Saturday, December 8, 2007
Chile – Rebellious State
To many people Chile sounds like quite an exotic place – and in a number of ways this is true! It is situated in the very west of South America and unlike any other country in the world it is more or less a mere strip of land; it reaches about 4,300 km from north to south but is less than 200 km wide on average. It is bordered by the Pacific in the west and the Andes in the east. The logical conclusion is that Chile must comprise all types of climate and landscape, from coastal to high mountain regions.
In Northern Chile you will find summits with over 6000 m, many of them of volcanic origin. If you move towards the coast you'll end up in the mighty and quite famous Atacama Desert. It is one of the driest regions of the earth with rainfalls only once every couple of years. For a long time in the past it was famous for its resources of saltpeter ("Chile saltpeter"!), a chemical needed for the production of black powder, explosives and fertilizer. Today it is its vast and easily accessible resources of copper that people are after. And the dryness has another advantage: The air is very clear and clam thus making this area a perfect place for oberservatories – in fact, some of the largest telescopes of the world are to be found in the Chilean mountains.
Okay, let's move further down to the south, what do we have here? The climate is more or less Mediterranean, agriculture works out nicely and therefore it is no surprise most of the 16 million Chilean people live here. Don't forget Chile isn't wide! So all cities and settlements that are not situated directly at the coast are likely to be surrounded by mountains – the capital Santiago with over 5 million inhabitants is no exception.
There aren't many people living in the harsh South – lots of rain, storms, etc. and many islands at the coast. The southernmost point of the continent is the notorious, infamous Cape Horn. Prior to the opening of the Panama Canal all ships had to sail through these Arctic waters. By the way, Chile claims a good portion of Antarctica!
The political history of the country is very diverse; the most recent and hopefully last cruel chapter ended just 1990 with the retirement of long-term dictator Augusto Pinochet. Right now the country's economy grows at fast pace, partly due to the high copper price on the world market. Let's hope things continue this way!
For all those of you who have followed this blog regularly it is clear that Chile, too, must have been one of the many Spanish colonies, although for a number of reasons – like the difficult terrain especially in the country's South – there were countless wars over time. Official language is Spanish, but the pronunciation is so different from regular Spanish that some claim it's an own language.
Interesting! But what's there suitable for the World Scenic Flights? Well, the most obvious and stunning place certainly is the Easter Island (Rapa Nui) – its history is a thriller and features more than one collapse of its civilization. Known around the world are the mighty stone statues called moai. We'd certainly have liked to go there and come back with most incredible reports for you, but unfortunately the flight to this place was definitely not within our budget – it is a real killer.
Okay, then what's the next best solution? Given the short amount of time at our disposal we had to look for a good spot in the vicinity of Santiago. The capital is situated in a bowl of 50 km diameter surrounded by high mountains; this just adds to the usual smog problem of big cities since the wind cannot blow away part of the air pollution. Compared to other cities of the same size Santiago doesn't offer much. The skyline is humble, there are no real sights – most tours would take you to wine-growing or skiing areas in the Andes. No good for us, so what else do we have?
There are two hills in Santiago; the bigger one has been transformed into sort of a recreation area. A cable car of the Francisco/USA type takes you to a platform on top. Like at the Great Wall in China it was a nightmare to queue up with a 90-size helicopter and all our baggage. Even more so because police and our taxi driver had warned us there were many thieves who would just snatch your cameras or other luggage.
Once on top you have a good view over the city – but with lots of trees in the foreground and security guys all over the place. In lack of any better ideas we took a gondola from one part of the hill to the next one; before descending to the station we saw a serpentine road on the back side of the hill – there seemed to be a lot less trees, probably because it was the northern side on which the sun burns down all day long. Was it hot? Yep, something around 30 °C. Certainly better than freezing, but not comfortable either.
After a while we actually found the winding road and walked till we'd discovered a place with a good view over the town. It wasn't as good as downtown with at least a few skyscrapers in the financial district, but certainly there was something to it. Have a look at the picture! Quite cool and it reminds you of the Mojave Desert in California/USA, just much more populated.
The people were really nice. During the flight cars stopped, everybody got out and wanted to have a look at the helicopter. Some guys were so enthusiastic they wanted to have a go with it themselves; well, as everybody knows that'd have ended in a disaster so we just did another flight for them because we hadn't taken any still shots yet anyway.
The AFD panorama didn't work out well this time; too strong contrasts leaving you with a black picture in the shadow areas or with clearly overexposed shots in sunlit spots (remember you must not change any properties while shooting the complete panoramic scene including sky and ground!). We tried the whole range of possible camera settings, but no way; it was worse than at the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
But anyway, Chile was a great stop and the last one in South America. Next is Canada – Niagara Falls, what else!
Labels: Chile, city panorama, desert, gondola, heat, Santiago
Monday, November 12, 2007
Ayers Rock – Spirit of the Aborigines
The next day we got up at 04:30 AM (don't ask when we went to bed!) in order to drop our rental car before boarding the plane to the Australian Outback. Due to a little confusion at the filling station (the rental company had no signs in the car at all what fuel it uses) we ended up with the wrong fuel in the tank – and broke down a kilometer later, still four kilometers away from the airport. It was clear we'd miss the flight; luckily a nice guy from Peru helped us and took Saskia to the airport. While she arranged that Qantas gave us a later flight I was standing in the rain for 2 hours waiting for a tow truck and dealing with the rental car company. Shit happens!
Ayers Rock is simply amazing! In the language of the local Aborigines it is called Uluru; not too far from it lie The Olgas (Kata Tjuta), another interesting rock formation and significantly larger than Ayers Rock. Both were formed about 800 million years ago in the same geological process; the whole land was flooded several times, and mud, sand, gravel, pebbles, rock, etc. accumulated in depressions. The whole mixture got heavily compacted (we're talking about geological time spans here!) and was finally pushed back to the surface. Erosion formed the structures visible today; and yes, this means we just see the tip of a much larger formation extending a couple of kilometers down into the earth. Please note that unlike Kata Tjuta the Uluru mainly consists of arcose sandstone; its original color is grey, but it contains a significant amount of iron minerals. The weathering process forms iron oxides which account for the nice red color; the whole mountain and desert around are rusting, if you want. :-)
Ayers Rock is about 350 m high (The Olgas over 500 m) and has been declared world natural heritage by the UNESCO (yes, these guys are everywhere! It is a mere matter of time until the whole planet is a UNESCO world something heritage …).
The local resort is called Yulara; it's basically a couple of hotels around a ring road including a supermarket and a filling station. That's it, and you won't find anything else in a radius of several hundred kilometers. The main language there is German! :-)
We inspected our baggage and found that the "fragile" stickers of the airline actually mean "please drop it extra hard!" Repairing the Three Dee MP-XL took about three hours, but it was nothing that couldn't be fixed. On this occasion we discovered that the main drive wheel showed strange signs of wear (see picture). The teeth in four parts of the gear wheel were heavily worn leaving big grooves between what's left of the original teeth. The four areas are the consequence of a slight noncircularity of the drive wheel (that's nothing unsual). As to what causes this strange kind of abrasion effect we're not absolutely sure. We have marked everything and will inspect it after every flight.
BTW, our last FP 4900 mAh pack was significantly ballooned after the air transport from Sydney to Ayers Rock – this is actually the first real indication that the constant transport under low pressure conditions may be (one of) the problem(s). The spare packs from Rainer Hacker (fedexed by Nicolas and BBT) should reach us Tuesday evening in Hawaii.
Both Uluru and Kata Tjuta are sacred in Aborigine belief and they were given back to them by the Australian government in 1985. Today the whole area is a national park; you can visit it for a fair entrance fee but have to follow the rules which means don't leave the marked paths, only stop in special viewing areas, etc. Not so good for flying; but then, there weren't too many people around so you could just jump over the fence or walk a little into the desert. Temperature? We had everything from 10 to 30+ degrees centigrade.
Okay, are the flights a homerun then? Not really, for several reasons. First difficulty is the weather; at least during our short stay it kept changing constantly. The funny thing is that the clouds appear out of nowhere within half an hour, but they do not move. After some time they simply dissolve and rematerialize somewhere else. The very moment it gets cloudy the wind freshens up to a point where your cap gets blown off; this can happen within less than five minutes. The next thing is, clouds cast big shadows onto the Rock – and this makes it look very dull in the picture.
The bottom line of all of this is: Find a good spot to fly where the Rock is not too near (so it'll fit into the picture) but still looks impressive, then wait in the car for as long as it takes, and when the lighting situation seems to get well jump out and fly.
The hotels at Yulara Resort provide (expensive) internet access; you get a fast download connection, but the upload is as slow as 2 KB/sec. which means most programs give up due to timeout when uploading pictures. This was the reason why we couldn't update the blog for three days. But transfer of the digital material to the computer, picture screening and selection, then post production and finally data backups kept us over-busy anyway. It's insane how much time such straight forward computer work takes – one day is nothing at all!
All in all the trip to Ayers Rock was both a success and adventure. To those of you appreciating the silence of a desert, the only sound being caused by the wind flowing over the landscape, combined with a clear vision till the "end of the world", we can only recommend this place.
The very cool image above is a pure HeliGraphix shot outside the WSF. Apropos, don't forget to check out our regular website as well! In our latest video we explore what happens if you fly with your R/C helicopter through a car wash. :-)
Labels: Aborigine, Australia, Ayers Rock, breakdown, desert, main drive wheel, national resort, Outback, repair, Uluru, Yulara
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