Site-seeing in South Africa | Travels through a geek's mind

A cold Easter in the Free State

As I mentioned in my previous post, we spent the long weekend away from home visiting the beautiful Golden Gate Highlands national park in the Free State. Other than gushing about the beauty and complaining about the bitter cold, I thought I’d share my five tips from the weekend.Yes, and some (mostly HDR ’cause I’m a little obsessed at the moment) photos.

If you’re visiting Clarens (which you should!), don’t pay R60 for a pretentious breakfast. Go to the Roter Hahn Bierstube Und Deli and enjoy a very wide choice of German beers with an even better meal.
Pack lots of blankets. Then another one. Also, a hot water bottle.
Take a good single malt with, it fights off the cold.
If you’re camping in a spot that doesn’t get a lot of sun, stay in bed ’till the sun hits your tent.
Visit the vulture restaurant on the Oribi loop drive. Maybe you’ll have better luck than we did and see some of these amazing birds.

A mountainous view from the Glen Reenen rest camp reception area

Looking back towards Glen Reenen rest camp from the vulture restaurant’s parking area.

An experimental HDR panorama of a watering hole set in the mountains

An experimental HDR panorama of a view on the mountains from the Blesbok loop drive

Another HDR experiment, the golden light on the left of the cliff face is from the setting sun

Some people in the image to add scale to the mountain side 🙂

A last view on the iconic colours of Golden Gate

We’re spending the Easter weekend in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park. Stunning mountains and freezing temperatures are the first two things that come to mind. These two panorama images, taken on my HTC One, were a spur of the moment experimentation with HDR. I’m quite happy with the results.

Full report back at a later stage (when not posting from my phone and dependent on patches of signal).

UPDATE: Photos and a few tips in the next post.