Yup that’s right. That woody, twiggy, leafy woods swallowed my spectacles whole. We were doing an exercise in which we were to find our way back to the campfire at night navigating by the sound of a drum. I took my glasses off in order to tie my blindfold tighter round my head. It was only when I got back to the fire and that I realised my glasses were no longer in my pocket.

The next day a bunch of us returned to our starting spot and rewalked the route, scanning the ground for my glasses. (Thankfully I had some contact lenses with me which I wore instead). It was difficult to know where to look, because I didn’t know which way I had walked/crawled when I was blindfolded and disoriented. The one potential clue to location was that I was probably doubled over at the time, since if I’d been standing up straight they couldn’t have fallen out of my deep pockets. So we looked around areas where there were low level branches and twigs. That didn’t narrow it down much.

It also didn’t help that my glasses are brown and blue and silver. Kind of like the colour of the birch tree twigs littering the woodland floor. After a couple of unsuccessful day time searches, Dan – also a glasses wearer, who made it his mission to help me find mine – joined me on a night time search.

We hoped that perhaps I could manage to retrace the path I took by recreating the disorientation I felt at the time and that the torch light might reflect off the glass/metal parts. As Dan paced behind me shining the torch about, I stumbled, half crawling, through the woods. And look what we found.

They were a couple feet away from a spot we had stood in earlier in the day, where Dan had noticed a small branch that was broken in 2 places – indicating that this path had been trodden more than once. Luckily, no one trod on my glasses.

(Thanks Dan – I couldn’t have done it without you!)

Last week I received an email attachment from a friend in Vancouver of this stunning photo. (Click the image to get the full WOW! effect.) This is a view of downtown Vancouver skyscrapers shrouded in fog at sunrise, taken from Cypress mountain, one of the mountains (with ski slopes) which loom over the city.

There has been much debate about who took this photo because there were many photographers up on the Cypress Bowl road that morning (this one is good because it has labels identifying what can be seen above the fog) but I think people are missing the point of why this particular shot is so striking: seeing a city from above the fog or cloud is pretty cool, but something not completely unattainable in these days of jetting around the globe.

What makes this photo so remarkable is the tree in the bottom right hand corner, which indicates that the photo is taken on solid ground, not from a airplane. Realising this gives me a touch of vertigo, which isn’t so far from the feeling I get being in Vancouver and looking up at those enormous mountains (when they aren’t hidden by cloud, which is often.)

The photo I took (below) when I was visiting in December might help you get an idea of the geography – its taken from Queen Elizabeth Park which is south of downtown, so we are looking back in the towards the mountains on which the fog photographers stood. I think Cypress mountain is on the left of the dip in the mountains, where the two peaks are obscured by cloud.

If you are curious about who took the Vancouver under fog photo you can follow the trail I took starting here. Someone who’d been emailed the photo posted it on their own Flickr stream, which leads you here, where it gets credited to Scott Miller and the Vancouver Sun (a local paper that printed the image). A couple days later the same blogger corrected the credit to Blair Kent after someone recognised the photo and revealed the real author. (The Vancouver Sun have also since corrected their credit).

What really surprised me, is that a keen photographer with a brand new Canon EOS 5D Mark II didn’t already have an online photo-sharing account set up on which to post his photos. Perhaps if he had all this confusion wouldn’t have happened. Well, Blair Kent has finally caught up and has since set up his own Flickr stream. It goes to show you can never be sure when you are emailing a few friends some photos, that they won’t find their way into other people’s plagiarising hands.

The stilts on which the walkway is built are made of rusty-looking iron and blend in nicely with the surrounding tree trunks. The wooden bannisters/handrails are made from oak trees that have been blown down in gails at Kew. The flooring is a wire mesh so if you really want to freak yourself out you just look straight down!

Back on ground level, we were invited to listen to the sound of a Eucalyptus tree trunk. Several headphones hung from the branches of the tree, and listening to them, you could hear a kind of rushing/rumbling sound. It was difficult to fathom that this sound wasn’t just random disturbance on an amplifier, but a good excuse to hang around an utterly stunning tree for while.

See all of my recent photos from Kew Gardens on my Flickr stream.