cold, sweet drink, cold towels, cab called, food boxed up. My wife was feeling fine, and ravenous, about 30 minutes later.

We had one last mini-adventure to unfurl on the trip home. We’d arranged a pickup with the ground agent to get us to the airport a couple of hours before they had suggested, which turned out to be a good job. Our driver was stopped at a police check-point and told that his insurance had expired, which was an arrestable offence. His car would have to be impounded, he’d have a night in jail and could arrange bail for a release the next day. We were sat in the back of the car, thinking, yeah, shame, but we need to get to the airport pretty soon. The driver called his son and, after a testing 45 minutes wondering how reliable this arrangement was going to be, he appeared in a very fancy 4 wheel drive and took us to the airport at breakneck speed.

The airport at Belize City appears a little chaotic to the uninitiated: e.g., a mismatch on flight departure times between the main board and the gate, and a very strange seat allocation mechanism that seemed to involve a lot of shouting. Our flight was duly called and, when I realised there were only going to be 3 passengers, my hopes of a nice 737 started to evaporate. We were in a single engined plane for the 90 minute flight. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t the air pressure differential on the wing combined with thrust that was keeping the plane in level – and admittedly fairly smooth – flight, but an act of intense willpower on my behalf. I was a nervous wreck by the time we landed. My wife loved it. We landed at a small, separate terminal and, because our pilot and co-pilot accounted for exactly 40% of the people going through the place, cleared customs and immigration control in about 5 minutes. At Belize City airport, we’d arranged for a private taxi to take us to the main terminal for international flights – vastly overpriced [$35] but worth it to make sure we were in plenty of time for final leg of the journey home.

So, all in all, a very enjoyable trip. It has to be said, it was a quite expensive one. While some of that is down to currency exchange rates, it was principally because the accommodation was pretty dear. Bottom line, it was still one of the best holidays we’ve had. The people were really friendly, and the country itself has a great mixture of history, wildlife and beaches to offer.

Thoroughly recommended.

Photography Footnotes

I took my tripod but not my 16-35mm lens, which was a mistake. There are plenty of opportunities for taking shots of the Milky Way [something I’d never tried before], and missing a wide shot of the Rio Frio cave was a bit of a shame.

It’s also worth taking a shutter remote. I had a half-pissed brainwave to improvise by putting the camera on the B setting, and using the off/on to trigger the shutter by holding the shutter release button down by using a Neurofen and about 10 Band Aids [cue my wife rolling her eyes again.] It nearly worked, but I got a bit of movement in the camera body when I turned it on and off – a combination of a beer-induced unsteady hand, and setting the tripod up on less than solid ground.

Best of a bad lot, this was a 111 second exposure [I had a Band Aid failure which closed the shutter] at f4 and ISO 800. I also bounced the flash around the foreground. Going to f2.8 and wide on the 16-35mm would have just made the difference:

Stars – don’t look too closely…