Dave & Meredith's Travel Blog

One of the hallmarks of many people who start blogging is that they use their blog as a soapbox – an outlet to rant against some perceived injustice, with no regard for relevance or whether their audience is interested. Today, I am that blogger. And this is that rant.

Photography is my main hobby and one result of that is that, when I travel, I tend to haul a lot of gear around. Cameras (more than one), big lenses, a laptop, plus myriad other doodads. I’d say that I travel pretty light – never more than a medium sized bag of clothes, etc. – but my photo gear easily doubles the volume of stuff I bring and that photo stuff weighs a lot.

One of the challenges photographers have faced since 9/11 is that, along with increased security measures, the airlines decided to lower the allowed weight limits for carry-on bags. Typical thresholds are far below what most photographers pack in their carry-ons. This is a recurring topic on most photography blogs I read and both professionals and amateurs share tips on how to beat the system. I know one photographer who frequently flies with a honkin’ big 500mm lens. This thing is 15″ long and weighs nine pounds. It’s huge. He doesn’t even wait for the rep at the counter to tell him he needs to make his bag lighter. When he walks up, he’s already got that lens out of the bag and hanging around his neck because in addition to one carry-on bag, we’re all allowed one “personal item” (which I’ve asked several officials about and the definition seems loose at best). When he’s checked in, he leaves the counter, walks around the corner, and puts the lens back in his bag. I once asked him for advice about a flight I was about to go on that had severe weight limits. He said, “wear a photo vest on the flight [one of those goofy things that has big pockets all over it] and if they insist on checking your camera bag, unload everything into your vest pockets and then hand them the bag.” Sound ludicrous? You bet.

This just doesn’t compute with my logical side. I can’t help wondering what would happen if I asked them if they would charge me extra if I weighed 205 pounds instead of 155. They would of course say no and then I’d say, “well then, I guess I’ll use those 50 pounds I would have gotten for free and apply some of them to my carry-on.” You think I’m being a wise-ass but this makes complete sense to me.

I’m writing this because I’m sitting here at the gate in Logan having just checked in for my flight on Swiss Airlines (nee SwissAir). A little while ago, I walked up to the counter with my “normal” luggage ready to check-in and my camera backpack on my back. I forgot my usual technique which is to take the backpack off and place it at my feet so that the rep can’t see it and perhaps wonder if it’s too big or weighs too much. We were done with the checking-in and the rep was wishing me a nice trip when he said, “oh wait, can I please see your carry-on bag?” Uh oh. We put it on the scale and it read 15. That’s kilograms.

You can guess what’s coming. He told me I’d have to move some of what’s in my carry-on into my checked luggage because the weight limit for carry-on bags is 8kg and I was at almost twice that. I told him that everything in there was fragile photography gear and I didn’t want to do that. “Are there any books?” he asked. Aha. I remembered that I packed some travel guides and reading material in the top pocket. I took them out and crammed them into my checked luggage. That only took 2kg’s away. He said, “you’ll need to take something out and carry it on as your personal item.” Sigh. I pulled out my heaviest camera body and attached my heaviest lens to it. “Attention, thieves in the terminal! You can now see that I have so much camera gear packed that I have to hang some of it around my neck!” Great. The scale now read 11kg. I took another lens out and put it in my pants pocket to get the weight down to 10kg . This looked ridiculous enough to completely justify anyone asking me if there was a lens in my pocket or was I just happy to see them. Ok, 2 more kg to go. I was out of ideas.

I noticed as I rummaged through my bag that the scale’s readout settled on different values with no change to what was sitting on it. If it read one value and I pushed on my pack and let go, it would settle back to a different value. Likewise if I pulled up on the back and then let go. I was taking so long that the rep was doing something else by now. I tugged up on my backpack once or twice and let go. The readout settled on 8.1kg. I said, “is that good enough?” He looked and said I was now ok. I grabbed my bag and left.

I walked around the corner to head towards the security line. We all hear about theft in airport security lines. And with a laptop to deal with along with taking off my shoes, do you think I was also going to put the camera around my neck and the lens in my pocket on the belt as separate items? No. Once I was all the way up to the table where I needed to take my laptop out of my backpack, I put all my camera gear back in my backpack the way it was and sent it through the machine.

I ask you, what is the point of the distinction between your carry-on and your “personal item?” I can’t see a logical explanation. If I’m allowed to bring all of this on in one form or another, why are we not allowed to carry it all in one convenient place? Surely it can’t be that the overhead compartments can’t support the weight. If they want to set a limit and then charge an overage fee, at least I can follow the business logic. But when I asked back at the counter about paying an overage fee, that wasn’t an option.

The final piece of ridiculousness? After leaving security and heading towards the gate, I went into a newstand and bought new copies of two of the books I had to put in my checked luggage and I put those in my backpack. Why haven’t they accounted for the fact that passengers can buy heavy things like water and books in those stores near the gates that we will then take onboard?

Am I alone or are any of you shaking your head as well? I just don’t understand the “logic” of any of this but maybe I’m missing some piece of info that would make it all clear. Some obscure regulation maybe? If you know it, please fill me in.

– Dave

Here is the view from our window in Sorrento (such as it is):

The place we’re staying is really great, but no view. We are about a 5 minute walk from the seaside, and a 10 minute walk from the center of town. And at 30 Euros per person per night, who cares that we overlook a wall?

– Meredith

We’ve packed too much in to give you a play by play of our trip here. Also, since many of you have probably been to Rome, it seems silly to tell you all about the places we’ve seen. Instead, I’ll tell you about a few of my favorite moments from our visit in Rome:

• Getting lost on tiny cobblestone streets.
• Eating dinner ai fuori (outside) and listening to everyone around me speak Italian.
• Getting shooed into the world’s tiniest elevator with Dave, all of our luggage and our B&B host Norberto (seriously, one person shouldn’t even ride in this thing).
• Walking down the Roman Forum on the same stones that people walked on 2000 years ago. I took Latin in high school and learned about all of this 20 years ago, and I’ve been wondering why it’s taken me so long to come here and see it with my own eyes. Seeing all of these buildings and roads that were built during the rise and fall of Rome made me feel better – as if 20 years really wasn’t that long ago.
• Strolling down the Via Appia Antica on a warm sunny Sunday when cars aren’t allowed to drive there.

– Meredith

Here is the view from our window at our second B&B in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome:

– Meredith

I’ve decided to show you a picture of the view from our window at each place we stay in Italy. Here is the view from our first B&B, located near Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome:

– Meredith

…and the same goes for our blog posts.

There’s so much to do here, and we’ve been trying to pack it all in. That has left little time for blogging, let alone thinking about what to post. I haven’t even written down everything we’ve done yet, but here is the quick and dirty laundry list.

Things we’ve visited inside and out:

• Colosseum
• Roman Forum
• Pantheon
• Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel
• St. Peter’s Basilica
• San Giovanni in Laterano (this was a surprise visit – we went in when we were walking by looking for a gelateria that is supposed to be the best in Rome – more on that in a subsequent post!)
• Catacombs of Domatilla (seriously creepy, except when the kids from Boston who were in the same tour group as us said, “hey, these big graves look like Bertucci’s pizza ovens!”)

Here are things we’ve seen while walking:

• Piazza Navona
• Campo dei Fiori
• Spanish Steps
• Vittorio Emanuele Monument and Campidoglio
• Castel Sant’Angelo
• Baths of Caracalla

– Meredith

Buon Giorno! We’re off to Italy tonight, arriving in Rome tomorrow early afternoon. Meredith has updated the Itinerary page with the details. No idea what Internet connectivity is like in regions like Tuscany but we hope to post regularly. Ciao!

The activities at Sacha Lodge were almost all during the day but we had two nighttime excursions. The first night we were there, we went out on the lake in the dark. Our guide scanned the water with a large flashlight while we rode behind him in the canoe. When we got to the other side of the lake, a pair of eyes reflected back at us. It was a Black Caiman: pretty much an alligator but for South America. It is the largest predator in the Amazon basin. In the picture below, his head is at the surface and he’s facing into the plants.

The second nighttime activity was one of our favorite things we did at the lodge. It was a walk through the forest with flashlights and headlamps, looking for whatever we could find. I think I liked it because I was surprised at how much we could find and I felt like I had slightly better odds of finding something myself instead of needing the guides 100%.

On our way into the forest, our guides started us right off with this Tarantula. It was perfectly still the entire time we watched it because, if you look closely, you can see the wings of a cockroach it had just killed and was waiting to eat. Including the legs, this was probably about as big as my hand.

We saw another stick insect feeding on a leaf.

And here is a whip scorpion hanging out on a tree:

I did see a snake moving under a bush about 5 feet away but when I called the guide over, he was only able to see it for a split second before it slithered away into the leaves. It was long enough for him to know it was a very poisonous snake though so what does he do? He and the native guide head right over to the bush and start digging through the leaves and underbrush with sticks to try to find this thing. Um, what part of “very poisonous” did they not understand? No pictures of it but hey, there’s a piece of bravado instead.

– Dave

I mentioned in the previous post that we saw a lot of wildlife on our walks and boat rides at Sacha Lodge. Although you can see several examples in our gallery of Ecuador pictures, those have no descriptions so I thought it would be interesting to show more of them with some context.

Many of our walks were on land, hiking on a trail through the forest. The foliage is dense so it’s harder to see wildlife than it was in the open such as in the Galapagos. Much of the time, we needed our guides’ trained eyes to see animals even if they were very close to us.

This Crested Owl was about 30 feet up and very well concealed. His coloring matched the shade he was in very well. I had to brighten the shadows in the image below to make him easier to see.

The Amazon Tree Boa below on the other hand was at eye level right off of the trail. But did we notice him? No, our guide did. It was a juvenile, probably 20 inches long. There’s no sense of scale in the picture but his head is about the size of my thumb. (Everyone knows the size of my thumb, right?)

I mentioned in a previous post how our guide had no problem picking up creatures you and I wouldn’t dare to. But he picked up this very little frog and held it out to us, saying is was a Poison Dart Frog. The natives use the skin excretions from these frogs to coat the darts they shoot from their blow guns. The poison is only effective if it gets in the blood though so handling them for small amounts of time is actually just fine.

There were lots of bugs for the budding entomologists out there. Millipedes on the ground, wasps in the air, lots of ants in the ground. This Stick Insect was right next to the trail a foot or two off the ground and was about 6 inches long.

One of the nicer canoe rides we took was spur of the moment. We were returning from an afternoon trip and crossing the lodge’s lake to return to our room. We heard lots of rustling from the trees to our left so our guides made a quick turn down a narrow creek and into the trees. Immediately a troop (about 40 or so) of squirrel monkeys (below) appeared overhead making screeches and checking us out. They were very curious. They climbed through trees and jumped from one to another as we followed the creek’s path all the way until it opened back up into the lake. This was one of our favorite experiences at the lodge.

The boat rides were probably our favorite type of activity overall. I liked them because being on water meant that you were in a more open piece of the forest so it was easier to spot animals. It also was a lazy way to endure the heat :-). Plus, you’d see animals typically found in the water such as the Caiman Lizard below.

The Amazon Basin in Ecuador is a major destination for birders and one of the activities the lodge offered was to leave the lodge and take a boat down the Napo River to Yasuni National Park so we could see the flocks of parrots there. There are some clay licks (natural, not man-made) where they have set up some viewing platforms. it started out looking like that day was a dud with only 2 or 3 parrots but by the time we left, there were several hundred that we could see, all jockeying for position and flying around. The picture below is just one piece of the whole scene.

Finally, I mentioned before that the lodge had a butterfly house that you could go to anytime. Our guide showed us a moth there whose wing markings looked like huge eyes to deter predators.

You didn’t have to wait long for butterflies to land on you. This one clearly thinks Meredith’s leg is a source of pollen nectar.

That concludes our tour of animals we saw in the forest … during the day. Stay tuned for night-time creepy-crawlies!

– Dave

For the last leg of our trip in Ecuador, we went to Sacha Lodge, a lodge in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador. That last description is a bit misleading. The t-shirts all say “Amazon – Ecuador” but the Amazon doesn’t actually flow through Ecuador. The lodge is really on the Napo River which is a major tributary of the Amazon. If you call them on it, it turns out that they meant the Amazon Basin. Hmmm. Anyhoo. To get there, we took a 25-minute flight from Quito to Coca and then a 2-hour canoe ride down the Napo. I say canoe but this has ten rows for 3 people, is covered, and has two motors. This is the 747 of canoes.

It’s a nice ride. You learn quickly that straight lines are not desirable here. The river is very shallow and there are many sandbars hidden just under the surface. The boat’s pilot knows where they are though and he weaves all over the place, sometimes all the way to the opposite side of the river to avoid them. He was pretty good but there were two occasions where everyone on the boat had to help rock back and forth to work it loose from where we had just run aground. Oops.

The jungle, erm, sorry, rainforest scenery along the river was a refreshing change from the Galapagos and the highlands near Quito. And because you’re moving quickly, there’s a cool breeze in your face. And that was the most misleading of all. You see, the Galapagos were very hot and humid. But you’re on a boat a lot or snorkeling so you have ways to cool down. But in the rainforest, it was even hotter and even more humid. Have you ever been somewhere so hot and humid that you’re never really dry at any point in the day (or night)? You get out of the shower and dry off only to realize you’re already sweating again. Two showers per day was the norm and there was a day in there that required three. Luckily they had laundry service.

Activities at the lodge were pretty mellow. They usually involved a walk in the forest, a canoe ride (normal size canoes this time), or watching birds from a platform. Sacha Lodge is known for its canopy walk, a set of three towers that rise to the level of the forest canopy and have a suspended walkway between them. The idea is that since the canopy is where most of the birds – and some monkeys – spend their time, you gotta go there to see them. When we were up there, we saw a few colorful birds including some toucans and, in the distance, some howler monkeys.

Oscar, one of the naturalist guides, looking for birds.

Meredith on the canopy walk’s suspended walkway.

Typically there was time after lunch to rest a bit before the late afternoon activity and you could swim in the lake next to the lodge to cool off. There were piranhas in the lake but it turns out there are a lot of myths and in the end, they’re scavengers so if you’re alive and don’t have any open wounds, they won’t touch you. Lots of people swam and had no issues. Still, I thought it was a better bet to take a guide up on his offer to take us out on a canoe and go piranha fishing instead. And if we got one big enough, we could take it back to the lodge and eat it. Apparently, piranha is a tasty fish. There were four of us in the boat: Meredith, myself, another guest, and our native guide (you had two types of guides: a naturalist guide who spoke English and a native guide from the area). We didn’t catch a lot – I caught one and our guide caught two.

Dave and his Super, Giant, Man-Eating, Scary Piranha.

The guide showing us the piranha’s teeth.

I asked the guide if the piranha has upper teeth as well to match the lower teeth you see in the picture. It turns out they do. I know this because, when he reached in to pull back the piranha’s upper lip , it bit him deeply on his finger. He said it was only the second time he’d ever been bitten by a piranha. He was bleeding a lot. Remember what I said about piranhas being scavengers? We didn’t stay out fishing much longer. 🙂

One of the other unguided options the lodge offered was a butterfly farm with many local butterflies and moths. This wasn’t unique to the rainforest but still pretty cool nonetheless to walk through huge numbers of them flying around you. See the Ecuador gallery for a few pictures of those!

On our walks through the forest, the native and naturalist guides would point out birds, insects, reptiles, etc. The picture below shows a large ant on our native guide’s arm (he put it there intentionally). It’s called a Bullet Ant because when provoked it bites you and then immediately stings you too. Supposedly the first English speaker to whom this happened decided it felt like bullet.

A Bullet Ant climbing our native guide’s arm. Before you ask, no, it didn’t bite/sting him.

A typical scene of a canoe activity through the rainforest.

Crossing the lake towards a creek that heads into the forest.

A typical view of the rainforest from a canoe ride. Very lush and dense.

Another view of the forest.

Ivan, our native guide, was excellent. Very friendly, knew so much, and loved sharing it with us. In addition to picking up harmful insects (see above), he showed us medicinal plants and told native stories about plants and animals in the forest. He even created a trap from scratch with trees and vines, set it, and triggered it to show how they would catch small animals. It worked! Now I feel like I could survive if I were stranded in an Ecuadorian rainforest. In the above picture, he’s fitting Meredith with a crown made from a palm frond.

Another great thing is that, after hearing me and another guy in our group joking non-stop for a few days about blow-guns, he brought one out with some darts and a target. He set a papaya up on a stake about 30 feet away. He then loaded a blow gun with a dart and we each took turns with target practice. The gun’s barrel was pretty long – harder than I thought it would be to keep steady. After a couple of misses, I was able to hit it just off-center with the dart going through the papaya. Surprisingly lethal!

All in all, we had a good time at the lodge and we’re glad we went. It is a little unfair to compare it to our experience in the Galapagos since there we saw more wildlife and much closer but the rainforest has its own look and feel which made it worthwhile. Now if they could just turn down the heat…

– Dave