brazil

Weekly Photo Challenge: Earth

I have a moment to tune in to the Weekly Photo Challenge contests that brought me so many great impressions (and yet so many great friends). This week’s theme is Earth: and as you would understand if you have ever opened my blog, I just could not pass such a topic.

My love for outdoors was not inborn. I am coming from the heart of a 5 million city, and for many years nature was something I mostly saw in books and on TV, something very theoretical. For a long time, landscape beauty for me equaled city skyline and fine architecture. The only sunsets I saw were that over the cities. Apart from my summer time in a Southern city where my grandmother lived, I have never seen the stars.

And then I moved to Finland, to the capital city smaller than my hometown’s central island. Finland has taught me many things, for which I will be forever grateful. Appreciation of (and introduction to) nature was one of them.

I have traveled a lot since then, and have seen many amazing cities. I fell in love with New York, Berlin, Lisbon, Rome and Havana. I gave my heart to Paris. But when I think about all my travels, the images that come to mind first are that of nature: the sunset over Oia, the turquoise waters of Crete, Morocco desert, Iguazu Falls. Cities make imagination wander, nature captures hearts. Even for a die-hard urban person that I am.

And Rio, Rio has it all. ❤

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Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

🙂

Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay: Latam 2016 Last Stop and Highlights

Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay was the last destination of our Latam 2016 trip. To be completely honest, we chose it for three reasons: 1) we were nearby, 50 km across the Narrow Sea; 2) we had never been to Uruguay (and did not exactly see ourselves coming back to Latin America just to visit it) and 3) visiting three countries on a new continent did sound exciting. Plus, Colonia del Sacramento is listed as UNESCO heritage, travelers’ photos were gorgeous, so it all got us fired up to go.

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Colonia, Uruguay
Colonia, Uruguay
Colonia, Uruguay
Colonia, Uruguay
Colonia, Uruguay
Colonia, Uruguay
Colonia, Uruguay
A happy local in Colonia, Uruguay
Colonia, Uruguay
Colonia, Uruguay
Colonia, Uruguay
Colonia, Uruguay

Was it a good idea?..

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Birds’ Park (Parque das Aves), Brazilian side of Iguazu Falls

Time to go back to my Latam adventure. My story about Iguazu Falls from the Brazilian side would not be complete without Parque das Aves, The Birds’ Park. 

I remember us visiting it on the last day of our stay at Iguazu, on our way to the airport. It took us around 2,5 hours to visit (which was not enough to take the iconic photo with a parrot in the end of the visit, for which, it seemed, the entire park was queuing for). I did not exactly remember what I have from that day on my camera and first thought that The Birds’ Park visit might make a boring topic for a post. To my sheer delight, I found not only tons of amazing shots of tropical birds but also a series of flamingo’s love making scenes. (Several weeks’ journeys tend to blur the impressions into a rotating kaleidoscope. Travel photography allows you to keep the precious moments. So TAKE PHOTOS).

I’ll start with the flamingos because I am sure you all want to know (well, don’t you?).

Difference in male and female psychology. I was (taking photos and) thinking: “Wow, he takes off with such a grace. Should be uneasy with this long and awkward body”. Louveteau watched silently, took a reflection pause and said: “My friend, I don’t want to sound judgemental but it was a little bit short”. While I was preparing this post, the subject started trending, and we have almost scientifically established in a wide circle of MBA/ Masters’ that in the animal kingdom, only pigs can boast about long love making sessions with as much as 9 orgasms in a row. Talk about the value of education.

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What I learnt from travelling to 37 countries (and living in 9)

I have recently posted a teaser on stepping out of the comfort of the place you come from and setting a foot to wander the world. Here is my learning on what happens when you actually do.

Credit card, passport, phone. You will probably forget something somewhere. And most likely, more than once. As practice has it, any travel gap can be covered by a credit card, passport and a phone or a combination of the three. So make sure you hold on to these fundamentals. Everything else is replaceable. It is still useful to pack as few valuable as possible (and in some case, like when travelling to Brazil, to avoid taking any at all), to lock the few you take with you in a safe and to check the room before leaving the hotel for good. Knowing what is enough though will save you a lot of time (and peace of mind) when packing.

Follow your (photo) hunch. Places make first impressions, too. And these first impressions matter. So take pictures of whatever catches your eye. The palm trees will become a usual part of the scenery after a few days on an island, the magic of the Mediterranean sunsets will fade away after a few nights, so keep the memories of the things as you first see them. And remember: imperfect photo is better than no photo at all. In a few months, you might find things that you hated in this picture less dramatic. In a few years, they might become a source of a great story.

Some of the best travel memories happen at 6 am. I learnt it the hard way: waking up that early is the last thing I want to do on vacation. And it can be oh so worth it. My trip to Iguazu falls would never be even nearly as amazing without a 6 am plunge into the smooth surface of the swimming pool followed by the breakfast in the sunrise rays (and a walk to the falls in the only company of coati). One of my best pictures from Rio is its sunrise, which Louveteau and I captured on our last day in Latam when we could finally catch the sun after several days of clouds at the dawn.

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