Category: Travel

Travel photo notes

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Botanical Beach

Panoramic view of Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.
We haven’t been to Botanical Beach since 2013. My daughter was two years old then. We wanted to make it a fun outing, so I rode my motorbike, and my wife and daughter followed in a car. This time, the whole family rode in the car, including my parents. We stopped to stretch our legs in Jordan River at the appropriately-called Cold Shoulder Cafe (they had no bathrooms and no decaf coffee, which is the only kind my father can take.) Otherwise, it’s a perfectly located pit stop between Victoria and Port Renfrew, where Botanical Beach is.
The distance to Botanical Beach from our home in Victoria is 270 km (round trip.) It’s just long enough to make it a significant excursion, so we don’t go there too often. It is a famous destination for Southern Vancouver Island, and when we just moved to Victoria, we learned early on that timing is important for planning a visit there. The tide needs to be low enough (around 1.5 m or lower) to be able to fully enjoy the tidal pools – the main attraction of this unique place. If you arrive at the beach at high tide, you miss the magic of walking on the exposed oven floor and peeking into the pools that are full of marine flora and fauna. It would be just another beautiful West Coast beach – something that we get de-sensitized to by living in Victoria. The problem is that the lowest tides often occur at an inconvenient time – either too early in the morning or too late at night to fit into a single-day sightseeing itinerary. This time, on a weekend in mid-June, the timing was on our side – the (relatively) low tide was at the middle of the day, so we could take a leisurely drive to the beach.
Panoramic view of Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.
From the parking lot in Port Renfrew, we meant to take the easiest route to the ocean, worrying that it could be difficult for my parents to scramble across tree roots on the trail. Having not been there for seven years, we miscalculated and took a relatively more difficult trail. It was a lucky mistake, though, because the parents managed the walk well,  and it took us directly to the most picturesque part of the beach.
My daughter was delighted by the extraordinary scenery. She spent all the time documenting her impressions on a GoPro. This is her camera of choice these days for recording footage for her soon-to-be-established vlog (a new hobby, spurred by the sharp increase of screen time during remote schooling during the COVID lockdown.) I also carried photo gear – a Sony a7RIV with two lenses (a 70-200 mm and a 24-70 mm) and another GoPro (stay tuned for some videos from inside the tide pools!) It is funny that every time I visit Botanical Beach, I feel compelled to go into photography mode, because the place is so uniquely beautiful. But sinse I go there sufficiently rarely, the technology develops so much that every time my photos are better simply because I have better gear. In a strange way, it feels both good and humbling at the same time.
A woman, a girl and their dog are looking at tidal pools at Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.
Panoramic view of Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.
Tidal pools at Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.
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Paddle boarding at Cadborough Bay

This weekend, my daughter and I took our paddle boards to the ocean for the first time this year. The water was surprisingly warm (no, we didn’t fall down), and the trip itself, as short as it was, didn’t disappoint in terms of the sights one can only see from the water: sunken boats, uninhabited islands… The former was only a stone’s throw from the shore and the latter was only thirty meters or so across, but we‘ll take them. My wife and Bruno, our puppy, were keeping an eye on us from the beach, although Bruno made an honest attempt to join us in the water.

We shot some footage with two GoPro cameras, one on each paddle board. If nothing else, it gave us some good material for a movie-making project the following day, which fits nicely in the current theme of remote education (read: finding a way of entertaining a child at home and justifying it from an educational standpoint by hoping that she might learn something in the process). Seriously though, we all felt that shooting and putting together the video somehow enhanced the whole paddle boarding experience.

Check out the result:

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Polite pedestrians

When my parents first visited Victoria, they were pleasantly surprised and even mildly inconvenienced by the fact that the local drivers were too polite. When my parents would be walking around town, the cars would often stop to allow them to cross the road (which they felt obliged to do, even though they were not planning to).

A couple of days ago I was riding my motorbike for the first time in 2020, taking advantage of a dry, sunny day. And I realized that the local pedestrians reciprocate the politeness – several of them stopped at the crosswalks and waved me though, presumably to save me stopping and changing gears.

It’s a small thing, but that’s why I like Victoria. “It is so civilized,” as one colleague said when we moved to live here. Besides, being able to ride a motorbike in January end even enjoy the sunshine is a real treat. Check it out:

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Best part of travel

“What is your favourite part of travel?” asked my eight-years-old daughter, who was eager to start packing for our skiing trip over the Christmas holiday.

I wasn’t sure I understood what she meant. Obviously, I like the skiing part, but I had a sense that it wasn’t what she was aiming at.

“My number-one favourite thing is packing,” she explained. “Second is arriving to the hotel room, and driving there is the third-favourite part
I am pretty sure “third-favourite” really meant “the part that could be skipped without missing much”.

I thought about my own order of preferences. I agree with her that anticipation is a large part of the overall experience. Planning of a trip is at least half of the fun, or at least it could be so. Unfortunately, for me there is often not enough time to enjoy the planning phase, to slow down and do it methodically. Packing is a perfect example. More often than not I scramble to do it at the last moment, and so it becomes a chore. Indeed, whatever is worth doing is worth doing slowly.

I find it amusing how much my daughter enjoys the novelty of the new environment. That’s her number two on the list of favourite aspects of travel. Playing in the hotel’s pool and being able to build a “royal bed” by collecting all the pillows she could find erased even the momentary sadness of saying goodbye to Bruno, our puppy, who is staying with his breeder during our trip.

For me, it’s the people we come across one way or another during the travel that ultimately make the experience what it is. Debbie, Bruno’s breeder, for example, had her hands full with a litter of puppies, yet she accepted him without hesitation at our first request. I really hope that Bruno’s first Christmas will be more enjoyable in the company of his original family than sitting in a crate while we go skiing. I somehow suspect he would not have shared my daughter’s enthusiasm about our hotel room.

On the way to skiing, I ran into my kendo sensei in a cafeteria. Two minutes of face-to-face chat to catch up about the kids and the parents, sharing our pride in their achievements and concerns about their health felt like being reassured that someone still shares your values and cares about your going-ons beyond a Facebook “like”. Watching us talk, my daughter suddenly became sad that I put kendo on hold in the past year in order to pursue other things together with her. And I became a bit sad that she is becoming a bit more grown-up every day, right before my eyes.

Then, there was a family from Brazil, whom we met at the pool. They live in Victoria as part of their sabbatical. Their experience of this part of the world was so positive that it reminded me how much of it I’ve come to take for granted. The hedonic treadmill is a tough thing indeed.

And the family time in the company of my daughter, wife and parents – being able to experience it in the context of travel, even if it’s short three hours away from home, is definitely a treat.

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Mt. Doug

A Saturday afternoon walk turned out into the first legitimate hike for both my daughter and our Lagotto Romagnolo puppy Bruno. We just started climbing past our usual turnaround point on the trail and soon found that it was easier to continue scrambling up against the little water currents running towards us on the rocks than to turn back and follow their flow. Soon the sweeping views of Victoria started opening up and my daughter, who minutes ago was vocally regretting her decision to go on this hike, was delighted at having made it to the top. While we were crab-walking along a slippery rock on our way down, Bruno was zooming up and down the muddy slope as some kind of mountain goat. “He is in heaven!” said my daughter, and he certainly looked like he was beside himself with excitement. It took three water changes when we gave Bruno a bath at home to wash off all the mud. And this is saying something, because he usually goes to a great length to avoid stepping into puddles or even on wet grass. (Some water dog he is!)

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By sea and air

What is a more appropriate mode of travel to a fluid mechanics conference than a float plane? I think you have to try hard to find one. It’s a combination of hydro- and aerodynamics, so what else to wish for?

In any case, taking this small plane from Victoria’s Inner Harbour to the lake Union in Seattle has been a highlight to my conference trip. One of the coolest things is that there are no assigned seats, so if you are among the first in line for boarding, you can sit in the cockpit next to the pilot (yes, that’s one of the passenger seats!) On some routes, e.g., between Victoria and Vancouver, they even give you a headset, so you can listen to the pilot’s communications with the flight control.

The drawback of the float planes is that they don’t have much in term of navigation aids (i.e. radars), so they are much more weather-dependant than the larger planes. In my case, it was not certain whether the flight would get cancelled because of the cloud cover until 20 minutes before takeoff.

Still, the flight itself and the views from the cockpit are worth the hassle, I think – it sort of feels like an adventure. Besides, it cuts the total travel time a lot, compared to a more conventional mode (if the flight does happen, that is).

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Things we enjoyed last summer

On the first day of school, my daughter was asked to bring a photo showing a summer activity that she enjoyed the most. We did many interesting things together, but she immediately said that she wanted a photo of her going paddle boarding.

Paddle boarding has certainly been our favourite thing this summer. We got into it last year, taking lessons and many guided tours. This year we were confident enough to go on our own little adventures – hopping between bays, going to the small islands, and even taking Bruno, our puppy, on the board with us a couple of times. Actually, on one of those occasions, he learned that he could swim after falling off the board.

Last year, it was my daughter, who was a passenger on a board, clinging to it precariously and frantically doggy-pedalling after occasionally tumbling off. This past summer, she was on her own board, pedalling by herself (well, sometimes just enjoying being towed behind my board) taking a keen interest in documenting our trips on camera and demanding “more adventures!” I am a bit overwhelmed that she is growing up so fast but still gladly poses for a back-to-school photo before going off to third grade.

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Old cars

During the last week of the past school year, after picking up our seven-year-old daughter from school, we went to a car dealership to trade in our old SUV for a new one. Our daughter was super-excited. As we were driving down the Douglas Street, one of the main roads in Victoria, she rolled down her window and shouted, “Dudes, we have a new car!” A few weeks later, she mentioned that she was missing our old one. This made me think that it is curios why we have such strong emotions towards such lifeless objects as our cars.

Of course, we spend a lot of time with cars every day and get used to them. There are also aspects of cars sometimes being luxury items and status symbols. But I could also see and feel genuine excitement at the old car show in Oak Bay that we went to in July. I think it is because of the human’s joint history and emotional connection with horses, which we project to our vehicles. In fact, this connection is particularly strong in the case of motorcycles. There is something about “riding”, rather than “driving” that makes the experience completely different. I think it has to do with the physical balance. On a bike, like on a horse, I need to be constantly aware of my body position, how far I turn my head to look into the turn, how tightly I grip the handlebars or the reins. Also, riding is both more technically challenging and inherently more dangerous than driving. And because challenge and risk help justify any activity, we are more likely to experience flow while riding a motorcycle. By the same logic, owning an old car and keeping it in a running order is a difficult pursuit, and this is what gives the meaning to the experience. We all understand it intuitively. Even if it is not our car, we are grateful to the owners for giving us a glimpse of this experience.

My only worry is that my daughter is now keen to ride my motorcycle. At least, it’s only as a passenger for now, but if my own experience is any indication, there is no going back from there.

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Storytelling challenge

MT-09 engine

I am finding that telling a story in a form of a daily motovlog is quite challenging, when limite by a single point-of-view of a GoPro camera and the absence of any voice commentary. At the same time, there is something to be said in favour of about these self-imposed limitations. I might experiment with including a secondary view from another camera at some point, but the reality is that even now it is difficult to keep up with the footage I generate on my short rides in terms of editing.

Evidently, there is not much drama in my short bike commutes (which is probably a good thing), but that is beside the point. The exercise for me is to practice storytelling by highlighting small details that normally go unnoticed. And it is indeed fun to focus attention on the mundane things. For instance, while scrolling through the GoPro footage, I noticed how the framing rate creates optical illusions with the wheels of the moving cars – one of the things that a human eye normally doesn’t do.

Here is the second video in the series.

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Photo opportunities

The concierge at my hotel in Paris (who, incidentally, could fluently speak several languages) gave me some excellent suggestions regarding moving around in Paris and interesting sights to photograph. In retrospect, most of the things he recommended turned out to be quite the opppsite (e.g. suggested metro stations were closed and supposedly photogenic sights turning out to be not so much so). He did, however, have the correct sense that timing and luck were important factors in taking a good photo. For example, he mentioned that a photo of the Eiffel Tour being struck by a lightning made the front pages of local newspapers not long ago. The Tower is the most photographed monument in the world, so for a photo of it to make front-page news requires something to be going on (in addition to the tower simply being there).

The concierge also suggested to look for a moonrise over the Notre-Dame cathedral, and I was excited to try it the same evening, because the moon was still nearly full, and I was hoping to catch it between the towers of the cathedral. Unfortunately, the location of the moonrise had shifted already, and it was no longer visible from the cathedral square. But the moon still made a spectacular appearance over the Seine river, as fellow photographers gathered on the bridges connecting ile de la Cite to the river banks to capture it.

Here is my attempt. I knew from experience that the moon needed to be exposed as a grey rock in a midday sun. This presents a dilemma if one wants to simultaneously (and correctly) expose the nigh-time scenery. Of course, taking two separate exposures and combining them in post-processing is a possibility, but if one wants to avoid compositing, it is better to underexpose the shadows and correctly expose the relatively bright moon.