Where to photograph wildlife in Colorado

July 23, 2015 Peter Batty Leave a comment

This is the first in a series of posts on how to take better wildlife photos.

Top of the list is figuring out where to go (and when). It may sound obvious but it really is the most important thing. You can go to several of the places listed here and have a great chance of getting some excellent pictures just pointing and shooting with your iPhone. No matter how fancy your equipment or how great your technique, you won’t get good pictures unless you go to places with the right subject matter!

By the way, when I say you can get good pictures with your iPhone, please don’t be this person! But for example, here’s a recent picture from Rocky Mountain National Park taken by my partner Paula from the passenger window of our moving car, with a compact camera without a big zoom (Lumix LX7), in auto mode.

These days there is so much information available online that it is easy to research. Look on Facebook for wildlife photography groups in your area (or an area you are planning to visit), try local meetups, or just search on Google. I am fortunate to live in Colorado which is a great place for wildlife photography. An excellent resource is the Front Range Wildlife Photographers (FRWP) group, who have both a meetup group and a very active Facebook page. The Facebook page is both a source of inspiration with many great pictures posted every day, and a supportive community. It’s also a great place to get an idea of good places to go, and good times. A little while ago someone posted a picture of a baby buffalo at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which prompted me to go out there the next day, and I got some nice pictures of the baby – and there have been other examples like this.

In the rest of this post, I share some of my favorite spots for wildlife photography in Colorado, and what you are most likely to see at each. Of course there is no “sure thing” when photographing wildlife, that’s part of what makes it exciting, but it’s very rare that I have been to any of these places and not seen something interesting.

You can buy a range of prints of any of the images in this post at batty.photos – just click on any picture to go there.

Rocky Mountain Arsenal – Bison

Rocky Mountain Arsenal is on the north side of Denver, just a 15-20 minute drive from downtown. It was once a chemical weapons manufacturing site, but is now one of the largest urban wildlife refuges in the country. This is a great place to get good pictures of Bison. The bison enclosure is the square area to the left of this map. You have to stay in your car while in this area. The bison also have access to an area to the north of this space, which visitors do not have access to. So they may or may not be visible. There is a gap in the fence about half way along the north side of the enclosure, and I have had good luck parking close to this and getting pictures of the bison as they walk through this in either direction. I have found late afternoon, around 5pm, to be a good time to see them in this location – but obviously there are no guarantees! I usually drive around the bison enclosure when I first arrive, then explore other areas if there is no action there, and revisit once or twice before leaving. The Arsenal is also a good place to see bald eagles, though I haven’t had much luck with those there, and other birds, deer, and more.

Rocky Mountain National Park – Elk

As I said, of course there are no guarantees in wildlife spotting, but at Rocky Mountain National Park you will definitely see some spectacular mountain scenery. You will almost certainly see some elk too, and quite likely in significant numbers. Good places to spot them include Moraine Park, near the Beaver Meadows entrance, and higher up on Trail Ridge Road, which is a must visit for the scenery (but is closed in winter). In the fall and winter you may well see elk wandering through the town of Estes Park. There are plenty of other animals you can spot there too, including marmots, big horn sheep, and moose. It’s about an hour and a half drive from Denver, so a comfortable day trip.

Mount Evans – Mountain Goats

Mount Evans has become my number one thing that I do with out of town visitors whenever I can. It is one of only two “14ers” (14,000 foot peaks in Colorado) that you can drive to the top of, going up the highest paved road in North America. It’s a spectacular drive and you are almost certain to see mountain goats somewhere near the top. The shot above is several years old but remains one of my favorites – I love the dynamic movement of the goat, and the background. You will often see bighorn sheep here too, and marmots. Mount Evans is an easy drive west of Denver – I love that I can leave downtown Denver at 3pm and still do a comfortable trip to Mount Evans – it takes about an hour to get to the beginning of the Mount Evans Road, and then it’s a 14 mile steep and windy drive to the top from there. Stopping at Beau Jo’s original pizza place in Idaho Springs on the way back is a well established tradition – I recommend the BBQ pie, my favorite pizza anywhere :). The Mount Evans road is normally open from Memorial Day (late May) to Labor Day (early September) – though in 2015 it has still not opened in mid July, due to lots of snow last winter which delayed reconstruction work on the road.

Waterton Canyon – Bighorn Sheep

Waterton Canyon is a new destination for me, I only went there for the first time in 2014. I was made aware of it by the FRWP Facebook page. This seems to be by far the best place to spot bighorn sheep. It is on the southwest side of Denver, not far off C-470, about 30 minutes from downtown. There’s a parking lot just after the Audubon Nature Center – park there and you can either walk or ride a bike up the (smooth) dirt road that runs up the canyon. I took the picture above at about 1.5 miles up, which seems to be a fairly common area to see sheep. The road goes up for 6 miles, and larger sheep are often seen nearer to the top, so a bike is a good idea if you want to get up that far. Waterton Canyon has its own Facebook page for photography which is a great source of good photos and information. You can see plenty of other wildlife there too – a number of people have posted pictures of bears from there, though I still haven’t managed to see a bear in the wild, there or elsewhere!

Brainard Lake – Moose

Brainard Lake is one of the best spots for seeing moose in Colorado. Early morning or late afternoon are the best times. It is near Nederland, west of Boulder and about an hour’s drive from Boulder or an hour and a half from downtown Denver.

City Park – Birds

City Park in downtown Denver is a great place to spot a whole load of birds. The small island on the south side of Ferril Lake has dozens of nests of herons, egrets, cormorants and more. This is another new spot for me, and I have to confess I don’t know if they are there all year round, but certainly in June and July there are lots of birds, and lots of interesting activity to photograph! There is parking along 17th – try somewhere around the intersection with Steele – and it’s a short walk from there.

Belmar Park – Birds

At Belmar Park, about 15 minutes drive from downtown, you can see a very similar range of birds to those I mentioned at City Park. I was there recently, in June 2015, for a FRWP meetup, which was a great outing. I got lots of good pictures of blue herons and cormorants, as well as some nice ones of a mother and baby avocet including the picture above. You can park in Belmar Library parking lot, and walk to the gazebo on the east side of the lake for a great view of the island in the middle of the lake where the birds nest.

And more …

Of course there are many, many great places to photograph wildlife in Colorado. This is just a sampling of some of my favorites, all within easy striking distance of Denver. Feel free to share any comments or other suggestions below!

Photography

Photo story: Fourteen stormy minutes over Denver

July 19, 2015 Peter Batty 6 Comments

I recently took this picture from the rooftop of my loft in downtown Denver. It is a composite created from 38 individual lightning strike pictures taken over the course of 14 minutes. It shows an amazing lightning storm near downtown Denver, with the Ice House and Coors Field in the foreground. A number of people asked me for more information on how I took it, which seemed like a good excuse to try (again) to get more activity going on this blog! This is a post primarily for intermediate to advanced photographers – I plan to do posts aimed at all levels, and will include some more basic ones in future. You can buy prints of this image at my Smugmug page.

A composite image made from 38 lightning strike photos over the space of 14 minutes, in downtown Denver.

I actually had no plans to take storm pictures on the evening that I took this. It was the evening of the annual Independence Day fireworks at Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies baseball team, and I was planning to take firework photos. I was setting up my camera and tripod on our rooftop deck ahead of the fireworks, and saw the lightning in progress, so I had to improvise and act quickly. An advantage of this location, both for fireworks pictures and for this storm picture, is that it has a cool foreground, with the Ice House and its water tower on the left, and Coors Field on the right – this makes the picture a lot more interesting than if you just have fireworks or lightning by itself.

Exposure

I have never really done lightning photography before, but did know that the main trick to catch the lightning is to take long exposure photos, of several seconds – even though the lightning flash is brief, it generates enough light to be captured as part of a longer exposure. I looked around online after taking this picture, and thought that this article in particular gave some good tips. That article suggests that an exposure of 30 seconds is a good baseline to try for lightning photography in general. I typically use exposures of around 1 to 5 seconds for fireworks, which give good “light trails” effects. The camera I was using, the Lumix GX7, has a long exposure noise reduction mode, which I generally have turned on. This does some extra processing to reduce noise in the pictures – if you take a 5 second exposure, it processes for an additional 5 seconds after taking the photo. The drawback of this is that you have to wait to get another picture. At 2 seconds or less this processing doesn’t happen, you can take photos continuously. So I decided to go with taking a (more or less) continuous sequence of two second exposures. At some point I will try to experiment with doing longer exposure night pictures with and without the noise reduction to see how they compare – in this sort of situation it would be nice to do a continuous set of longer exposures.

I set the camera in manual mode with settings of 2s, f/6.3 and ISO 200, the lowest ISO setting on my camera. I will do other posts that explain more about how to use manual mode. This is one of the very rare occasions when I use manual mode – some serious photographers use it a lot more, but I am a believer in using the intelligence of your camera, and probably only use manual mode maybe 5% of the time in quite specific situations. Doing a time series where you may want to combine multiple pictures, either into a time lapse movie or a composite image, is one situation where it’s important to have consistent exposure in all the pictures. And even without the sequence aspect, lightning, fireworks and night sky pictures are also situations where manual mode is important.

Taking the pictures

For any long exposure you need a sturdy and stable tripod. If you are doing a sequence of pictures this is even more important. Like most aspects of serious photography, buying tripods can become expensive quite quickly. I have two relatively inexpensive tripods that I have been really pleased with. The first, which I used for these pictures, is an Amazon Basics 70″ Pistol Grip Tripod. It is amazingly inexpensive for a good tripod – $57.49 at the time of writing this, including a nice pistol grip head which is very easy to adjust quickly. It weighs 8.1 pounds and is very stable – so good for situations where you don’t have to carry it too far. More recently, I bought a MeFoto Backpacker Travel Tripod, which is more expensive, $149 at the time of writing, but it only weighs 2.8 pounds and folds up to be quite compact, so works much better with my lightweight travel philosophy, or if you need to hike with it.

My camera has a built in time lapse mode, where you can tell it to take a picture every so many seconds for a long period of time. In this case I wanted to take continuous pictures to try to make sure I captured as many lightning strikes as possible. Though I have used the time lapse mode several times, I haven’t used it in exactly this situation, and wasn’t sure if I set it to take a picture every 2 seconds with a 2 second exposure, whether I would get the desired effect of continuous pictures, or whether I would have a 2 second gap between the end of one picture and the start of the next. Since the lightning was already under way, I didn’t have time to experiment and I elected to just hold down the shutter button on my cable release to keep taking pictures one after the other. I ended up taking around 750 pictures over a spell of maybe 30 minutes – the ones that went into the picture above spanned a spell of 14 minutes. From a quick test that I did just now, the time lapse mode on the GX7 doesn’t seem to support doing continuous bursts – if I set it to take a photo every 2 seconds with a 2 second exposure, there is a 2 second gap between the end of one photo and the start of the next. I tried setting an interval of 0 seconds but it wouldn’t take that – the minimum gap between photos seems to be a second. So my improvised approach of just holding down the shutter release for long periods seems as though it may be best bet with my camera at least. If anyone has any good tips on a more automated way of doing this please comment below!

Shelter from the rain

It was raining most of the time while I was taking these pictures. I had been meaning to buy a rain cover for my camera for some time but hadn’t yet! So I improvised with a plastic grocery bag that I tore a hole in to fit the lens through, and fixed it with a rubber band. And then I also held an umbrella over myself and the camera, to try to keep rain off the lens (a lens hood would have helped too, but I didn’t have one on the lens I was using and didn’t have time to track one down). I had to wipe rain off the lens a few times. Here’s a picture of the impromptu setup – sometimes a low tech approach does the trick!

Since then I looked around online and have bought this Allura Photo Professional Rain Cover, which seems as though it will do a good job from some quick testing at home, though I haven’t used it in the rain yet.

Post processing

I use Adobe’s Lightroom software for nearly all my post processing, plus a few plugins that I will cover in other posts. I very rarely use Photoshop, but this was one of the few occasions that I did – it is needed to combine all these pictures into one image. I looked through all the images I took of the storm from that viewpoint, as I mentioned above about 750 of them, and added all those with lightning into a Lightroom collection, ending up with 38 pictures.

I edited one of the pictures to get the settings how I wanted them. I always shoot in RAW format. If you don’t do this, I would say this is one of the biggest steps you can take to improve your photos – shoot in RAW and learn the basics of using a software package like Lightroom. You can do a much wider range of editing on RAW files than on JPEG, and it means that it’s less important to get your original exposure and other settings like white balance exactly right. One good tip in the article I mentioned above was that lightning tends to look better if you adjust the white balance to a lower temperature, to look more blue. I did this on my images and liked the result.

Once I was happy with the edits on one picture, I copied those edits to all the other photos, which is a nice feature of Lightroom. To combine the pictures you need to open them in Photoshop (you can also load them straight into Photoshop if you are not using Lightroom). To do this, select them all, then choose Photo -> Edit in -> Open as Layers in Photoshop. This takes a little while with 38 RAW images, but you will end up with a Photoshop image with 38 layers. Only the top photo will show by default.

You need to select all the layers on the right hand side – click on the first layer, then scroll down and shift-click on the last layer. Then select the pulldown above the layers and change it from “Normal” to “Lighten” and this will give you a composite image showing all the lightning!

In general, if you quit from Photoshop at this point, your image with all its edits will automatically be saved back to Lightroom. In this particular case, my image was larger than 2GB, which is the maximum size of a regular photoshop file. They have a “psb” format for larger files but this is not supported by Lightroom. So I had to save it as a TIFF file and load that back into Lightroom to do a little final tweaking on the image.

Summary

This composite image technique, often referred to as stacking, is definitely a good one to consider for lightning pictures. Even if you are trying to get individual lightning pictures, taking a sequence from a fixed tripod gives you the option of stacking if you want to. Having a stable tripod is obviously very important, as is making sure you get consistent exposure. Looking for a good foreground helps make a picture like this more interesting – this applies to lightning, firework or night sky pictures. Let me know if you have any questions or comments! You can buy a print of this picture from my Smugmug site.

Trips

Tips on a short visit to London

April 2, 2015 Peter Batty Leave a comment

Today an American friend asked me for suggestions on what to do in England with 2 or 3 spare days on the end of a business trip. She has never been to the UK before. I have been meaning to get this blog reactivated for a while, so this gives me a good opportunity to do that! She will be in Cambridge for the work week, so will get to see a good amount there.

My primary advice is to visit London, which might seem to some like an unoriginal choice, but there are so many world renowned things to see that I think you have to start there if you’ve never visited before. So this post will focus on some tips on doing a short visit to London, especially for overseas visitors passing through, but hopefully it may have things of interest to anyone! I’ll do a follow up post on other options outside London.

Take a bus tour

Many of my London friends laugh at me for this, but my top recommendation for a first time visitor (or indeed anyone who hasn’t done this before) is to take one of the open topped double decker bus tours first to get oriented. It may be “touristy”, but you get to see an amazing amount of stuff in a couple of hours. I have done this a number of times with various visitors and everyone has really enjoyed it. You are rather at the mercy of London’s weather though – if it’s raining then you may want to postpone this, if there’s any prospect of the weather improving.

There are multiple companies that do this, including The Original Tour and Big Bus Tours. They are both pretty similar. You get a ticket that is good for 24 hours, and they both have two or three routes that generally take 2-3 hours to complete if you don’t get off. They have frequent stops and you can get off and on as often as you like. Also they both include a river cruise ticket, which is worth using if you have time. Depending on your schedule and other plans, you could stay on for the whole loop in one go, then visit places afterwards, or alternatively hop and and off wherever you wish.

Where to get off

Of course there are many, many great things to see in London. This is not based on a rigorous survey, but these are a few of my top recommendations.

Westminster Abbey is amazing, and my top choice. It’s also right next to the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, so you get two (or three) for one stop! The architecture and history are amazing. Many kings and queens are buried there, as well as a diverse range of notable people including Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Laurence Olivier, Handel, Lord Kelvin, Dr Livingstone, Rudyard Kipling, and many more. I find it fascinating to wander round there. I just found out that they now have fast track entry if you buy a ticket online ahead of time, so that is worth doing. Before or after, walk across the River Thames on Westminster Bridge for great views of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. The London Eye is nearby and offers great views. It’s worth doing, but you will probably have a fair wait there, and I wouldn’t necessarily put it on my list for a short visit. I personally would rate the river cruises that come combined with the bus tours as a more interesting experience, and you can also get on (or off) those at Westminster Bridge, and take them along to the Tower of London.

The British Museum is one of the best of many incredible museums and galleries in London, and definitely worth a visit. Other options depending on your preference and location include the Natural History Museum, the National Gallery, the Tate Modern (housed in a disused Power Station by the River Thames) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). On our last trip, we were going to go to the Natural History Museum but there was a huge line so we went to the V&A which is next door, and loved it – I had never been there before.

A personal favorite of mine is the British Library – they have a relatively small and manageable “Treasures of the British Library” collection that is free and open seven days a week. I have visited it several times and always find it amazing. Just a small sample of items you can see there include Gutenberg’s Bible of 1455, Beowulf – the unique manuscript in Old English, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, Shakespeare’s First Folio, Handel’s Messiah in the composer’s hand and original hand written lyrics from the Beatles. It is right next door to St Pancras and King’s Cross stations, so easy to visit if you are heading north from London on the train (to Cambridge, for example!).

Covent Garden is another fun place to visit – the main square there is packed with lots of restaurants, bars and interesting shops, and also has lots of street entertainers, especially in the summer. It’s home to the Royal Opera House, and a cool Apple Store (I know, I know, you don’t go to London for the Apple Store, but if you’re in Covent Garden it’s worth a quick look – you can get free WiFi there if nothing else!).

Getting around

You definitely DO NOT want a car in London. If you have a tour bus ticket, that can get you to most places. Other than that, the best way to get around is on the Underground (also known as the Tube), which is well signed and pretty easy to navigate. If you will be there for two or three days, it is worth buying (or borrowing) an Oyster Card. Actually I just found out you can buy a special Visitor Oyster Card and have it delivered in advance, which is worth considering if you are organized enough! This is especially true if you are arriving at Heathrow Airport and want to take the tube from there, as you need to buy an Oyster Card from the ticket office rather than the machines, and there is always a huge line there. Once you have a card you can top it up and re-use it, so keep it for future visits if you can. Talking of traveling from Heathrow, there are two main options, the tube or the Heathrow Express. The Heathrow Express goes to Paddington and is somewhat faster but a lot more expensive – at the time of writing this, £21.50 versus £4 on the tube if you have an Oyster Card, or £6 if you don’t. If you are going to somewhere on the Piccadilly Line, which goes right across London, then I definitely recommend taking the tube, rather than taking the Heathrow Express and changing – it’s much simpler and cheaper, and won’t take much longer. I normally take the tube to King’s Cross St Pancras if I am heading on to Cambridge or Leicester, two of my regular destinations. Central London is fairly compact, and walking is often an option too, which means you get to see more. And taxis are also not too expensive and a reasonable option within the center (but don’t take them to or from the airports, they are a long way out).

Where to stay

London hotels are expensive, but I have had good luck using discount sites like Hotwire, or more recently Hotel Tonight (I use their iPhone app). I have been very impressed with Hotel Tonight – as the name suggests, they are focused on booking a hotel at short notice, and they have great deals. On our last visit we spent two nights at the lovely Hotel Xenia for only $133 per night including all taxes and fees – and we found the same room on booking.com (at the same time) for $400 a night! We booked this the day before we were staying in London. You need a little nerve to wait and book a day ahead, but there are so many hotels in London that it’s a particularly low risk there. I am definitely likely to use Hotel Tonight for future stays there, unless I have a particular need to be in a really specific spot. If you want to splurge then the St Pancras Renaissance hotel is incredibly cool, but also very expensive. I have stayed there a couple of times on business trips, and charged half to expenses (which was comparable to other business hotels I would have typically stayed at) and paid half myself.

The living room at St Pancras Clock Tower

One other amazing place that we have stayed at is the St Pancras Clock Tower which you can book on airbnb. You will need to book a long way ahead, but it’s a unique place to stay for a special occasion, and not overly expensive by London standards – half the price of staying in the St Pancras Renaissance, and much more exclusive! I have stayed there multiple times, and held the London stop of my 50th birthday party there! See our pictures here. The owner Peter is a wonderful host.

Where to eat

Obviously there are a massive number of places to eat in London, but I just wanted to mention a couple that I’ve particularly enjoyed. A place we’ve been to multiple times is the Gilbert Scott Bar which is in the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, and right by the station. It has a really cool atmosphere, excellent food and interesting cocktails – I highly recommend it. If you walk between the lobby of the hotel and the bar you will walk past the grand staircase, which is worth checking out.

Indian food is always a good bet in London, and the UK in general, and that is something that you should try if you’re visiting, from the US especially. On our last trip we stumbled on a place called the Bombay Brasserie, which was a very formal and upmarket Indian restaurant, quite unlike the typical British Indian restaurant which is much more inexpensive and informal. If you haven’t tried a more typical place I’d probably suggest you do that first, but if you fancy something different, and more expensive and formal, the Bombay Brasserie is well worth a visit.

Overview, Planning

Trip Planning

January 27, 2014 Peter Batty Leave a comment

A lot of friends ask me how I find all the cool places we stay at. In this post I’ll introduce a few of the sites that I use for researching and booking places to stay.

TripAdvisor is probably the site I use most heavily when researching trips. I’m sure most people are familiar with it, but it’s a site that ranks hotels, restaurants and attractions based on user reviews. I use it primarily for researching hotels. I’ll look up a specific hotel that I’m considering, which I may have found elsewhere, as well as looking at the hotel rankings for a city or area I’m interested in. For example, I recently used it to check out hotels in St Augustine. There are various useful filters, for example this was for a trip with my partner Paula over Valentine’s weekend, so I filtered to just show the “romantic” hotels and ended up booking the top one on that list, Casa Monica. I don’t go purely off TripAdvisor rankings though, I do read the reviews in quite a bit of detail to try to work out which place would best suit what we’re after on a given trip – and of course cost comes into it too! Also I often find useful tips on TripAdvisor for a given hotel – which rooms to ask for, where to go for dinner, etc.

Tablet Hotels is a site that I use quite a lot to find cool boutique hotels. A lot of the nicer hotels that we’ve stayed at in the past few years I’ve found through Tablet. Some of their properties are pretty expensive, but in a lot of cases they’re comparable to the costs of more boring chain hotels – there is quite a price range, but based on my experience so far, their hotels are always cool and interesting. Tablet is just an agency, so hotels are not exclusively with them – you can book through Tablet, or via other means. Usually I have found Tablet prices to be competitive with (generally the same as) other booking routes, though on our recent trip to Trancoso, I booked one of the hotels I found on Tablet for half the price on Expedia. But this is the exception rather than the rule. They have an optional paid membership called Tablet Plus, which costs $195 a year, and gets you various perks including room upgrades when available (at some but not all hotels), and other things like free drinks/breakfasts/Internet depending on the place. If you think you’ll use Tablet quite a bit it’s worth considering, I have received some nice room upgrades through this. You can use this link to sign up for Tablet’s private sale email, which sends you special offers before they are generally available.

Hotwire is another site I use a lot, which approaches this from a whole different direction than the previous two. They offer discounted deals for hotels or car rental, but you don’t know in advance the name of the hotel or rental car company. I use them quite a bit for both hotels and cars, in certain situations. For example, if I’m staying in Manhattan I often use Hotwire to book a hotel, as hotel rates there tend to be so crazy. I can usually get a 4 star hotel for $150 to $200, and they usually have 3 star hotels for closer to $100, which is much cheaper than booking direct, in most cases. If I’m staying in New York I’m usually not going to be spending much time in the hotel anyway. I’ve used Hotwire in London a number of times too. They often have incredibly cheap deals on hotels by Heathrow Airport, which I’ve used quite a few times – though recently I prefer to stay in central London, I’ll write a post on traveling in and out of Heathrow shortly. I have also used Hotwire fairly often for rental cars – in most cases I don’t have a strong preference which company I use, and often they do have good deals.

Airbnb is a site I’ve used quite a bit recently, where individuals rent out rooms in their homes, or their whole home. I used to think of them mainly as a low budget alternative to staying in a hotel, but these days they have a wide price range and a lot of very cool and interesting places to stay – and all across their range you are likely to get something that is a much better deal than a comparable hotel. I recently used this to book a couple of stays at an extraordinary apartment at the top of St Pancras Clock Tower in London. It’s definitely worth checking out airbnb as an alternative. In most cases you won’t find airbnb places on TripAdvisor.

VRBO is another site somewhat like airbnb, in that it lets home owners rent out their homes directly. It’s been around a bit longer and is a little more “old school” – it doesn’t handle all the booking and reservations in a consistent way like airbnb does. But in some situations I’ve found it useful. I was just booking a house to rent for a few days in Santa Fe, and VRBO had a much bigger choice of places than airbnb there.

Trips

Trip to Trancoso, Brazil

Gallery January 26, 2014 Peter Batty Leave a comment

In December 2013, Paula and I had a wonderful trip to Trancoso, a small village in the northern state of Bahia in Brazil. I first read about it in a couple of different magazine articles, which talked about how it was the laid back but chic place to get away from it all in Brazil. It was originally a small fishing village, but these days has quite a few nice restaurants and arty shops around its central square, the Quadrado. You can see a full set of pictures and more details on what we did in this album.

I did quite a bit of research on places to stay, using Tablet Hotels and TripAdvisor. You can either choose a hotel in the village or a hotel on the beach. While the village is close to the beach, it’s just far enough to most of the beach hotels that you probably don’t want to walk back to them after having dinner in the village, it’s better to take a taxi. We decided to spend a few days staying in the village and a few days at the beach, and chose Etnia Pousada and Villas de Trancoso respectively. Both were wonderful places, and it was good to get the different experience of staying both in the village and at the beach. We got a great rate at Etnia through Expedia, roughly half of what we paid at the Villas. And I liked Etnia slightly better – I preferred the more rustic and interesting design of the place, and I liked being just a couple of minutes walk from the Quadrado. We still went to the beach every day from there, to their sister property Etnia Clube de Mar. That was about a 40 minute walk in total though, 20 minutes to get to the beach and then a further 20 minutes along the beach. Or you could take a taxi which would take 5-10 minutes, but we enjoyed the walk. If you wanted to be right by the beach then obviously that’s a point in favor of the Villas or other beach hotels.

One day, while at Etnia, we rented a car and drove to Praia do Espelho, Mirror Beach, which is the most famous beach in the area. The staff at Etnia organized the car for us, which was done with a refreshing lack of paperwork and bureaucracy! The drive to get there is along a very bumpy dirt road, which ended up being a fun adventure. I’d be wary about driving along it if there had been a lot of rain on the previous few days, though. The beach was beautiful, but the highlight was having lunch at Silvinha’s, a wonderful little restaurant on the beach with just three tables and no menu – you just got the meal of the day. The food is Thai with local influences. You had to book in advance, and again the folks at Etnia took care of this for us.

We had a wonderful time in Trancoso – the beaches and both hotels were beautiful, the Quadrado has a very unique laid back vibe , and people were very friendly. One drawback if you’re coming from outside Brazil is that it is a bit of a pain to get there. There aren’t many flights in a day from Sao Paulo to Porto Seguro, so I ended up having a 5 hour layover after arriving in Sao Paulo from the US, and then it’s a two hour flight and an hour and a half drive before you’re in Trancoso. So it ended up being a 27 hour trip for me from leaving home in Denver to arriving at the hotel in Trancoso, which is much more than it takes us to get a lot of other nice beach destinations in Mexico or the Caribbean. But I guess on the positive side, that probably helps keep the number of tourists manageable! The majority of the other guests that we met were Brazilian.

All in all it’s a wonderful place to get away from it all and relax – as one of my Brazilian friends said, time stands still in Trancoso!

Overview, Packing

Introduction to traveling light

January 24, 2014 Peter Batty Leave a comment

I am a huge fan of traveling light – this makes various aspects of travel easier and more enjoyable. For the past 4 years or so I have been a “one bag” traveler. On all except three of the hundred or so trips I’ve taken over that time, I have taken just a single carry on bag (with no additional bag for a laptop or other items). Two exceptions were when we were going to events where I had to wear a suit or tuxedo, when I carried an additional lightweight suit carrier (which I still carried on the plane). And the third was when I went on a winter bald eagle photography trip, for which I had to take lots of equipment and warm winter clothing! On most trips I use a bag that is smaller than the maximum carry on size, which will fit in the overhead bin even on a small regional jet, or underneath the seat if necessary. Even other seasoned traveler friends of mine are usually impressed at how little I travel with!

I use bags that can be carried as a backpack, rather than bags with wheels, as this gives you more flexibility in many situations, for example when navigating steps, bumpy streets or crowded spaces. I am fairly large and strong and have no problem with the weight of a backpack. My partner is more petite than me and has had occasional back problems, so she prefers to use a lightweight wheeled bag, and that works just fine on most trips.

Benefits of traveling light

It makes life much easier in many situations if you can easily walk carrying all your luggage. I use public transport quite a lot, and it’s generally much easier on buses and train if you are fairly mobile, and able to walk a reasonable distance when needed. I travel through London fairly often, and it’s a real pain to navigate the Underground with large or heavy bags.

Not having to check bags on planes eliminates the risk of the airline losing your bag, which isn’t common but does happen – it has happened to me several times in my pre-one-bag days. In the event of flights being canceled or delayed, you have a lot more flexibility to change plans and switch to a different itinerary if you don’t have any bags checked. In some cases the airline won’t re-route you unless your bags are on the same plane – rules tend to be strict about this on international flights in particular. And even if the airline does let you take a different route from your bags, you risk not being reunited with them in a timely fashion. You also save time when arriving at your destination if you don’t have to wait for bags to arrive at the baggage claim. On international flights, this often means you can get to customs ahead of the rest of your fellow passengers, which can save further time in some situations.

You run less risk of having a bag stolen if you only have a single bag to watch, and you can easily carry it around with you whenever needed, rather than having to leave it watched by someone else even for a brief time.

Packing and unpacking are quicker and simpler tasks if you have less stuff, and there is less chance of forgetting things. Additional techniques like using packing cubes, which I’ll talk more about in another post, can also help with this.

There’s something that’s just satisfying and enjoyable about reducing clutter, whether in your life in general or when traveling. Doing it when traveling is by far the simpler of the two to achieve, so it’s a good place to start! I’m a big believer in having less stuff and more experiences. Also, it’s not a primary reason for doing this, but it is fun to see other people’s reaction when they see you carrying one small carry on for a three week trip around Europe!

In upcoming posts I’ll talk a lot more about different aspects of traveling light. A few other good resources on this topic are One Bag, One Bag, One World and this article by Rick Steves.. There is a whole sub-culture out there around one bag travel!

Inspiration

“Move”!

Image January 5, 2014 Peter Batty Leave a comment

This video may inspire you to travel!

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

small world, live large