Here it is folks, the video about how Lachie & I got led down the forest path in Yepachi, Chihuahua, Mexico.
I really enjoyed reading Lachie’s write up of the 40km hike we ended up injuring, and I am sure you will too!:
http://www.planetkapow.com/379
We’d really like to know what people are thinking of the videos so if you get a moment please drop us a comment over at Planet Kapow.
What an interesting few days…
After buggering around in Ciudad Obregon for 2-3 days, we finally got on a bus to Yepachi thinking we would end up on the farm later that day.
The journey was only around 200km I think, but it still took 8 hours.
And… we missed the stop and ended up an hour past Yepachi.
So we had to spend the night in that little town and got the first (and only) bus the next day to Yepachi.
We arrived in Yepachi around 12pm, then spent the next 7 hours walking to the farm – no one was there to pick us up and we had no luck finding a lift.
That ended up being 15miles or so! Yes, we are awesome.
We finally made it to the farm only to be defeated by a river – we were100m from the house, but no one was home and the big river was too hard for us to pass at 7.30pm.
We walked back up a hill and slept under the stars for 4 hours. I only had a tshirt and shorts on and Lachy had a jacket.
At midnight we decided to walk back to town, a pretty amazing feat considering that by the time we did arrive back it had been 24 hours since we’d last eaten.
Oh yeah, we are just that awesome that we only took 1L of water with us, so ended up having to drink the muddy water that was running off the mountains (filtered with our tshirts).
Oh yeah, it was raining a lot.
Oh yeah, it was quite hilly.
Oh yeah, we had to wade through streams.
Oh yeah, we were charged at by bulls.
Oh yeah, we are pretty fucking awesome we have decided.
Oh yeah… we had to spoon.
To finish off the fun little adventure we ended up gettign a ride back to town, in the back of a truck that had been carrying cow manure.
And then… we were asked if we wanted to buy dope from a bunch of dudes wearing bullet proof vests… carrying machine guns (they were nice folks though).
We decided that fate had really been trying to tell us something for the whole duration of this expedition, so we took a bus for 6-7 hours to the city of Chihuahua and crashed out – the most exhausted we had both been in a very long time.
In the end it looks like we walked around 35-40km based on the tracks I had going on my iPhone GPS.
Mosquito bites are gone, but now we are just rooted.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
So very happy to be back in civilisation ,sipping a beer, and using a half decent internet connection.
It is good to eat food again.
¡Buenos Dias Caballeros y Dames!
Here it is, Planet Kapow episode 3.
In this ep Lachlan & I make our way through Guerrero Negro, San Ignacio, Mulege and on to La Paz.
Come check out the video at Planet Kapow and feel free leave a comment about the ep!
We are off. Lachlan & I are in Ensenada, Mexico.
On the 26th of August we made some very sorry adios’s to our buenos amigos and spent 13 hours in the air to LAX.
The flight was quite ok. The entertainment system was good and there was reasonable leg room way back in the last row of the aeroplane. The food was even edible.
I was lucky enough to sit next to Luis, a cool dude from Mexico City who had been living in Melbourne for the past 2 years or so doing his MBA. Thanks to him we now have mas lugares y cosas to see in Mexico.
After the 1-2 hours in Immigration at LAX we managed to navigate the LA pubic transport system to Venice Beach and crashed at a hostel for the night (after a nice 6 pack or two of Fat Tyre beer). The next day we bussed it into Downtown LA, found the Greyhound bus terminal and proceeded to spend 4 hours or so in some heavy traffic on the way down to San Diego. Luckily the bus had free WIFI.
San Diego turned out to be a really nice place. We stayed 2 nights out on Ocean Beach at the hostel there and met some cool peeps from Finland & Canada and on the 2nd night we befriended some locals who took us to their place for some beers and were even kind enough to drive us back to the hostel in the back of their truck.
San Diego is a really easy city to get around and seems a world away from LA. The people are just as friendly but there aren’t nearly as many people trying to out crazy each other. Downtown (Gas Lamp) area seems to be where all the action is. Balboa park was cool, as well as the harbour that is home to some retired warships
From San Diego we took the trolley/train down to San Ysidro and crossed the border to Tijuana. Probably the easiest border crossing I have ever made. No immigration. No stamps. But it looks like we were meant to get some sort of card & stamp so will have to sort that out tomorrow here in Ensenada. This was our first attempt at speaking Español. “Dos boletos a Ensenada por favor”.
Ahh Ensenada. This is our first proper taste of Mexico. We are staying at “The Ensenada Backpacker”, a great little place run by a lovely chica by the name of Gabi. This is our second night here and I must say I am really enjoying Mexico so far. We’ve had some great tacos, met some friendly Mexican folks, washed some underpants and I bought a pair of pantalones.
Tacos so far have been about $12MXN ($1USD) and are muy delicioso! I am really going to enjoy the food here.
It looks like Ensenada has a few things to check out, then from here we might try to somehow make our way to Sierra San Pedro Martir Nation Park but it looks like public transport is going to be a little difficult.
Photos and hopefully the first Planet Kapow Mexico episode 01 video to come soon.
¡Hasta Luego!
Whistling Kites, Adelaide River, NT from Adam Teale on Vimeo.
I just got back from a short excursion to the Adelaide river to see the “jumping crocs”.
The visit was interesting but probably the most amazing was the boat ride back down the river. We were tailed by Whistling Kites which swooped down near the boat and plucked pieces of buffalo meat out of the air (tossed out by our Croc conjuror Sharelle).
I just got back from a short excursion to the Adelaide river to see the “jumping crocs”.
The visit was interesting but probably the most amazing was the boat ride back down the river.
We were tailed by Whistling Kites which swooped down near the boat and plucked pieces of buffalo meat out of the air (tossed out by our Croc conjuror Sharelle)
Davina & Betty – maiden voyage from Adam Teale on Vimeo.
Davina takes her new scooter “Betty” out for a few laps
Watch as I try to find focus with the 50mm f1.8 lens I bought yesterday for my new Canon 550D.
The video features some cool cats.
It was all shot at 1920×1080 25p, ingested as Apple Pro Res LT via FCP and the Canon EOS plugin.
I bought the upgrade to Magic Bullet Colorista II as well a few days ago so I used it to push some colours around in this clip.
What’s the best thing you can do after doing mental hours in the vfx world and not seeing your friends and family for weeks on end?
There are probably many options out there. One of them is to let your friends do all the hard work and book a nice little house up in the Blue Mountains in a little town called Mt Victoria and cook tasty food and let you eat it and then drag you along on bush walks.
Fresh air, sunlight & good friends are truly amazing things.
So I finally got to test out my new camera, the Canon 550D (a.k.a the Rebel T2i) or as it is affectionately known in Japan, the “Kiss X4″.
I am sticking with 550D.
(I just need some black electrical tape to cover the red “Kiss” logo on the front of the camera.)
This camera is impressing me so far, and I think a fair amount of that impressiveness is coming from the “Tamron SP AF17-50mm f2.8 XR DiII VC” lens I was recommended.
Anyway enough gas bagging, here are some pics I punched through Lightroom 3 and put up on Flickr. Yes I know the grading is over the top and has killed all the nice dynamic range in the original image, lots to learn!
And they keep coming!
Continuing on from ep 14 of PPKP ep 15 takes the PPKP team to the mystical village of Zhongdian, a.k.a “Shangri La” high up in the mountains of Yunnan.
As always, make your way over to planetkapow.com for Lachlan’s much more interesting write up on what went down in Zhongdian town.
Ping Pong Kapow episode 15 from Adam Teale on Vimeo.