Matt
“Your wetsuit has some holes in it.” Jacob Kelly told me. “So it’s going to be a little colder for you.”
It was May and we were standing on the banks of the Kananaskis River in the mountains between Calgary and Banff, Canada. The day before it had been snowing. I had finished photographing the surfers for Tourism Calgary and was about to try river surfing in the barely-above-freezing water.
That was not what I wanted to hear.
As I drove down Highway 93 from Canada to my photography assignment for the Chamber of Commerce in a city I’d visited once or twice as a child, I had no idea how many awesome things to do in Kalispell I was about to discover.
If you look at a map, Kalispell, MT, is a dot just south of the Canadian border that sits at the junction of two squiggly yellow lines (highways) that wind through enormous swathes of green (national parks) and splotches of blue (lakes). Notable points of interest on the map have names like Lonepine, Lost Trail, and West Glacier.
It’s almost like the people who named these places were trying to make it sound as desolate as possible.
That’s my kind of place.
I met Rita in Batad, one of the small villages perched among the 2000-year-old rice terraces of the jagged Cordillera mountain range on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.
No roads reach the mountain village. To get to Batad my friends and I hired a jeepney in Banue and rode an hour along a windy dirt road to the trailhead where we disembarked. We hiked an hour down the steep rocky trail into the village.
Most of the villages in this part of the Philippine Cordillera can only be reached on foot.
When I was invited on a blogger trip sponsored by Singha to try out their signature Singha concert experience, I figured “Why not?” My buddies Ian and Erick were also going on the trip and not much happens in the sleepy little beachside village 3hr southeast of Bangkok where I live.
I thought it would be a fun night out, but I wasn’t expecting much
Man, was I in for a surprise.
Photo: Moyan Brenn /Flickr
The depictions of vast, barren lands north in of the wall in the series are mostly set in the Earth’s own real-life Land of Ice and Fire: Iceland.
Sitting on the fissure between two tectonic plates Iceland’s ice-covered landscape includes towering mountains, sprawling valleys, active volcanoes, glacial lagoons, natural hot springs, ice caves, and ferocious geysers.
These 34 insane Icelandphotos capture the surreal beauty of one of the world’s most epic geographic wonders. I’ve written before about my desire to take an Iceland vacation, and these photos just make me want to even more.
Before we get to the photos, check out this short (one-minute) video, which highlights the beauty of the country beautifully.
A lot of my travel blogger friends are always on the move. They count the number of new countries they visit each year and many seem to have the goal of visiting every country in the world.
I don’t.
Yes, it’s another one of those ‘things I’m going to do in 2016’ blog posts. But, I think you’ll find this one different from most.