Posts Tagged ‘photo-heavy’

Beautiful KL

As I said in the last post, we each picked one thing to do before the year was over.  My pick was going to Borneo!  I had heard great things about the island, and after researching it a bit more, three things in particular stood out for me.  First, I wanted to see Kuala Lumpur – it is a really big city made famous by the twin Petronas towers.  Second, I wanted to scuba dive Sipadan, known as one of the finest sites in the world to dive, with sharks and turtles everywhere.  Third, the Kinabatangan River has loads of wildlife that is easily visible because of the palm oil plantations that are slowly removing all the jungle habitat around the river (only 1km on each side is protected).  These three things turned out to make a really great Malaysian adventure! (more…)

The second day we hired a different tuk-tuk (our first driver was a bit pushy and upsold us a little too much) and went to the famous Ta Phromh which is a temple that’s been left in its semi-ruined state.  Trees are growing literally out of the walls!  It is pretty cool and very atmospheric (and part of Tomb Raider was filmed here).

I've seen sand castles but not sand temples before

Crumbling Temple

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We were sad to leave the campsite when we did – 2 nights just didn’t seem enough to fully appreciate where we were.  However, Maggie and I got to have a completely different experience of the delta once we got out: a 45 minute flight above it!  We were stoked because it had been said that it’s hard to fully appreciate the size of the delta from the ground.  Whoever said that was right!  It was wild to see animals, scenery, and the odd fire from 500-1000 feet up. I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

Our Plane

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This post has been a while coming partly because the amazing awesomeness of Chobe National Park is so huge that it’s a pretty intimidating post to write.  This, for me, was a completely magical day.  I wanted elephants and I got ELEPHANTS.  Tiny baby elephants, elephants having mud baths, a huge herd of elephants crossing a river, and even sunset elephants.  This park has the highest concentration of elephants in the world.  In fact, they like it so much that if they try to take the elephants elsewhere to redistribute the population the elephants will walk back over 700 kms to get back to this park.

We got up in the morning in Livingstone, in Zambia and had to wait for some new people to join the tour.  There was a bit of a miscommunication between the head office and our tour leader (the didn’t tell him that some people were not going to show up!) which resulted in a bit of a mad dash to get the ferry across the border.  Fortunately, our guide was looking out for us and arranged for our game drive vehicles to meet us straight off the boat and take us directly to see the animals.

We had a really nice game drive vehicle and driver and had about 2.5 hours of driving up and down the Chobe river looking for wildlife.  There were so many amazing sightings, so if you want to see all the pictures click on any of these and it will take you through to the gallery.  But here are some of my favorite things!  (EDIT: ok, there are about a million pictures below.  But it really was that great!)

First view of the Chobe River

Hippo!

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We got up early again – around 6am – to depart for our walking safari which started at 7:15 and was to last 3 hours.  Fortunately the chefs at the Waterfront opened the restaurant early (sweet!) and we were able to eat before loading up on the safari vehicle.  It was our first safari 4×4 – seemingly a converted pickup truck with 4 rows of 3 seats in the back.  They very considerately provided poncho-like blankets for the drive to the park, which was fairly cold in an open-air vehicle early in the morning.

En Route to Safari

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In Istanbul, the remnants of the Ottoman Empire are everywhere. This is very readily apparent if you go to visit the Sultan’s Palace Museum in downtown Istanbul. There, they’ve opened most of the palace grounds and some of the interior buildings to give you a sense of what it was like to be king in Istanbul. There are also quite a few surprising relics stored inside.

Storming the Gates

We opted for another free walking tour in order to get our bearings in Budapest, and I have to say, I thought it was one of the best.  Our guide was really good and we saw a lot of the sights.  The city is beautiful and we decided to give ourselves a little of a photo challenge – trading cameras for the day!  My camera has really awesome zoom capabilities, but Justin’s takes much better wide shots and has virtually no zoom.  We bought them because we knew they would complement each other, but it was a quite different experience to trade off!

Here are some of my favorites that Justin took:

Decoration on a building

Fountain

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Many of you are probably thinking: Why haven’t they gone up to see the castle yet!  It’s so spectacular!  I don’t know, but we never did end up going to see the castle.  We heard rumors of another sight not far from Prague that sounded so much more unique and exciting to me that we went there instead!  It was the Sedlec Ossuary, a church whose cellar is completely full of (and decorated with) human bones!  This is not the type of thing that even exists in the US so we jumped at the chance to go.  It took a two hour train ride to get to the town, a suburb of the city of Kutna Hora.

Sedlec Ossuary

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Because Hazel wasn’t feeling well during our hiking around Machu Picchu, I went up the mountain nearby myself. This was a really amazing hike – not only do you get great aerial views of Machu Picchu, but you also see tons of flora just not found elsewhere on the site.  I’ll leave the talking up to the following pictures.  I have tons of others in the Best and Rest albums as well!

Orchids found low on Montaña Machu Picchu

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Hazel and I just got back from our trip to the rainforest! We had a blast, and that will be explained in another post, but we also saw and photographed TONS of wildlife! In this post I’ll introduce you to most of the species we saw by name and picture!

We couldn’t have done this without the great help of our guide Carlos, who was working for Amazon Trails Peru our tour operator. He did a really spectacular job!

Even though this post has a TON of pictures, there are many more on SmugMug. Check out our BEST photos, and the REST of them!

Reptiles and Amphibians

I saw each of these on my second night walk in the jungle, except the last two which we found during a daytime walk:

• Phyllomedusa Palliata
• Phyllomedusa Tomopterna
• Oreobates Quixensis
• Poison Dart Frog
• Juvenile White Cayman!

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