i LOVE staying in hotels. i don’t travel often, so i don’t have that jaded traveller attitude to hotels and flying as if it’s all old hat. it’s always new hat to me. even the most boring, average hotel – i’m basically like, “wait, i get to sleep in this foreign place, i don’t have to make my bed, AND someone else is making me breakfast tomorrow? sign me up.” of course when a hotel is actually nice that feeling is multiplied by a thousand, which is what i imagine it would be like to stay at the Hotel San José in Austin, Texas. i have never had any inclination to visit Texas, but now i do.
Built in 1936 as an “ultramodern” motor court, the property has been transformed into a 40 room urban bungalow-style hotel tucked behind stucco walls and set amidst lush garden courtyards. More than just a unique place to sleep, the Hotel San Jose serves as a gathering place and occasional hub of community activity for locals and visitors alike. Dogs are always welcome.
since i have shared a bit about the wedding i thought it would be nice to show some pics from our honeymoon. whenever people asked where we were going post-wedding, and we replied NYC, they were either really excited for us or genuinely confused about our choice of destination. i guess people associate honeymoon with tropical beaches or romantic cities like Paris – but we have always, always wanted to visit NYC (ever since we first got together) and we are far more into new visiting places that allow us to explore, see museums, eat great food, shop and just experience something other than what we have at home. we have beaches at home… and fantastic ones at that.
our trip unfolded like something out of a storybook. everything we did was awesome. staying in Williamsburg and taking the subway into Manhattan every day like some kind of a real New Yorker (and being totally blasé about it – just gonna take the subway), doing a cheesy but required and ultimately enjoyable boat ride in Central Park, seeing the Book of Mormon on Broadway (highly recommended!), running into someone i know from the internet at a random subway station on our first day, experiencing Sleep No More (what a trip), eating more pizza than i could handle (i can handle more pizza than you might think), indulging in very expensive lobster rolls as a treat, seeing more art than my eyeballs could deal with, falling in love with the Natural History Museum, spotting some celebrities (ok don’t look now but Hilary Swank is eating a burger right behind you), going to the top of the Empire State building at night, eating a feast at Brooklyn Crab, spotting a Banksy, seeing ARCADE FIRE at a secret show in Brooklyn after discovering a cryptic poster in Red Hook – that actually happened! for reals! it was just absolutely unbelievable and amazing. by the end of it we were walking fit and our bank accounts were drained.
i want to thank everyone who commented on this post (and emailed) with recommendations of places to visit in NYC. we tried to do everything on the list but it was just impossible, even with 2 weeks there. if anyone is planning a visit soon be sure to check those out. you can also visit my pinterest board for more.
i took all of these photos on my iPhone. had the best intentions to take actual nice photos with my camera, but after taking perhaps 5 shots i decided i didn’t want to view our holiday through a lens. and, because i know it will be asked, they were edited with either VSCO or Afterlight, depending on whether i was on my phone or iPad – VSCO doesn’t work so great on my iPhone anymore after the iOS7 update (of course!) so i often just used Afterlight, which is simpler but also great.
if you want to know where any of these were taken, just ask in the comments!
i first noticed Megan & Mike Gilger of The Fresh Exchange when they tagged me in an Instagram photo of their travels in Cape Town – they had been making use of my Cape Town City Guide to discover some cool places to see. i always get the warm and fuzzies when people tell me that the guide helped them in some way, and when anyone visits my city for that matter, so I clicked over to their site and what a nice discovery.
Megan is a talented designer and together she and Mike have a design studio called Wild Measure. on their trip to Cape Town they collaborated with Over to create an app in 24 hours (!!) that with allow people to celebrate their love for Cape Town, featuring Megan’s beautiful hand-lettering, appropriately called Cape Town Love.
The app was inspired by the city we have been working in for the past 6 days, and we wanted to develop something that did not just offer another pack of graphics, but meant far more. We wanted to find a way to celebrate the Mother City, and to help encourage people to discover the beauty that we have found in this place.
read about how they created the app in 24 hours here and watch a short video by Megan and Over designer Aaron Marshall. the app itself is great to look at and a dream to use. i think it’s pretty damn awesome that a handful of talented Americans created such a lovely app that’s so appreciate of our city. download it here.
we are going on our honeymoon to NYC in October, and i am beyond excited to travel again! i haven’t been overseas since 2010, which felt like an absolute lifetime ago (but honestly i am very lucky to be able to travel every few years). even started collecting a bunch of stuff that we need to see while we’re there – 99% food related – so i tend to be a a bit of an obsessive researcher in that way. actually i’m pretty sure that i’m quite irritating to travel with, always consulting a map and making sure that we hit all the museums and get to our trains on time (my poor husband-to-be). well, i will try to relax a bit this time round, especially since we will be on h-o-n-e-y-m-o-o-n.
Paris based Pauline Chardin makes travelling look so easy, she just launched a blog called The Voyageur where she shares her beautiful travel photography, as well as insights into the places she and her husband visit. i always love seeing what people photograph on their travels, what one person notices that another does not. Pauline has visited some interesting places, i did not even know about the archaeological museum in Istanbul, but that is now top of my list if we ever go there. her photography is also absolutely exquisite, particularly the vegetation of Sri Lanka and this mouth-watering shot of quintessentially Italian figs and parmesan… mmm.
My day job is being a fashion designer, but I have been traveling and taking pictures for some time and it seemed only fair to share a little bit of it. The Voyageur is a place to make you discover or rediscover small corners of the world that feel unique, inspirational and surprising. All pictures are shot by me, unless, well, I am actually ON the picture, in that case I have my husband to thank for it. I currently shoot with a Sigma DP2M even if some of pictures here were taken with my former Sigma DP1. My husband’s pictures are shot with a Ricoh GR1V, a Leica MP or a Ricoh GXRm.
it’s cooooooooooooold in Cape Town today. i even wore my winter jacket that i bought (and last wore) 5 years ago when i was in wintery London. so when i got an email introducing Tiny Atlas Quarterly, an online magazine founded by photographer Emily Nathan and art director Liz Mullally, and i clicked through to this wonderful photo essay about Santorini i was temporarily transported to a warmer clime.
So often art directors, designers, photographers, stylists, digital techs and photo assistants become great friends on set, intermittently cracking up and stressing out during the long sunrise to sunset hours we keep. As friends we work for clients and as friends we dine and travel the world together. It is rare that we come together professionally for projects of our own devising. Instead of keeping all of our location production information and call sheets to ourselves though, we want to share it. With Tiny Atlas we are creating these stories for ourselves and for you. And while our clients may want the ever-sunny day, we also relish a moody storm sweeping across a mountain range. With Tiny Atlas Quarterly we want to show you the places we love to travel ourselves, both high and lowbrow. We also want to show you how we see our own backyards.
you should check out the rest of their Summer issue, which includes a story about demystifying abalone (which used to be a summer staple when i was a kid, before they became endangered in south africa due to illegal poaching), tips for traveling through the south, and awesome summer potraits. seriously, have a long look at Tiny Atlas Quarterly.
when i think about how little i have travelled in Africa, a continent i’ve lived on for the better part of 30 years, i am actually pretty ashamed of myself. part of that can be to blame on the fact that i’m just a little bit of a lazy traveller. it’s easy to jump on a plane and book into hotels or backpackers in Europe. it’s just easy. (saving up for that flight to europe is not to easy, though). Africa is hard, in more ways than one. you need to have a pinch of the adventurer in you to deal with the interesting modes of transport and long drives, or dodgy bus trips, to get where you want to go. but once you’re there… man, is it worth it.
Anton Crone is a SA photographer & journalist who documents his African travels on his blog Bright Continent. on the surface it’s just amazing to see all the beautiful places that he has visited (Lake Malawi has long been one of my dream destinations) – but like the best travel blogs out there you gain a better understanding of life in Africa through the stories and anecdotes that he shares. i must admit i had something in my eye after reading this story of the Mfuwe school in Zambia.
you can follow him on twitter & read more of his travel articles at Getaway (want to know what it’s like to drive a Smart Car from Cape Town to the Ngorongoro Crater? he did that too). all photos by Anton Crone.
i was catching up on emails this morning after our internet-less weekend away and a wonderful letter from Anna Fusco was just so awesomely serendipitous & co-incidental, as i had literally just read this book and listened to this podcast.
both are stories of people who one day decided to hit the road and leave their ordinary lives behind – whether it was to go on a quest, or for no particular reason at all but to experience the open road… Anna & Nate are on the same path, having bought a thirty year old camper van and setting off on April 1st “with nothing but our cameras, our dog, the books we couldn’t bear to leave behind, and a new sleeping bag courtesy of my mother.”
Since then, we’ve been traveling the U.S. without a calendar or a particular destination, living off of canned beans and tortilla chips. I’ve been religiously documenting every step of my wanderlust, the beauty and the breakdowns. Trust me that the van isn’t the only thing having an occasional meltdown. But that’s life, that’s van life, and I like it.
Everywhere we stop, people tell us they wish they could do what we do. I want people, women especially, to know that they CAN live in their VW campers and eat their cake too. I say women in particular because for some time it appeared to me that this was a seemingly male dominated “lifestyle,” attainable only by ex-professionals turned religious surfers (i.e. Foster Huntington, another big inspiration) – not by shrimpy twenty-something city girls too attached to their Swedish Hasbeens to “rough it” and too afraid of big waves to surf.
be sure to follow their adventures at Anna’s blog Dama and Dig. all photos by Anna Fusco.
we’ve been wanting to visit River View for a long time, and so really had no better excuse to go than to celebrate our anniversary weekend. not being hotel types, we much prefer to find chilled out (and budget friendly) self-catering joints where you can just relax, read, cook, eat and sleep for a few days. luckily you can find so many places that tick those boxes within a few hours from Cape Town.
River View is just outside Calitzdorp, a town in the Klein Karoo that’s a leisurely 4 hour drive from Cape Town along Route 62 (depending on how many stops you make along the way). owners Colin & Bronwyn left the city to set up home in the Matjiesvlei valley, and as every day passed we became more & more envious of their slice of paradise.
if you manage to stay there (and I urge you do) then you’ll no doubt be paid a visit by Jock – the doe-eyed jack russell terrier who strangely always pitches up around eating time… as well as Jessie, the beautiful boer greyhound, who has a bit more style and finesse than old Jock – but i think that’s part of her clever ploy to get doggie treats. we were more than happy to oblige, in exchange for having temporary pets for 3 days.
and now we’re home again, missing it already.
ps: many of you asked in my Kruger Park post what camera and filters I use. those & these were shot with a Canon 5D mark III and edited in Lightroom, making use of VSCO filters when I’m feeling fancy.
