Alentejo

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As you may have noticed by now, I am quite a big fan of the Alentejo region of Portugal. South of the Tagus river (Tejo) but before you get to the southern most coast, this part of the country is typified by olive trees and cork oaks, vineyards and tiny sunbleached villages. I love it here and visit as often as possible (except for during the peak of the summer, when the heat is unbearable). These are a few iPhone photos from the last year or so of visits…  Barragem da Alqueva Évora  Alcaçovas Casa Branca

Évora, Alentejo

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The first time I visited Évora was back in 2007 and I fell in love with the city immediately… so much so that we were even talking about maybe living there once we decided to settle in Portugal. But then the second time I visited was in the peak of the summer, and I quickly changed my mind. The city is incredibly beautiful, yes… but 40 degree heat and absolutely no cooling breeze for 2 months of the year… not to mention the fact that it´s a bit far from the coast, is all too much for this wind and ocean loving…

Ilha do Farol

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Our good friends Matt & Lena live down in the Algarve region of Portugal, about 3 hours drive from us in Ericeira… so whenever we have an empty week or two on our calendar (and the weather is playing along) we pile into the car for a mini-roadtrip down south and spend some time with them.  And because I can´t sit still for longer than 10 minutes without wanting to explore somewhere, I always have a few places on my list of “things to see” whenever we´re in an unfamiliar part of the country… this time around it was the…

travel photography portugal

Autumn Road-trip – Serra da Estrela

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After we left the Monsanto region we travelled further north to the Serra da Estrela. We´d been sort-of hoping to catch a bit of snow but since it hadn´t yet started we weren´t really expecting it… and as it turns out, the first snows fell the night after we´d left… bad timing! But I´m also not sure how much fun it would have been to be in a tiny tent in the snow anyway, so I guess everything happens for a reason. The autumn colours got more and more vivid the higher into the mountains we went, and we became…

travel photography monsanto, central portugal

Autumn Road-trip – Monsanto

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Last November, a few weeks before we left to spend Christmas in South Africa we went on a very spur-of-the-moment camping trip in central Portugal and the Serra da Estrela. I´d been wanting to explore this part of Portugal for ages, particularly the town of Monsanto and it´s little houses built into the boulder strewn hillside… it looked like something out of a fairytale and I really wanted to see it for myself. And so, while checking the weather report one day (I´m a total nerd for weather reports) I saw that we had a full week of sunny days…

Porto

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Shortly after we returned from South Africa, and before the post-summer-holiday-mid-winter-blues could set in, we squeezed into a small car with a videographer, a photographer and a DJ for an adventure up north in Porto. You can read more about the who/where/why over here but these are just a few quick shots from our weekend in this beautiful capital of the north. We keep saying that we’re going to spend more time here, to get to know the city a bit better… but then again we keep saying a lot of things, like how we’re going to go to South America,…

travel photography south africa

Southern Cape Coast

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Sometimes I take loads of photos. Sometimes I feel really inspired and I shoot without even having to think very hard about what I´m doing… it´s just me and the camera and my surroundings and it all blurs together in a kind-of haze where I am vaguely conscious of the fact that I´m not really in control of the situation, nor do I really know if I´m shooting on the correct ISO or if my shutter speed is just right for the specific subject… but I just go with it because I know that when I´m in that zone it´s…

travel photography south africa

Karoo Road Trip – Calitzdorp to Prince Albert

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The last few days of our Karoo road trip were spent in the town of Prince Albert, right at the foot of the Swartberg Mountains. Our plan had been to drive the Swartberg Pass from the Klein Karoo over to Prince Albert, but the thunderstorms persisted and there was constant cloud on the mountains which meant there wouldn’t be much to see from the top, so we went around the mountain instead, through the Meiringspoort. We seem to attract the rain whenever we’re camping… it’s like the weather KNOWS that our tent isn’t particularly waterproof, and even though we went…

travel photography klein karoo south africa

Karoo Road Trip – Ladismith to Calitzdorp

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The distance between Ladismith and Calitzdorp really isn’t very far, but we took a bit of a detour to get there and wandered around on dirt roads for a few hours, chatting to Nguni cattle and enormous tortoises along the way… getting caught in the first of many thunderstorms and then witnessing the most dramatic sunset. The light in the Karoo is really unlike  anywhere else in the world…

ronnies sex shop klein karoo

Karoo Road Trip – Montagu to Ladismith

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During our recent trip to Cape Town we took a week and hit the road in the direction of the Klein Karoo. The idea was to follow Route 62 through the Klein Karoo and then cross the Swartberg Pass to Prince Albert, but the weather has it´s own plans which meant that we had to alter ours, but thats the beauty of a road trip, you never really know what to expect. We were on the road for about 8 days but I didn´t shoot every day, or every place we stopped, so I´ve divided the trip into 3 blog…