Well, after a brief discussion we agreed that Cuba would be our next destination to see whether it could be a full-blown expedition. Clearly the people, landscape, old cars and buildings would be the focus. So flights booked today and the rest of the details sorted out later.
How exciting!
Julie and Adam
Cuba, Havana, Cigars, Dancing and People - 27 February 2011
Follow us on twitter - shuttertravel - February 2011
We have opened up a twitter account to connect with all that good stuff up there in the cloud. We can be found at shuttertravel. Please feel free to follow us ... and we will follow you!
Julie and Adam
Two days in the Flinders Ranges, Australia - January 2011
Just back from a very short recce to the hot Flinders Ranges in South Australia. Absolutely amazing place to see real wilderness. The landscapes are like nothing else. The colours are so earthy. If you want to practice landscapes, this is the place to go!!!
I hope you enjoy. Written from a much colder London!
Julie
Australia's Flinders Ranges - playing David Attenborough - January 2011
Just back from the Flinders Ranges, a few hundred kilometers out of Adelaide in South Australia. Awesome. The scenery is truly spectacular and there are a lot of emus, kangaroos, wallabies and euros around plus some smaller stuff like trapdoor spiders for instance. Gorgeous landscape and gum trees you just want to hug. Needless to say, there are some photos I need to sort through so watch this space for when I have managed to do that. In the meantime, a short piece on what some of us got up to whilst hanging around for ages waiting for some roos, euros, wallabies or just anything to come down to our waterhole. I guess they could see through our feeble disguise or were just put off by our laughing.
Julie
ShutterspeedTravel
Botswana - funky slideshow!
We put together this slideshow from our wonderful exhibition over Xmas to Botswana. We have to say that this was one of our best trips and that Botswana has a special place in our hearts. Every time we go we experience something different.
We recommend you put the volume of your music right up! The track is pretty cool!
Julie and Adam
Botswana Christmas 2010 - Happy New Year 2011!
Happy New Year everyone. We hope 2011 is a good year for everyone, filled with good travel, good times and good health.
Botswana has rarely disappointed us, it is a low tourist volume destination and the wildlife is plentiful if you know where to go. That combination means you are not jostling to get pole position at a sighting and the sightings are often a fantastic insight into animal behaviour.
So....this last trip we stayed at just three of our favourite camps, flying by bush plane between each camp and our highlights were:
Following wild dogs hunting on two separate days. Lots of bush bashing and a great driver meant we managed to keep up with these magnificent hunters for most of the time. Really, truly, fantastically exciting.
Seeing a cheetah walk through the water to cross the Savuti Channel which is of course flowing again after 37 years. We're not sure whether we prefer the Savuti dry and dusty with its huge elephant herds converging on the scarce water pans, or the channel in full flow presenting us with this great adaptive behaviour. What a choice!
Meerkats with all their antics and this time, incredibly they were supplementing their diet with huge frogs, along with scorpions and grubs.
Following a sub-adult male leopard going about his next two days' quest for food, after having his impala kill stolen by four hyenas at dusk. We wish we'd had a GPS going, you wouldn't believe how many miles he walked and the apparently haphazard path he took each day. We were really willing him to bring something down as he became noticeably thinner each day. Having said that, he did get sidetracked by one tantalising female leopard who was keen to get her claws into him. It was looking very likely that we were going to get a mating leopards viewing until a herd of elephants interrupted the amorous couple. We did see our boy catch a squirrel, eat a whole stash of frogs eggs and in desperation, stick his head down a warthog's hole extremely dangerous), before we had to catch our plane. What a great insight into the life of the elusive leopard, it's evidently tough hunting alone.
Time with the Kalahari bushmen who delighted us by digging tubers out of the ground, this one for diarrhoea, that one for the onset of malaria, teaching us the usefulness of different animal dung, pointing out that hole's a scorpion's, that one's a snake's, what's edible in the desert and what's not. And of course their language is fascinating!
At this time of the year Botswana is green, hot and the skies are building up for the rainy season so really fantastic, huge shapely cumulus clouds building, some cirrus also still present, reminiscent of my Northern Territory, Australia days. A bit of rain most days but this meant no dust to contend with and it was always short sun showers. Some fantastic lightening in the evenings, rainbows during the day. Lots of months old babies: antelopes, baboons, warthogs and birds. The carmine bee eaters were like dolphins riding the wake of our vehicle, catching the insects we flicked up. Really beautiful birds accompanying us at the start and end of our drive each day, the youngs ones sometimes messing up their landings:)
Only one frown inducer on the trip, and that was an Error 30 on one of the camera bodies. Not fixable on the trip. It's a shutter problem requiring a trip to Fixation now that we're back but you can imagine the slight frustration being one body down with so much action going on. Which lens to use, bloody hell! Oh, and of course because BAA doesn't know how to run an airport, we lost two days of our trip on account of not being able to get away from snowy London on time.
We were averaging 50 gigs each per day, so action-wise that's nearly up there with what we'd take in Antarctica! As always, a full slideshow and trip report to follow in the next couple of weeks, once we've had a chance to look through them all. 
Best wishes, Happy New Year!
Julie and Adam
Perils and uncertainty of travel - 23 December 2010
The poor weather in the UK which shut down Heathrow for a couple of days means that rather than shooting in Botswana, we are catching up on all sorts of (shitty) stuff in London. Our Virgin flight to Joburg should have left on Monday night, but was cancelled. We are booked for Friday night, but who knows? In BAA we do not trust.
This made us both reflect that it is becoming increasingly impossible to take international travel for granted as all too often something messes up the best made plans. Just looking back at problems we have had with some of our trips...
1. In March to celebrate Adam's 50th, we had booked a recce to attend the Holi festival in Rajasthan. We turned up at the Virgin check-in desk at Heathrow only to be told that Julie's multi entry visa had ceased to be a multi entry on account of anti-terrorism measures and she could not fly. No phone calls to the Indian embassy (Adam spoke to the security guard), pleadings with Virgin or anyone else changed that so Adam flew on his own.
2. On another trip Adam was out in Iraq trying to get back to London to meet up with Julie before heading down to Tanzania. A sandstorm shut down Baghdad for 24 hours and he missed all his connections and had lots of waiting in Jordan before arriving in Tanzania a few days late.
3. Last summer without any reason aside from a "technical fault" our Virgin flight to Joburg was delayed 12 hours ... lucky we had built in a 24 hour buffer before our connecting flight.
4. The BA strike 12 months ago gave us kittens. Lucky the strike ended a couple of days before we were due to travel to India. However again bad weather set in and we remember long lists of flights cancelled on the departure boards. Lindy flew in from the US to hook up with us and was not able to enter the terminal to meet up for hours. In the end fine, but lots of worry.
5. Passport theft in France meant Adam not being able to fly to the Congo on time for one of our Bonobo trips and a very fraught Christmas yo-yo-ing between London and Paris to get new passport, new visa, new flights.
6. Don't mention the Icelandic volcano this year!
So, what are the lessons?
A. Assume that for big trips something will go wrong. So build in some buffer at the start to ensure that if the international flight is late setting off, hopefully all is not lost.
B. Check visa conditions, not once but again and maybe again a week before you depart in case the government changes the rules.
C. There are many, many people with much bigger problems, so keep a sense of proportion.
As the great Chinese traveller, Lin Yutand, said "A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from" and by Lewis Carroll (Adam's favorite) "If you do not know where you are going, any road will get you there".
Enjoy your own Christmas breaks and a wonderful 2011 for you all! Be safe, have fun, and despite all odds, keep traveling.
Julie and Adam