Last year: Frankfurt. This year? just sitting at work

Last year at this time I was having an awesome, fuzzy jet-lagged walk around Frankfurt on my way to Africa.

I had several hours between flights and decided to take advantage of the excellent weather and speedy train into town to stretch my legs a bit.

The day was one of those totally bizarre half-drunk with jet-lag and half-drunk with excitement of traveling off to new destination days.  The combination of hyped-up excitement and over-tired dull brain made for an interesting, dizzying state of mind.

Africa was definitely one of the best trips I’ve done, and while I imagine it may be a while before I get back, it is definitely on the list.

In the coming weeks I’m going to take advantage of the weekly-photo posts to re-visit the experience.

For now, I’ll just continue sitting at my desk, working.

Ha! Finally solved the mystery of the tubu that are red

So, from time to time I check out my website analytics, just to see what is drawing people to the site.

By and large most of my visits to picsfromtrips.com (generally over 70%) come from search engines – people searching for images of such-and-such and google doing a decent job of pointing them to my site.

For months I’ve gotten visitors searching for red tubus.  I rank well there because of the red lechwe I saw while staying at Tubu Tree lodge in Botswana.

What I couldn’t figure out though, was what a red tubu was. I had visions of some rare species of animal – or perhaps a variation of the (tree? person (Tubu’s tree)?) that gave Tubu Tree camp its name.  Wikipedia cleared that up – Tubu village in Botswana’s Okavango delta has apparently lent its name to the safari camp.  But that didn’t answer my question.

Well, I finally figured it out.  It’s a misspelling.  People are looking for a particular kind of image site – not at all the kind of images I have on picsfromtrips.  It’s a bit of a play on youtube, substituting red for you.  I’d link, but I’m not running that kind of site.

New York Times video about Namibia

I just saw this video on the New York Times site.  It’s a nice quick overview of Namibia and shows a couple of the places that we (and most travelers to Namibia) went: Sossusvlei and Swakopmund.  Many of the images are similar to those that I (and most photographers) took shown here in this album from Sossusvlei

More Africa photos online

After some more filtering, developing, and writing, I’ve posted some more photos from the great African adventure..   Africa Photos.

In this latest update, I’ve covered our trip to Victoria Falls, our safari experience in Botswana, and our respite in Tanzania.

Still to come (shortly) are the photos from Rwanda and our day trip to London.

Enjoy!

Finally getting to those photos..

Driving around South Africa

Well, it’s taken me a month or so (then again, I’ve had a busy month…) to get through the Africa photos but I’m finally starting to post them online.  I’ll trickle them onto the site over the next couple of days.  Check here for the latest..

There have been a few reasons that it’s taken me a while to get these photos online.

First of all, I really have been busy, Hiking in the Sierra for a couple of days, moving Meghan into her new apartment, heading to the East Coast for a couple of weeks, and finally settling into San Francisco again.

Second, I’ve been exploring other ways to display my photos, including playing around with iMovie on the Mac (a product I’m pretty impressed with – it definitely has its limitations but it exceeds expectations for a free application) and other online sites.  In this case, Flickr really has the stronghold on photo sharing.

Third, I am supposed to be looking for a job…

Anyway, if you want to check out the Africa Photos, check out the site over the coming days.  And if you want to see the iMovie I put together, just ask.  It’s a little long for an upload to Youtube, besides, the High-Res file is the way to see it.

a day in London

Finishing off our trip, Meghan and I flew back to Nairobi and then on to an overnight flight to Heathrow.

We took the Picadilly Underground into the city which dropped us off just across the street from our Kensington Gardens area hotel.  Since we arrived first thing in the morning, we were unable to check in to our hotel room so we just dropped off our bags and walked around for a bit.

We started off through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, eventually hitting Oxford Street but being a Sunday, it was pretty quiet as most of the shops were still closed.  But, we found a cafe for breakfast and enjoyed a light meal with some good coffee.

After our breakfast we continued walking around for a bit and eventually found ourselves in front of Buckingham palace where the changing of the guard was going on – or so we thought.. we later realized that it was a bit more than that, with two marching bands performing and was probably associated with the annual Colonel’s Review (which happened the previous day) and Sovereign’s Birthday (which would happen the following week).  We stayed there for a little while and enjoyed the music and watched the crowds and then eventually moved on.

We next walked along the Thames for a while checking out the London Eye and walking along the water.  The weather was quite warm and there were a lot of people out on the streets enjoying the sun, as were we, though we were starting to feel the effects of the overnight flight, no shower, and a little too much sun.  So we sat on the shade side of a pub with a couple of pints and relaxed for a while.

We decided to take an underground back to our hotel so that we could finally check in and shower but the tube station was closed so we found ourselves walking further to the next station.  Along the way we saw a billboard for the Lion King which we thought would be a fun end to our Africa trip so rather than heading back to the hotel we grabbed a train in the opposite direction and got tickets for the matinee performance.

It was a lot of fun seeing the Lion King and fully appreciating all of the Africa references in the performance – like the sets and costumes and the way the animals move – so much of it is right on.  And with all of the kids in the theater for the matinee we got the added treat of enjoying the show with their perspective exhibited through their laughter and gasps.

After the play we finally head back to our hotel where we showered and changed while watching a little of UEFA EURO 2008 soccer.  And when we were ready to head out we went to a local pub to watch the beginning of the next game (Germany Poland).

For dinner we found an Indian restaurant with a TV so we could watch the remainder of the game while enjoying a good Curry.

By the time we finished dinner it was about 10:00 and we were amazed that it was still light out!  During our whole Africa trip the sun had been setting by 6:00 so we were a little taken off guard that it was already so late.  And with the weight of the flights and the trip behind us we were pretty beat.  So off to bed and up the next morning for our flights home.