https://pajac.sk/blog/Recent content in Photo Stories on Pajac SlovenskyHugoenSat, 22 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://pajac.sk/blog/iceland-ring-road-midnight-sun/Sat, 22 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://pajac.sk/blog/iceland-ring-road-midnight-sun/<p>In February, photographers come to Iceland to chase the dark. In June, you come to escape it. For two weeks this June I drove the Ring Road clockwise from Keflavík, and in all that time I never once saw a proper night. The sun would dip toward the horizon around midnight, hang there sulking in a wash of orange, and climb straight back up. My tent glowed pink at 2 AM. I stopped wearing a watch and started reading the day by hunger instead of light.</p>https://pajac.sk/blog/svinafellsjokull-farthest-frame/Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://pajac.sk/blog/svinafellsjokull-farthest-frame/<p>This is the story of the photograph that now fronts the <a href="https://pajac.sk/gallery/iceland-aerial-2024/">Bird Perspective</a> gallery, and of the twenty-one minutes of flying it took to bring it home.</p> <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/leaflet@1.9.4/dist/leaflet.css" integrity="sha256-p4NxAoJBhIIN+hmNHrzRCf9tD/miZyoHS5obTRR9BMY=" crossorigin="" /> <figure class="trip-map-figure"> <div id="tripmap-svinafellsjokull_flight" class="trip-map" style="height:480px"></div><figcaption>One Flight over Svínafellsjökull, 15 June 2024</figcaption></figure> <script src="https://unpkg.com/leaflet@1.9.4/dist/leaflet.js" integrity="sha256-20nQCchB9co0qIjJZRGuk2/Z9VM+kNiyxNV1lvTlZBo=" crossorigin=""></script> <script> (function () { var stops = JSON.parse("[{\"country\":\"\",\"dates\":\"Launch\",\"end\":false,\"images\":[],\"lat\":64.00156,\"link\":\"\",\"linkText\":\"Open gallery\",\"links\":[],\"lon\":-16.88006,\"name\":\"Launch\",\"start\":true,\"text\":\"Up from the moraine at the glacier's snout, straight into the wind pouring down off Vatnajökull.\"},{\"country\":\"\",\"dates\":\"Outbound · into the wind\",\"end\":false,\"images\":[\"/images/iceland-aerial/glacier-ogive-bands-icefall.jpg\"],\"lat\":64.0194,\"link\":\"/gallery/iceland-aerial-2024/\",\"linkText\":\"Bird Perspective gallery\",\"links\":[],\"lon\":-16.8193,\"name\":\"The Push Up-Glacier\",\"start\":false,\"text\":\"Six minutes and forty-three seconds of continuous headwind transit, filmed the whole way. 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Silfra is a flooded crack in Þingvellir National Park where the North American and Eurasian plates are pulling apart — about two centimetres a year, roughly the speed your fingernails grow — and for forty minutes I got to fly through the gap.</p> <h2 id="a-crack-in-the-world">A Crack in the World</h2> <p>Silfra opened in 1789, when a swarm of earthquakes rearranged this edge of the rift valley, and it has been slowly filling with the strangest water in Iceland ever since. What pours through the fissure is meltwater from Langjökull, the glacier fifty kilometres north — except it doesn&rsquo;t <em>pour</em> at all. It seeps. Every drop spends somewhere between thirty and a hundred years filtering through porous lava rock before it wells up in the fissure, and by the time it arrives it is about the purest natural water on the planet. You can drink it mid-dive. I did. It tastes like cold, and like nothing.</p>https://pajac.sk/blog/mauritius-sugar-salt-seven-colours/Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://pajac.sk/blog/mauritius-sugar-salt-seven-colours/<p>Mauritius sells itself as a honeymoon brochure, and for the first hour off the plane it obliges: sugarcane to the horizon, sega music on the car radio, a lagoon the colour of toothpaste. We landed in the first days of May, at the hinge between the wet season and the austral winter, and drove the length of the island north to Grand Baie — on the left, past temples and cane trucks, in a hire car that would end up doing far more work than any beach towel. Ten days later I flew home convinced that the brochure undersells the place. The interesting island starts where the resort lawns stop.</p>https://pajac.sk/blog/zanzibar-spice-farm-morning/Wed, 11 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://pajac.sk/blog/zanzibar-spice-farm-morning/<p>Three days after the safari loop closed in Nairobi, the dust of <a href="https://pajac.sk/blog/kenya-tanzania-safari-from-nairobi/">five parks</a> still in my camera bags, I traded savanna for ocean and flew out to Zanzibar. Most people come to the island for the beaches. I spent my first proper morning nowhere near one — half an hour inland from Stone Town, in the farm belt around <strong>Dole</strong>, where the air itself is seasoned.</p> <p>They call Zanzibar the Spice Island, and it isn&rsquo;t a marketing line. In the nineteenth century the clove plantations here were valuable enough that the Sultan of Oman moved his entire capital from Muscat to Stone Town to sit closer to them. Cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and pepper built the island&rsquo;s fortunes — and its tragedies — long before tourism arrived. Today the great plantations have shrunk to family farms, and the farms have learned to harvest visitors as well as spices. I expected a tourist trap and got a botany lecture you can eat.</p>https://pajac.sk/blog/kiwengwa-carpenter/Tue, 10 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://pajac.sk/blog/kiwengwa-carpenter/<p>Some sessions you plan for weeks. This one I didn&rsquo;t plan at all — it simply happened, one warm October afternoon on the beach at <strong>Kiwengwa</strong>, on Zanzibar&rsquo;s east coast.</p> <p>We had come to Kiwengwa for the obvious reasons: white sand, turquoise water, the reef at low tide. But halfway down the beach, between the palms and the tide line, stood a workshop — a few rough poles, a plank bench, a thatch of shade, and a back wall made not of wall but of <strong>Tingatinga paintings</strong>, hung in rows, their colours shouting cheerfully over the blue behind them.</p>https://pajac.sk/blog/kenya-tanzania-safari-from-nairobi/Sun, 08 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000https://pajac.sk/blog/kenya-tanzania-safari-from-nairobi/<p>In October 2017 we set out from Nairobi on a two-week loop across two countries and five great parks of the East African Rift — Nakuru, the Masai Mara, the Serengeti, Ngorongoro and Amboseli. Every park had its own character and its own light; this is the trip the way it unfolded, park by park.</p> <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/leaflet@1.9.4/dist/leaflet.css" integrity="sha256-p4NxAoJBhIIN+hmNHrzRCf9tD/miZyoHS5obTRR9BMY=" crossorigin="" /> <figure class="trip-map-figure"> <div id="tripmap-kenya_tanzania_trip" class="trip-map" style="height:500px"></div><figcaption>Kenya &amp; Tanzania — October 2017</figcaption></figure> <script src="https://unpkg.com/leaflet@1.9.4/dist/leaflet.js" integrity="sha256-20nQCchB9co0qIjJZRGuk2/Z9VM+kNiyxNV1lvTlZBo=" crossorigin=""></script> <script> (function () { var stops = JSON.parse("[{\"country\":\"\",\"dates\":\"Departure\",\"end\":false,\"images\":[],\"lat\":-1.2864,\"link\":\"\",\"linkText\":\"Open gallery\",\"links\":[],\"lon\":36.8172,\"name\":\"Nairobi\",\"start\":true,\"text\":\"The safari begins in Kenya's capital — the last tarmac before two weeks of dirt tracks and open plains.\"},{\"country\":\"Kenya\",\"dates\":\"1–2 Oct\",\"end\":false,\"images\":[\"/images/kenya-tanzania/nakuru-white-rhino-lakeshore.jpg\",\"/images/kenya-tanzania/nakuru-great-white-pelicans.jpg\",\"/images/kenya-tanzania/nakuru-rothschild-giraffe-feeding.jpg\",\"/images/kenya-tanzania/nakuru-baboon-mother-infant.jpg\"],\"lat\":-0.39,\"link\":\"/gallery/kenya-tanzania-2017/\",\"linkText\":\"Trip gallery\",\"links\":[],\"lon\":36.09,\"name\":\"Lake Nakuru\",\"start\":false,\"text\":\"A soda lake ringed by yellow-fever acacia: white rhino on the shore, rafts of great white pelicans, and troops of olive baboons.\"},{\"country\":\"Kenya\",\"dates\":\"2–4 Oct\",\"end\":false,\"images\":[\"/images/kenya-tanzania/mara-lioness-close-portrait.jpg\",\"/images/kenya-tanzania/mara-lion-pride-dawn.jpg\",\"/images/kenya-tanzania/mara-elephant-herd-escarpment.jpg\",\"/images/kenya-tanzania/mara-elephant-golden-grass.jpg\"],\"lat\":-1.41,\"link\":\"/gallery/kenya-tanzania-2017/\",\"linkText\":\"Trip gallery\",\"links\":[],\"lon\":35.07,\"name\":\"Masai Mara\",\"start\":false,\"text\":\"Lion country. 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