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I have been working on some of the data I brought back with me. One experiment is to have a small video of the eruptions on Mount Yasur. They are very not perfect I know that. But I don’t want to be perfect anyway. 😉 And I am curious if this really works. You might have to click on the link ‚Mount Yasur‘ – No, it didn’t work. Have to check if I can somehow make work-   In addition I have created two panorama pics based on several pics that I took for that purpose. One is again Mount Yasur, the other one isRead More →

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In: Allgemein, Singapore
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Well, I better finish with my report of my vacation. 🙂 On the way back from Adelaide I had a 9 hour layover in Singapore. It is boring to spend that much time in the transit area although Changgi-Airport is one of the most entertaining and interesting to be at. So I contacted Jim whom I had met in Raja Ampat 5 years ago and he came to get me at the airport when I arrived from Adelaide. We went into the city to the Marine Bay Sands-Building and took the elevator up there. After some sightseeing we went to the restaurant to get aRead More →

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In: Allgemein
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Although I am already back home I still need to post pics of the ‚Adelaide‘-stop above water. You will find pics from the stop in Edithburg and then Adelaide. I was somehow no longer enthusiastic about seeing new places… guess it was a lot that I have seen over the weeks and there is only so much the brain can process. But I definitely would like to go back to South Australia and dive some more there. Here are the pics… next and last pics from the trip will be from Singapore where I had a 9 h-stop and friends came to get me atRead More →

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In: Adelaide
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When I woke up this morning around 6 it was raining hard… and I was cold… so after about 2 hours I was at the point to say ‚Let’s just return to Adelaide’… Dan came to get me at 9 and said ‚Let’s go to the Jetty and have a look.‘ That’s what we did. By the time we arrived there I had decided that I would probably kick myself once back home if I didn’t go in so we prepared and actually got in the water. It was 16° and we made it about one hour. Dan was going for a Tazzled frogfish firstRead More →

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In: Adelaide
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So this morning at 9 I was at the dive-shop where I met Dan who is my company for the weekend. We drove about 2 hours north to go south again. Actually we can see Adelaide from here in the distance. The wind picked up while we drove. Once arrived in Edithburg we brought our stuff to the caravan park where we are staying and then went to the dive-site where Dan had promised me to do his best to find a leafy seadragon. We got dressed and I found that I should have put on the wetsuit entirely because the legs were fine butRead More →

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In: Allgemein
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Arrived safely in Adelaide but I think I won’t ever again take an airport shuttle where I can’t decide the pick-up time myself. They picked me up 2 hours before departure time but then someone else still needed to be picked up. And then it was friday and we were stuck in the weekend-rush hour. Shuttle services should know that…. I arrived at the airport with less than one hour to go and the lines at the drop-off were long. 🙁 At security a guy asked me if I was OK because I looked stressed out… I had thought to eat at the airport beforeRead More →

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In: Allgemein
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Sorry, just taking my time today… nearly finished packing. In one hour I need to leave my appartment and then wait another 2-3 h till my shuttle to the airport is coming to pick me up. Flight to Adelaide at 6 PM. Tomorrow morning at 9 I have to be at the dive-shop for another 2 days dive-trip. Not sure where we are going as weather conditions do not seem to be favorable for the planned dive-sites. Well, nothing I can do about it. And as long as I see ONE leafy seadragon I’ll be happy. 🙂Read More →

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In: Sydney
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Yesterday when I started thinking about what to do I checked the weather forecast first. And the reason why I did the whale watching yesterday was the forecast of the wind…. So this morning I decided to do the Hop-On/Hop Off-thing to Bondi Beach. I am not usually a fan of the Hop on/hop off-tours and today just confirmed that again. Would have been cheaper to take a normal bus and it wouldn’t have made a big difference… I had been to Bondi-beach only once on my first visit to Sydney (2002? don’t remember the year) and was not too impressed then. So for todayRead More →

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In: Sydney
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So this morning when I woke up my throat was hurting and my sinusses were not working well either so I decided with a heavy heart to cancel today’s dives. The thing is… we had a clear blue sky yesterday but the wind was VERY cold. So it had not been a good idea to sit in the wet clothes between the dives without even a towel to protect my body. If I would fly home from Sydney I would have gone diving but that is not what I am going to do… well… as sad as it was I still think it was theRead More →

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In: Sydney
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Sorry, looks like I skipped one day of blogging and didn’t even realize it. Pics from yesterday will come later. I took it slowly yesterday. In the morning I had some washing to do and then I walked a bit around Darling Harbour. When I found that the Maritime Museum had an exhibition from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year-pics I went to see that. Wonderful pics! But other than that I just didn’t do anything as I needed some time to relax. This morning I took a taxi to the Abyss Dive shop which is a bit outside of Sydney. I had been divingRead More →

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In: Adelaide, Sydney, Vanuatu
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Well… it was a bit sad to leave Vanuatu but all vacation end sooner or later. Two last pics from there (not sure where the pics are that I made from the plane leaving Tanna). The first one is a landing plane and the second one is Jimmy, my buddy on the shore dives. 🙂 Left Tanna early in the morning and when I arrived in Port Vila I was told that my room was not ready and that check-in was at 2 PM – which was nearly 4 hours away. They didn’t only NOT make any effort to give me a room earlier thanRead More →

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In: Vanuatu
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You know what is heavenly? The first chocolate bar after three weeks… 😉 I am safely back in Vila and when I arrived at the hotel shortly after 10 they told me check-in was only at 2 PM. The hotels I usually know are flexibel and even if you have to wait for a bit they will clean a room for you. Not at the Melanesian in Port Vila. They made me wait nearly 4 hours and when I went back to reception at 2 they had already forgotten me (although I had been sitting in plain sight) AND my room was not ready. IRead More →

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Just got back from another visit to Mount Yasur and it was once again entirely different from my visit on sunday. It was my 4th visit to the volcano and each time was different. Unfortunately my flight to Vila was changed from 10 to 8 AM so I have to pack now instead of checking pics but tomorrow in Vila I will have lots of time to kill (and the internet-connection will be better too) so time enough to do all that once I am back in Vila…Read More →

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In: Vanuatu
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Today I had my last dive-day on Vanuatu. Did the first one with Jack on a new boat dive-site that they have done only three times so far. When we went down I saw lots of Dories there… 😉 No Nemo’s though. 🙂 It was a really good dive with about ten different nudibranches. Really cool. And then I couldn’t leave without going back to Circus with Jimmy and we were not disappointed. Apart from the fact that Jimmy found really cool very small stuff we found cannibal-nudis. One of the white with red dots was eating a seahare. I had seen the white oneRead More →

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In: Vanuatu
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So I went diving again this morning and the Blue Cave divesite is the least damaged I have seen so far. It is still damaged significantly but for the first time I saw a big coral fan and gorgonias. Jack found a wonderful nudi twice and I think the first one just showed her behind (I couldn’t see the other end) and the other one might show her head to the right (not entirely sure though). There were lots of featherstar-babies and you could see that the riff is coming back. When we went back they dropped me off at the jetty before going toRead More →

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In: Vanuatu
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Yesterday evening I went out again to take pics of the milky way but this time with my Olympus camera and the fisheye-lense. The sky was reddish in the background and I was wondering what it was till today I read on Facebook that this is a phanomenon in the South Pacific that comes up with a more or less intensity. Today two boat dives since I was lazy the past two days. You can see that the reef has major damage but you can see as well that it has started to come back. So it has been destroyed but it is not dead.Read More →

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In: Vanuatu
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This morning I had planned on going back in the water but at breakfast one of the girls told me that someone else had booked a tour that I was interested in so I quickly changed my plans. I was still tired from yesterday evening anyway so I took the rest of the day off as well. I wanted some more hammock-time this afternoon but not sure where my hammock on the beach has gone… After breakfast I met the honeymoon-couple from Brisbane with whom I was going on the tour to Lowinia village. So we started our drive via Lenakel (the biggest village on Read More →

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In: Vanuatu
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Today I took a day off (diving) and spent the morning in a hammock… 🙂 I wanted to go on one specific tour but the problem is that they don’t do it for just one person so I have to wait till someone else books it. So I went to Mount Yasur instead. This is an active volcano. Going there we had to go to the other side of Tanna and I realized that the island has changed a lot over the past two years. PAM destroyed it but after came the good. A lot of construction work has been done since, especially on theRead More →

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So yesterday eveing I went to participate in an ‚John Frum‘-excursion. This cult is some kind of religion only on the island of Tanna. I had thought that there would be a flag-raising (I had seen pictures of that) but that was not what happened. There was a gathering house in a village where 6 men with guitars were already sitting with some villagers around them. They started to sing then and people started to dance. After a while I realized that women were dancing on one side while the men were dancing on the other side. And the women were wearing special gowns thatRead More →