We have been told by a few fellow travellers that a really great place to see the famous Halong Bay is via the less touristy Cat Ba Island. So 2 busses, a ferry and another bus and we arrive in Cat Ba town about 4 hours later. We stay for 3 nights and opt for the seecond day to do our boat trip to Halong Bay as his looks like it will be the best day weather wise. It turns out to be the brightest out of the three but also the coldest and still very grey – our boat is no luxury liner! We may have been lucky as we have spoken to people since who could hardly see a thing when they went out and some overnight trips had to be cancelled!! When I say it’s cold we are literally wearing most of our clothes – not exactly what we had in mind!!
After a short flight from Saigon (Ho Chi Minh) we arrive in Hanoi with a population of close to 7 million. We head straight for our hotel, The Rising Dragon Palace in Hanoi’s Old Quarter. We love the Old Quarter, think French colonial meets Old China, add in the hustle and bustle of traditional street trading in the narrow streets and alleyways. What a buzz, a great place to explore and people watch while sitting at a pavement cafe sipping coffee. Luckily we can get western style coffee here, lets just say that Vietnamese coffee is an acquired taste and unfortunately one which I’m never likely to acquire in my lifetime!!! The weather’s supposed to be cooler up North, the first 2 days are really warm and then some drizzle comes in and it gets much cooler – is this a sign of things to come? We visit a few museums, the best of which is the Womens Museum which had some fascinating stories of how women coped though the wars.
The border crossing into Vietnam was uneventful if a little slow. We stopped overnight at 2 towns on the south coast Ha Tien and Rach Gia before moving on to Can Tho in the heart of the Mekong Delta. The first thing you notice upon arrival into Vietnam is the improvement in the roads, i.e. fully paved and in fairly good repair. However there appears to be ten times more traffic, with thousands of scooters weaving in and out, the delta has a population of 20 million. The roads appear to stretch on for eternity and are lined with houses and stores, it’s like the longest street in the world! We are also the only westeners travelling on these legs. There is very little English spoken – hello, goodbye and thank you are not helping much when trying to get from A to B, it all adds to the fun!!
We arrive in Can Tho and stayed at the Hau Giang Hotel, they gave us a lovely welcome and fab service throughout our stay. We were up before dawn the next morning to visit the floating markets, apparently the biggest in the region. It was a great experience and the early morning fog added to the atmosphere. We are here at the end of Tet which is Chinese New Year, which this year happens to be my year – the horse! The bus journey to Ho Chi Minh was a little chaotic as everyone seemed to be travelling back after the holiday, plus 2 hour delay, plus traffic jams, plus crazy driver – welcome to Vietnam!!!!
Lying in Cambodia’s South East corner very near the border to Vietnam lies the sleepy town of Kep. Once a premier beach town for wealthy visitors from Phnom Penh, Kep is now better known for it’s oceanfront Crab shacks. Sunsets were spent watching the locals trawling the shores for the soft shell crabs that ended up on diner’s plates in the many rustic shacks overlooking the water. Along with Siem Reap and Angkor this was our favourite place in Cambodia. A great place to relax, visit the nearby National park and explore the area on bikes. We can definitely highly recommend our accommodation here, Sea View Bungalows.
So this is our lost stop in Cambodia before crossing the nearby border into Vietnam. The only negatives we can think of during our short stay are the dusty and bumpy roads and the very overcrowded local transport. These were a very small sacrifice and far outweighed by the freindly people and laid back vibe we found everywhere we went. The weather is just great at this time of year – you may need a long sleeve for the evenings! The Khmer cuisine was a real surprise – delicious! Our only regret may be that we didn’t lengthen our stay!
Lying about 115 miles southwest of Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville is a port city and the main beach area for the South coast of Cambodia with easy access to the many offshore islands. We had a lazy couple of days here and had a great day out to the islands with a beach BBQ thrown in! The seafront is one long stretch of beach bars, a great spot for a sundowner or two!!!! We can’t really recommend our hotel here, although the service and cleanliness were great it was right next to a night club!
A couple of hours bus ride from Phnom Penh is the quiet riverside town of Kampot on the South coast of Cambodia. Kampot is well known for it’s black and green pepper, apparently it’s unique and sought after world wide, it definitely made delicious pepper sauces! We took a lovely sunset boat ride up river and stayed at a wonderful little guest house called Rikitikitavi, where the service and food were amazing! We would have loved to have stayed longer, if only they had availability!!
A six hour dusty bus journey took us from Siem Reap to Cambodia’s capitol Phnom Penh – you have to pronounce the ‘P’ in Phnom, which I’m still struggling with!!!. Once known as the Pearl of Asia, Phnom Penh was considered one of the loveliest French built cities in Indochina. Sitting on the banks of the Tonle Sap and Mekong rivers the city now seems to be getting back to it’s former glory after the devastating take over of the country by the Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979. We visited the Killing Fields where much of the Genocide was carried out and S21 a former school that was used as a prison vacility for torture of captives. Needless to say a pretty harrowing day, but one we felt we needed to witness to get a feel for how far the people have come since. We also visited a Russian Market and spent a lovely afternoon exploring the Grand Palace. Our day usually ended at the FCC (Foreign Correspondence Club) for cocktails overlooking the river at sunset – nice!!!
A short flight from Bangkok takes us to Siem Reap where we were kindly picked up and taken to our hotel the Lotus Blanc Resort. We had fabulous service here, the manager organised our tuk tuk driver for our trips into Angkor. We decided on a full day ticket into Angkor which also allowed us an evening sunset the day before entering the park. The first thing that strikes you when entering the park is the sheer scale of the place, one of the temples we went to was about a 20km drive! We started our day at about 5am with sunrise at Angkor Wat said to be the worlds largest single religious monument. Usually sunrise is a quiet serene moment, not here however as it appears half of Siem Reap had the same idea as us!!! We were a little worried that this would be the order of the day but because of the size of the place we managed to find lots of areas that we virtually had to ourselves. Here are a few of the images taken and if anyone would like some further reading here’s a link to the wiki website!
We really enjoyed exploring Siem Reap except for the rather tacky ‘Pub Street’ and found some great restaurants. This is the cool dry season in Cambodia which is great for us as not too hot in the day and a little cool at night. The roads throughout Cambodia were in quite poor upkeep and very dusty, so we had some interesting bus and tuk tuk rides!
It was great to catch up with Rob & Emma who kindly did an amazing road trip from Riyadh stopping at Abu Dhabi on the way and way back. We had an amazing view of Muscat when flying in with the sun rising over the Western Al Hajar Mountains which surround the city. We visited the very impressive Grand Mosque where in my wisdom I decided to drop my camera and lens on the very hard marble floor – Oops that’s the end of that lens for the trip!! We had a great walk over a craggy mountain and did a great little road trip to the Bimmah sinkhole and the nearby beaches. Here are a few pics with some of the demonstration in Bangkok too, which luckily were very peaceful when we were there!
These are a few panoramic images from our recent trip to Victoria, Australia and here are some tips of the method I use of taking and stitching multiple images to make a panorama.
Tripod Method
1. It’s important to get the top of your tripod mount level so that when you pan the tripod head the horizon stays level. This saves you having to loose parts of the image later when cropping to a level horizon. You do this by adjusting the height of each tripod leg independently. Some tripods have a small spirit bubble aid at the top of the tripod legs. I also use a spirit bubble that attaches to the camera flash mount so I can double check the level as I pan the camera. I can then make any further minor leg adjustments if required.
2. It’s most important to use the camera in manual exposure mode. If the camera is using any of the auto exposure modes, each frame is likely to be lighter or darker than it’s adjacent frame, this then becomes much harder at the stitching stage. If you are including the sun in your final panorama image, take the initial exposure from the frame nearest to the one that includes the sun for a more balanced overall exposure.
3. Choose a manual white balance setting so that the white balance remains constant throughout the scene.
4. It’s also important to put the lens/camera in manual focus mode and focus manually. You do not want the focus points changing between frames.
5. When taking the images, start at one edge of the intended panorama, take the first shot, pan the camera making sure you have at least one third overlap of frame, take the second shot, then repeat until you get to the other end of your intended panorama image. I always start at the left edge of the panorama, I just find this easier when stitching. Also, bear in mind that you may often loose some information from the top, bottom and edges of your panorama at the cropping stage after stitching.
6. I always use a shutter release when the camera is tripod mounted. This helps speed up the panning and taking process and stops any vibrations when shooting long exposures. I also try not to touch the lens when panning just in case I inadvertently touch the focus ring.
7. Composition is equally important in panoramic photography as any other type of photography, so know the main rules of composition and also experiment by breaking them. Sometimes points of interest at the edges of the frame often work to help lead the eye into the image and keep it there.
8. Switch your camera to live mode to aid composition and manual focus.
9. Be careful with very wide angle lenses as perspective can often look odd when stitched into a panoramic picture.
10. Watch out for movement within your panorama, such as people, transport, flora blowing in the wind and waves breaking on a beach. These can sometimes cause overlapping sections that don’t line up at the stitching process and ruin the final image.
11. Experiment using your camera in both the vertical and horizontal position while creating your panorama.
12. For very precise panoramas you can buy a panoramic head for your tripod. This head enables you to move the mounted camera back, forth, left and right so that the Nodal Point of the lens is directly over the axis of rotation of the tripod, this will eliminate parallax error. Each lens has a different nodal point and can be quite tricky to find. For anyone interested here is a link to a youtube video that demonstrates the setup.
Hand Held Method
Use the same guidelines as with the tripod method. Manual Exposure, white balance and focus. Try and keep any horizon level and allow room for some cropping after stitching.
Stitching the Panorama
I won’t go into this in great detail as it will depend on what software you use to stitch the panorama together. I usually use Adobe Photoshop ‘merge to panorama’ which I can also access directly from the RAW files in Adobe Lightroom. Here is a link on Adobe TV on how this works on Adobe Photoshop Elements.
If you haven’t got Photoshop or Photoshop Elements another excellent free programme that I can thoroughly recommend is called Hug-in.
To Summarise
Level the tripod head
Level the Camera
Use manual exposure, white balance and focus
Take the series of shots from the left edge of your panorama
