Tag Archives: Tauranga

Kayaking, New Zealand, Photography, Travel Planning

42. Tauranga – Whitianga

Tuesday, March 24: Changeable, with some dark clouds and rain around the middle of the day; starting and finishing sunny

On the Beach Backpackers, 46 Buffalo Beach Rd, Whitianga 3542, tel.: +64 7 866 5380, double/twin as single in a unit shared with just one other party; kitchen, living room, TV, fridge, large balcony with BBQ equipment shared (BBH, $38 + $3)

Liz gave me the whole rundown of her neighbourhood dispute this morning before I left; in any case I was in no particular hurry to get going. The plastic shop did in fact carry a salt-and-pepper shaker set but didn’t have any in stock; the cutlery set looked just as useful as the stuff I already had; but for $4 I got two cosmetic containers which were just larger than my filters and a snap top bottle obviously designed for some sort of liquid that could also be used for salt (the pepper part was not so important). Filled the tank & then I was on my way. Read more…

GPS Tracks, New Zealand, Photography, Tramping

41. Tauranga: Mt Maunganui

Monday, March 23: Cloudy with rain all the morning, becoming very much finer & warmer by the late afternoon

Tramping: Mt Maunganui, 6.3 km

Liz & Phil’s

The dogs (Airedale terriers) hadn’t woken me @ 5:00, but from about 7:45 onwards I was awake. Breakfast (and Liz insisted that there would have to be one, otherwise her business wouldn’t be a B&B) was cornflakes, coffee from a very expensive looking machine and at least tasted like something, toast, cantaloupe and some spreads which I didn’t have.

Perfect day for a technical day, and I started off by trying to synchronise the internal and external hard drives in terms of pictures. For D: to have the absolute essentials that would be the main folder with the processed images (all DNG & IMG – debarrelled and dechromaticised) and one subfolder with thumbnails. It has occurred to me during the day that PPP could work primarily with G: as the source and copy some files to the internal hard drive at the end of the day. If that were the case, then it would also be worth considering extending the postprocessing procedure beyond just ATM (advanced tone mapping). Read more…

New Zealand, Photography

40. Taupo – Rotorua – Tauranga

Sunday, March 22: Sunny at first, very cloudy in the early afternoon, then sunny again

Liz & Phil’s (airbnb, $48)

Breakfast was possible at the trucker’s place, as I had everything with me, and the free truckers’ coffee could be diluted with milk, the cereal finished off, and the bowl washed. Then it was off very early to Taupo to try to get accommodation for tonight but the i-site was not providing more than its usual service – no wifi hotspot, but, “You can try a café.” Yeah, right, which one. Taupo i-site seems to have won the prize for the worst service – any question you ask, you realise that the answer is the one you had already come up with anyway. No added value asking there at all. Read more…