Travel – Page 6

The Colours of Queensland

I’ve been meaning to doing some business admin and finish off my last magazine article about our Los Angeles trip…but I’ve been procrastinating. With waves on the doorstep it’s all too easy to distracted by the surf. And I’ve even been procrastinating so much that when a colourful little lorikeet arrived on our balcony I found some bread crumbs and pulled out the camera. Tourists pay $44 at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary just down the road for pretty much the same experience – we are pretty bloody lucky to basically live in a tropical paradise, more so as our first floor apartment is located pretty much at treetop level. Birds (and bats sometimes) zip past the balcony and wake us up outside the window every morning. And take a look at the beach scene when I had a sneaky look at the waves this evening. Every day something colourful and magical happens on the Gold Coast…

Bi-Coastal Surf Sessions

My last weekend in Melbourne was action-packed, helped by a 3 day visit from brother El Rad, who was keen to try the cold waters off the Surf Coast. Fortunately on the Saturday the weather was actually warm and sunny, the water retained a lot of its summer heat and the waves were pretty clean and off-shore. Annoyingly, an amateur surf comp was on at Jan Juc, clogging up the beach, so we headed down the road to 13th Beach, where all we had to dodge was a few horses. Yes, horses. They allow them to gallop along the beach – maybe they were inspired by Old Spice?

We made it back in time to Melbourne to join our cousin James, who’s on dog-mauling injury-leave from his Northern Territory Thunder footy team (see the front-page article here…but which is nothing compared to James’ brother’s wife’s boobs-inspired front page effort! Most popular story on news.com.au. Check it here). I hadn’t been to the football in ages – man it has changed, and not really for the better. But it was good to sit in the new(ish) MCG northern stand, even if it does feel a bit like you going up the escalators to a shopping centre to get to your seats.

El Rad was keen for a bit of a bi-coastal surf mission on monday: the waves were forecast to be all right on Monday morning, and with a 1.30 pm flight back to the Gold Coast he was hoping to hit the waves up north too. We set out well before dawn – it was a nice sight to see the city in the golden morning light, but not really worth giving up a comfortable sleep in and warm bed when the thermometer showed 4 degrees going past Geelong! After a hard-work short session out in heavy overhead waves at Torquay back beach (a couple of dudes were absolutely ripping, almost getting barelled) it was straight to Tiger Airways at Tullamarine for El Rad. Two hours later he walked through the gates at Coolangatta with his carry-on bag, picked up his car and was straight to Currumbin Alley for another hour-long surf till the last light slipped behind the hinterland. It’s pretty epic to be able to get two surf sessions in during one day, basically in two separate oceans and 1800km apart!

The next day it was my turn – sort of. I flew up to the Goldy, surf board in tow to spend some time in the warmer weather with waves at the front door…not an hour and a half’s drive away. It’s great up here – and pretty relaxed according to the postcards! Unfortunately the bogans over the road have found another piece of junk car to clog the street up with, but their house is on the market so they’ll be moving their infestation along soon I hope. There’d been a huge storm the night before I arrived and couldn’t replicate El Rad’s Currumbin surf – the water coming out the rivermouth was as brown as strong tea! I didn’t want to risk paddling through that, even if it is mostly just silt and leaf tannin, it means there must be all sorts of other chemicals and pesticides washed down from the hills.

As fun as it is up here, it’s going to be tough to handle when the snow starts to fall and the lifts start to run down at Falls Creek – I think that might be my cue to head south again. So take a look at my photos – we caught some great sunsets down south, but really nothing compares to the light and sunsets up here. There’s something about the water, mountains, storms and setting sun that consistently creates the best evening visions of anywhere I’ve ever seen.

Radman Cameo…

Our medium-to-slow speed internet has been out and running even slower for about 10 days now (and only just got changed over to super fast ADSL2+ with a different provider) so I haven’t had time to check out the video of our June Mountain trip. You’ve probably already seen it in your Facebook Newsfeed or on snowboardermag.com.au or transfermag.com. But if not, (and if you have fast internet) take a look…

The film is up on Vimeo thanks to Destyn Via, the Torquay-based outerwear company that both Darragh Walsh and Cohen Davies ride for.

Fellow Falls Creeker, Jeremy Richardson of Ollipop Films has put together a pretty rad edit of our day and a half riding there. He certainly got a lot of content filmed! And if you check it out, you’ll see me in the back and fore grounds snaking photos, and also getting a little riding cameo in the park. Yeeewwww!! haha.

And one funny thing I noticed about the vid is the angry, pissed-off look on Darragh’s face when he stomps his (final) switch frontside boardslide. Normally a rider is stoked, and pretty much “claims” with a joyous fist-pump when they stomp a tech trick, but because of the general annoying crowd, overall disorganisation, early painful slams and problems “getting the shot” on earlier stomps, by this stage Darragh had well and truly had enough. He just wanted to get it done and get the hell out of there. And I think he was taking some of his anger out on me. It’s all good though – we kissed and made up. And got a great photo to boot.

To see some photos from our trip, click the link here…or wait till issue 2 of Australian-New Zealand Snowboarder Magazine drops…

The magic (and disappointment) of film

The last few times I’ve travelled overseas I’ve taken along one or two small(ish) Minolta instamatic film cameras. Maybe I’ve been inspired by Terry Richardson, or maybe I just want to have that little bit of doubt every time I take the camera out and the little flutter I get from gambling with the expected outcome.

Film is certainly a gamble. It used to be pretty bloody hard to get decent snowboard shots when you were working with slide film and not given the lattitide for exposure correction that regular negative film has (ie, in the processing of “regular” film into photos the lab can correct most minor mistakes you made in over or under-exposing your shots). Digital has made things even easier, with mistakes being able to be corrected in Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom. (You may have noticed that ever since Himbrechts put me onto Lightroom I’ve used the preset colour/saturation/etc settings on many of my photos, just to make them a bit more interesting). But not only that, digital allows for the snowboard style police to instantly check a frame and make sure arms, body, head and grab are all the way they should be…and if not, it’s a hike up the hill for the rider and another attemt to “get the shot”.

So it’s nice to play around with film when the end result isn’t so important, like with my travel shots. And I’ve always liked to add an extra level of “gambling” on the outcome by putting in rolls of slide film and then getting it cross-processed in the chemicals normally used for regular negative film. Here you can see the outcome of only 2 rolls I shot on my travels. I thought I had snapped off more frames than a mere 72 in 9 weeks, but I guess digital is really taking over my life if the amount of shots taken on my little Sony Cybershot are anything to go by. You’ll probably recognise a fair bit of the same subject material from my previous posts – I often wanted to be able to compare the film to the digi shot.

If you are interested, the film I used here was Kodak Ektachrome 100VS, cross-processed and scanned lo-res at Vanbar Imaging in Carlton. And I’m not sure if the gamble paid off. I’m not so happy with all the end results – maybe I expected more? I dunno. Maybe next time I’ll take alond a Canon EOS5 film SLR with a cheap zoom lens and use that as my “Go-To” cross-process beast: it’s fairly compact (certainly much more so than my 2 EOS 1 bodies), it seemed to handle tricky exposures well, and I got a heap of published snowboard shots back in the day with it, so it has good memories.

Homeward bound…but where is home again?

To paraphrase the Michael Buble hit: Another winters day has come, And gone away, In even Reno and LA, And I wanna go Home, Let me go home. (And no, I’m NOT gay – I bought the CD for my Mum!) I didn’t really want to go home, but as I had finished my last photo shoot at June Mountain and I felt my shooting season was done I started to think about getting home to enjoy my first big family easter in five years in a little place in central Victoria called Tarnagulla. The more I thought about it, the more I began to miss home and started to plan all the final steps: packing the bags, cleaning the apartment, getting the landlord inspection, driving the crew to the airport, finding a place to store the car for several months…and finally running the gauntlet of check-in chicks with my excess baggage. Then of course there is the three actual flights and 17 hours or so of sitting on my arse from Reno, via LAX and Sydney, to Melbourne. Why can’t heading home just be easy? I guess any big move is always a pain.

Things were winding down at our place as we all thought about home, but although I wanted to pack it away, the camera couldn’t quite go in the camera bag yet. A couple of candid “lifestyle” portrait shots needed to be taken, and it was down to the wire to get a shot of Cohen Davies. A huge snow-dumping storm had rolled into Tahoe on the last couple of days making all our outdoor locations a bust, and with his lack of mobile phone credit, he was lucky to catch me still at home before I busted a move back down to Reno (I had aleady made a trip down and back to drop Darragh off at the airport early that morning…only seeing 4 wrecked cars on the side of the road in the blizzard!) Evil Editor has the shot and it will come out in issue 1, but not the frame I preferred as somehow Cohen was reading the newspaper upside down. I swear I thought he was actually reading the paper as I fucked around getting the lighting right – he must have upside-down eyes, or didn’t notice as a result of the previous night’s action?

We filled our last few days in Tahoe on a little bit of a party train – unfortunately everyone else in town was winding down and the party ended up basically being 20 bored guys around a dowstairs pool table. We had to find ways to amuse ourselves. The highlight for Darragh was his packet of peanut M&M’s (he’s mad for the things!) and the 3 buck McLovin fake ID he bought in 7-11!

More fun was to be had on my last night in Reno. I booked into the awesomely rad 30 buck-a-night Terrible’s Sands Regency (Terribles is actually a chain based out of Vegas – not merely capitalised adjective as you might think – but has the added benefit of running petrol stations around Nevada so you can cash your “Terribles Bucks” for gas on the way out of town. Awesome.) I was rooming with Longy, who was down to his last 10 bucks (in fact he had to borrow $5 off me to pay for his $10.99 all-you-can-eat at The Eldorado Casino) and couldn’t eat again till late the next evening when he got aboard the V Australia flight home. In fact, now that I think about it, Longy never paid me back for that 5 bucks!

It was Tim’s birthday, and the last night in the States for 3 of us as Ben was flying out to London on the Wednesday too, so the three of us not-totally-skint-guys (ie, not Longy) hit the town. It was an adventure, to say the least, but a lot of fun. Sort of like a trashy Vegas. But not bad for a Tuesday night. However, now I know why The Man in Black sang ” But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die”: he was putting the guy out of his misery!

I had a reasonably late arvo flight, and despite the gods of time and scheduled lunchbreaks working against me, I managed to store the car away, check in and get my bags checked through all the way to Sydney (even if I had to secretly stuff some gear back into my board bag behind the pillar before I dropped it off at the Oversize Baggage section). I was confused when I saw the destination for my Horizon flight flash up as Mammoth – apparently, weather depending, that flight makes a short stop on the way to LAX in Mammoth Lakes. The flying scaredy cat, Longy, would have hated the swirling and turbulent landing, but it was worth it for the amazing snow stormy views out the door. Longy had taken an earlier flight to LAX, but would join me on the V Australia flight to Oz (one of the only times I have shared a flight with a mate in a long, long time. It was a welcome change…and I got my revenge for the missing $5 by freaking him out pointing out every mysterious plane noise, bang and bump on the 14 hour flight home!) As I took off from Mammoth, I turned around to see Falls/Hotham rider Lauren Smith a few rows back – while I had spent the day ferrying crew to the airport, running round Reno and waiting for my flight, she had been cuting laps in knee-deep Mammoth pow before she threw everything in a bag and made the 5.30 flight to LA and onto Oz. I wish my last day was so simple.