Sri Lanka (August 2002)

Besides seeing elephants, we also visited a lot of other cool places while in Sri Lanka. Here are just a few:

Helga's Folly: This is one of the most fun hotels I've ever stayed in... It is in the mountains outside Kandy. It's very over-the-top, and the bedrooms certainly weren't great, but I forgave them that for the experience of being able to hang out in the main rooms and the amazing feasts we had each evening. This is years ago now so I would check out recent hotel reviews before going there, but certainly back then it was worth a visit. In case you're wondering about the choice of music, it's because they had this playing on the old gramophone when we first arrived. :-)




Polonnaruwa Temple: This was my favourite of the temples we visited, I wish we'd had more time to explore the ruins as everywhere you looked there was interesting detail.



Sigiriya Rock Temple: It was a *long* way up. I didn't make it all the way, because the last part of the stairs were metal slats that you could see through and I got really dizzy... so I stayed down on the level below and watched the monkeys playing, while Dave went up to the top - with the camera.



Potgal Vitara statue: This giant buddha wasn't far from the Polonnaruwa Temple.




Dambulla Rock Temple: Speaking of Buddhas, we also saw a whole hall full at them at the Dambulla temple




Driving in the Tea district: We went up in the mountains for a few days, lots of winding curves and rural vistas occasionally mixed with spectacular views.



Visiting a spice garden: Amazing to see it all growing..

Sri Lankan Elephants (Aug 2002)

I only recently got round to digitising all the video from our Sri Lanka holiday back in August 2002. Here are some of the highlights which feature animals - especially elephants, as seeing them had been one of the main reasons for the trip:

A ride on Nonna Elephant: we went on an hour long safari with a lovely friendly elephant called Nonna. Nonna was a huge fan of bananas, and partial to the odd pineapple or two as well... needless to say, we fed her loads, to the point that she did some remarkable yellow cannonball poos enroute!



Elephants at Pinnawala orphanage: This is like it sounds, a sanctuary where both elderly and young elephants come to live out their lives. Besides just the wonderful opportunity to see so many elephants so close up, my favourite parts were when I got to bottlefeed a baby elephant and help wash another elephant in the river. :-)



Wild elephants at Uda Walawe: In the course of a several hour jeep drive through this national park we saw lots of wild elephants. These are the best bits, as captured on camera.



Uda Walawe elephant orphanage: It's not that widely known (or at least it wasn't in 2002), but the Uda Walawe national park also has an elephant orphanage. It's for all the young elephants who are orphaned in the park, and they keep them in a separate area alongside the park and then gather every day just for feeding but with minimal human handling. Once they're old enough to survive on their own, the orphan herds are released into the park and they're encouraged to be wild again. My favourite bit was how they were released in pairs to walk up to the feeding area, so no-one got crushed, and also how the really tiny babies were paired with some of the much older ones who were acting like big brothers to them. :-)



Elephant at Temple of the Tooth: This lovely elephant had tusks and was so tame that you could have your photo taken holding them.



These were the very first elephants we saw - but they were far away in the distance... luckily our video camera had an amazing zoom. :-)



And finally... it wasn't only elephants we met.

We got to see a Porcupine family:



Also lots of lovely baby turtles:

New Years Day walk in Earith

Earith is a small village in Cambridgeshire, UK. Every New Years Day the villagers get together for an hour or so's walk through the nearby fields and canals, culminating in a bagpipe performance by the local Scotsman. A good friend of mine lives in the village, so this year I got to tag along.

Highlights from Selous

In February we spent a week in Tanzania. To say it was amazing would be an understatement. We spent 4 days in Selous national park and saw more animals than I'd dreamed of. Here's a video with some highlights:

Dickens Christmas Fair

While visiting friends in San Francisco they took me to the Dickens Fair. It was a little surreal to find a replica of Victorian London in something called the "cow palace" but I ended up having a really fun time and definitely it felt very xmassy. This video has some of the highlights.

US trip (part 3): Yellowstone

After a day in Cody we headed on to Yellowstone.

Rather than go the most direct route, we went along the famous scenic highways - first the Chief Joseph, then a slight backtrack to go along part of the Beartooth. We did a u-turn at the 'Top of the World' store and headed to Yellowstone via Cooke City. On the way we stopped at the Clay Butte fire lookout that had great views. It was a lovely drive, photos don't do it justice but hopefully this will give you at least a smidgeon of an idea what it was like.



Yellowstone surpassed my expectations, not least by not being overly crowded! I'd heard nightmares about 5 mile long tailbacks, but turned out that early August was a great week to go - still summer, but the week before school went back so very few families. We were amazed by the geysers and other geothermal features, but also just the scale of everything.



But of course we didn't just go to Yellowstone for scenery, the main attraction was the animals...

US trip (part 2): Across Wyoming to Cody

After our little foray into South Dakota, we spent nearly a week in Wyoming.

We left Mt Rushmore early morning and drove virtually without stopping down to Denver Colorado to rescue our suitcases (don't ask) and then back again all the way up to Douglas Wyoming.

The best bit of the drive were the backroads - stark but beautiful:



Next morning we left early to drive to Cody. This had been planned just as a stopping over point enroute to Yellowstone but it turned out to be great. There's 5 parts to this video: 1) Downtown Cody 2) Cody gunfighters 3) Cody trolley tour (seriously, this was one of the best of its kind I've been on, really fun & interesting) 4) Buffalo Bill museum and historical centre (ditto) 5) Cody nite rodeo (we nearly didn't go, thank goodness we did as it was the highlight of our visit!)

US trip (part 1): South Dakota

In summer 2007 Dave and I took off on a nearly month long roadtrip in the US. We were supposed to start out in Denver but due to Air Canada's ineptitude we ended up only making it as far as Sioux Falls before giving up and hiring a car from there.

We drove pretty much all the way across South Dakota in an afternoon:



We would have loved to stop along the way but we'd committed to be at Mount Rushmore by that evening, and would have lost our hotel reservations had we not made it. Mount Rushmore was smaller than I'd imagined but still impressive and something I'd always wanted to see:



What was even more impressive though was Crazy Horse, which we went to the following morning enroute to Denver (to collect our bags which somehow Air Canada managed to send there even though they couldn't swing it for their owners!)

Fleeting visit to Shanghai (Jan 2006)

Last week I was in Shanghai for a few days. It was for work so I didn't have a chance to do much sightseeing, but even just driving around it was interesting.

This is some video of what it was like. The modern looking skyscrapers and high visibility of western brands in the shop windows made me feel surprisingly at home.

Walking around in one of the main shopping streets...



From the back of a taxi...



One of my favourite parts was going on the Maglev train which is supposedly the fastest in the world. We got up to 430 km/hr! This is some film of the experience.

Maldives (Aug 2002)

We spent a lovely week at the Banyan Tree in the Maldives back in 2002. It was their off-season and they were building a new entrance pavilion, so we got a fantastic deal in terms of prices. The weather was still perfect, and the added bonus was that we almost had the island to ourselves! Off-season was definitely a great time to go.

This is a compilation of some of the film we took walking around the island, playing in the sea, etc. It was a lovely place, watching this brought back a lot of memories.



One of the highlights for me of the trip was the local wildlife. This video is a compilation of some of my favourites. It includes a sea turtle, friendly wild stingrays that came up to the beach each night for petting, a lovely cute hermit crab, fish playing 'football' with breadrolls we threw to them, and some of the luckiest hens in the world.



UPDATE (Apr 2011): I don't remember making this but apparently a few years ago I put together a compilation of the best clips set to music. Here tis: