Yogini, photographer, writer, wanderer, wonderer, philosophizer, dog's best friend, reluctant but sometimes sparkly introvert, curious one, believer in magic.
This year, I’ve decided to dedicate a portion of the proceeds of my annual calendar to the amazing research and conservation work Bring The Elephant Home is doing on elephant behaviour, habitat, and wellbeing in South Africa and Thailand (and soon other parts of Africa, like Zimbabwe, Uganda, and more!).
The calendars are available in my photography shop. Just select the SHOP button, go to Specialty Products, and scroll down to the calendars.
Currently, I’m only able to ship within the US, but send me a note if you’re out of the US and want a calendar…we’ll figure something out.
While you’re in my photography shop, browse around… you may find something fun as a holiday gift. The photo lab I use does amazing prints, and we can ship pretty quickly for holiday gifts.
Dachau is the first concentration camp that I’ve seen, and even though I’ve learned about the depths of depravity we humans are capable of by reading about the horrors and visiting the Rwanda Genocide Museum, by visiting the old slave market in Stone Town, by walking through Berlin and learning about the Holocaust in school and in Germany in an unapologetic way, it felt important to see this place, to walk through the ghosts of things that should not have happened.
Ditto, Oktoberfest. I mean, it felt important to go. I’ve been in Munich a few times (even when the Wiesn was in full swing). I love Germany. Aachen feels like my 2nd home. Yet for some reason, Oktoberfest has never been on my list… But this time there was time in the itinerary, so why not.
That these two juxtaposed realities can exist in the same plane of existence is both appalling and yet somehow not entirely unexpected.
1 / 10
The words arbeit macht frei (work makes you free) are wrought into the iron in the entry gate at Dachau. It was a work camp more than a death camp, though the calculated deliberateness of the atrocities and the hypocrisy of the arbeit makes it very clear why chiefs from this camp went on to do even more evils at Auschwitz and others.
Walking the grounds and exhibits, in their brutal honesty, makes you realise that as horrible as the recounting was, it was sanitized for the sake of the viewer. Sanitized, for fucks sake. What actually happened there was far worse.
It was a gray, semi-rainy late-September morning. By the time we left, I was cold. My feet hurt. I was hungry. I needed a shower. Absurd first-world problems by any measure. Unfathomable, by today’s.
A cold, almost metallic, shiver stayed with me throughout the gray morning, and I couldn’t get the word hypocrisy out of my mind as I tried to align the thoughts this should not have happened with how close are we now to the timeline then?
It was a quiet bus-then-train ride back to the hotel, where a shower felt a little more decadent than the day before and a snack of some day-old bread was a luxury in a real world that felt so surreal and undeserved after the morning.
Rhetorical question: How can we simultaneously release ourselves from the past while living with empathy and integrity and inclusiveness so that history doesn’t get the chance to repeat itself?
Genuss lässt dich vergessen (indulgence/enjoyment makes you forget) is written nowhere that I’m aware of, yet the visions of the morning dissipated as we meandered the streets of Munich and wended our way to the Theresienwiese, the Oktoberfest fairgrounds. Along the way we saw lederhosen-clad revellers on electric scooters, dirndl-dressed Fräulein, and oodles of others dressed in traditional garb and less-so.
We had been with German friends for the past week and a half, all of whom joked and rolled their eyes that we wanted to go to Oktoberfest; all of whom suggested visiting the more authentic Oide Wiesn.
So we entered the fairgrounds via the Oide Wiesn, the historic Oktoberfest, in hopes of avoiding some of the chaos outside these gates. It felt like a state fair, only 11,000 times bigger, replete with enormous beer tents and oompah bands and Bavarian folk dancing. As one does, we indulged a bit: drinking steins of local beer, eating Bavarian pretzels and Fischbrötchen, riding the Willenborg Ferris wheel, and maybe the best part, peoplewatching, because the outfits and the mayhem truly make the day.
Traditional Bavarian folk dance in a beer tent at Oktoberfest
The Oide Wiesn felt like the safe place, as venturing into the wilds of the main Oktoberfest madness felt like a frat party on steroids. We ducked in and out of beer halls and played “spot the American tourists” (inebriated 20-somethings in rented lederhosen with stuffed chickens on their heads…I am not kidding) and “dodge the detritus” (unfortunate results of said inebriation) enough to call it quits for the day and head to the exit with one final auf Wiedersehen to the experience.
2 / 7
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to visit the polar extremes on the humanity spectrum in the same day…But maybe it does. Maybe they both teach us lessons on balance and compassion and bramacharya, restraint.
I started writing this post on a dark plane flying North over the African continent, visions of elephants and African wildlife swimming in my head. Now I’m home, back from another trip to Kariega with the BTEH team to do additional observations and work on an exciting elephant ID project that blossomed from that first trip.
How it started: I went down to South Africa last March sort of blindly. I had signed up for a volunteer program with an NGO called Bring The Elephant Home to help the researchers do behavioural studies on elephants at Kariega Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape. We spent 10 days there, in the field and in the classroom, learning about and studying these amazing creatures. Just a few months before that trip, they had removed the interior fences in the reserve, so one of the key questions we tried to answer was “what happens with the eles when you remove fences?” I wrote about that amazing experience here.
Fast-forward a year and a few months, and these elephants have been living in their expanded habitat for some time now.
5 observations after another 10 days in the field:
The herds seem to be thriving. There are new-ish calves and lots of mud wallowing. The eles really seemed jovial and happy.
3 / 7
All the herds seem to be spending a lot of time in the Harvestvale section of the reserve. There are still 3 matriarchs with GPS collars (Half Moon, Beauty, and Bukela), and the BTEH team has tracked them over the past year in a sort of migration pattern with the seasons. Last year, Bukela’s herd was very cautious about crossing over into their new territory, so it could be that the Kariega West herd has benefitted most with the new habitat.
They’ve made new friends and acquaintances. One of the most beautiful things to observe was that all the herds seem to be affiliating, if not intermingling. Time will tell whether this leads to new mini-herds or one giant one.
The bulls are roaming about in bands of 2s and 3s, and even these guys have crossed clans. We observed Matchstick hanging around with Holy Moly, and Sean (one delegate from each of the herds). Maybe Matchstick (from Harvestvale) is playing mentor – or host – to the other two (from KW).
Kambaku was in musth. He’s from the Kariega West side. It seemed probable that he mated with Mavis (from Harvestvale), so the bulls are probably enjoying the fact that they have more ladies to choose from.
Exciting news.
Last year, I left feeling like there had to be an easier way to ID individual elephants. So I organised a Hackathon team to work on an AI model that would help speed up and automate the identification process. While we didn’t fully solve the problem for Hackathon, we came close… and that led to a partnership of sorts between our Hackathon team, Bring The Elephant Home, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, and WildMe, the internationally-known NGO that works to identify and track endangered species worldwide. To date, WildMe’s WildBook population monitoring doesn’t have elephants in their re-ID model because they didn’t have a large enough data set to train the AI. So through this collaboration we are going to first train their re-ID model to include elephants, and then work on a mobile app that can be used in the field.
To say that we are very excited is an understatement!
More exciting news.
All research points to the fact that habitat expansion leads to thriving herds, lower environmental impact, less human/elephant conflict, less human intervention needed for elephant population control, and a healthier ecosystem for many of the interdependent species in the area. Together with the Elephant Reintegration Trust, BTEH is working on creating the world’s first elephant rewilding reserve. BTEH also supports initiatives to create an “elephant corridor” in the Eastern Cape that aims to pull down more fences between private reserves and build a network of connected wild spaces up to Addo National Park.
This year’s program felt like both a summation of research as well as a lens into the future. Many thanks to Antoinette and Brooke at Bring The Elephant Home for creating these exciting programs to promote elephant wellbeing and more successful human-elephant coexistence.
More to follow, with photos and stories, from an amazing 10 days with the elephants and the BTEH volunteer team.
They say the ideal holiday length is 10 days. You need 4 days to decompress from the real world, a few days to deep dive into the present, and a day or so to get ready to go back to reality. By dia cuatro, I felt a shift, whether it was the whales, a surrender to the humidity, or the fauna, I felt like I was on a proper escape from the real world.
My last day of diving was a Friday. The currents were shifting with the moon, bringing higher tides and more surge, which could mean lower visibility. But as we were getting ready for our first dive, a manta ray swam directly under the boat, chasing plankton on top of the reef at the el Diablo dive site.
I’ve dived in Thailand, Burma, Zanzibar…but I’ve never seen a manta underwater. These creatures are as graceful as they are massive (giant manta ray wingspans can be nearly 9 metres or almost 30ft!), yet they eat the tiny stuff: krill and plankton. This was going to be an interesting dive!
The ocean did not disappoint: we were graced by 3 giant mantas in total, an aloof pair travelling together and a solo one who seemed to really enjoy swimming over our bubbles. The sheer size of these animals is breathtaking; absolutely enormous, yet they fly overhead like chubby kites.
4 / 6
This day made up for every other thus far!
And I had 2 days left for wandering, birdwatching, critter-finding, and hammock lolling before needing to wrap up and get back to reality.
The Bahìa Drake trail is a path that follows the line where the sea meets the jungle, and runs many kilometres from Drake Bay down the coast towards Corcovado National Park. It was brutally hot out, so I walked about 30 minutes, landing on a beach inhabited by a fleet of college spring breakers. I quickly retreated to another little beach, completely quiet save a few thousand hermit crabs skittering around the sand.
I spent my remaining time in Drake Bay trying to slow down time. I knew that when I got back, the pressures of an impending product launch would be all-consuming. So I sat and watched while a small company of scarlet macaws amassed in a mango tree to gorge on the unripe fruit. I watched as giant iguanas appeared out of nowhere to slowly yet lithely scamper up trees. I stalked hummingbirds and a handful of different kinds of tanagers.
5 / 11
And like that, the week was up. The trip back was without issue, though I felt more nervous travelling back into the US than I did leaving it. My passport has a somewhat chequered history, and the current news cycle didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. This too shall pass.
Awesome souvenirs.
I got a text message from one of the French guys on the dive boat a couple of days after I got home. “Awesome souvenirs,” he texted. I had sent some of the manta photos and videos to the group. And it made me smile. I think we have it all wrong here…the word souvenirs in French means memories.
After diving a few days, I joined a tour to the massive Corcovado National Park (42,000+ hectares of land area). They’ve somewhat commoditized and package-ized the outdoor experiences here, which ruffled some of my meander-leaning feathers. This was before the bad dive and the whales, so I was still uncertain of my feelings for the place overall. But I went in with an open mind, a camera, a lot of water, and a desire to see some cool critters.
Check-in at 5:45, load onto the boat at 6, disembark and check-in at the ranger station, bag check for illicit food and plastic (Corcovado is very strict), and we’re ready to go into the park. In my group of 10 was a very nice Italian couple, a trio of French women, and a few others. We walked the trails slowly, with the guide stopping every 50 metres or so to point something out. It felt like he was acting the “guide” part a bit, with a flourish of his scope each time we stopped. Despite the showmanship and the production value, the trails were nice and we managed to see some indigenous species: 2 sloths, 3 tapirs, a smattering of birds and reptiles, a coatimundi, an agouti, and a partridge in a pear tree. Actually, a partridge-type thing (a tinamou), a great curassow, a couple of crested guans, a chachalaca (which is a great sighting if for the name alone), and others.
6 / 7
All-in-all, it felt canned. Like walking through a ‘nature park experience’ rather than hiking through primary and secondary rainforest. And, while I’m not regretful that I went, I’d likely sign up for a different experience if I go again. When I got back to Drake Bay, I booked some time with a local guide to go birdwatching.
The highlight of the day: a couple of Imperials (the local beer) with the Italian couple, some very decent ceviche, and fun conversation, culminating in them urging me to reconsider my domicile in these very bizarre times.
I rode out the hottest heat of the afternoon on the balcony of my hotel room doing some napping and lazy birdwatching from the hammock. The cacophony begins at dusk, when the cicadas announce the exact moment of sunset. It’s amazing, really, the scissor-like crescendo of their song. Track 2 to the evening symphony is the squawking chorus of scarlet macaws as they make their way, 2-by-2 into the jungle to sleep.
I met up with the local birding guide the next day with honestly low expectations after my Corcovado experience. But the magic of the whales prevailed and it ended up being a lovely, if a tad wet bird walk (we got caught in a tropical downpour while looking for toucans), making the memory better, if soggy.
7 / 7
If you are in Drake Bay, I highly recommend William Mora Gomez as a guide. He knows the area like the back of his hand, and his passion for birds and local wildlife shines through.
We ended up going on 2 outings, each time seeing more and more local birds and wildlife. The 2nd walk we took, William had rescued a baby white-face capuchin earlier in the day. The little monkey had gotten zapped on an overhead wire, and William reunited him with his troop. We walked by the same area a couple of hours later and the monkeys were still there, maybe waiting to give some good photo ops in gratitude. I’m anthropomorphizing of course, but it’s nice to wonder if they remember the good humans.
This inspired me to take my own late afternoon walks in-between lazing and diving. Birdwatching is good for the spirit. Looking through a viewfinder focuses your attention and silences the ridiculous chatter in your mind. A nonsense self-conversation about what’s going to happen in 4 days when you’re back in the real world has no chance against a chance sighting of a red-lored Amazon parrot with mate sitting on a nest, close encounters with rufous-tailed hummingbirds, cartoon-ish sightings of fiery-billed aracaris and yellow-throated toucans. Lineated woodpeckers.
It was during these walks, despite the heat, despite the prices (I still have no idea how people without a hefty vacation budget can afford to live there), despite the touristic-centricity, that I came to really appreciate the Pura Vida, pure life, aspect of Costa Rica.
There is a concept in my yoga practice called Iccha: the willingness to allow something, or the opening up to what might be. It had been a long time since I’d really, purely tapped into this energy and it felt like my spirit was trying to come home.
