TheNHBushman.com

Last weekend, I took a shot of a “human faced spider” in Taroko Gorge (using my new Nikon D80). I’d never heard of this creature before so naturally I had to take a photo. It wasn’t until later on that someone told me this thing is dangerous.

Click this link to see the human face up close! Not recommended for the squeamish!

Nothing much going on lately to blog about. I got a new camera but the weather has been lousy for going out and using it. I am also getting a new DV camera in the next few days, but other than that, things have been slow. So, I decided to blog about something Hui-chen and I did a few months ago.

I enjoy good cigars, as well as pipe tobacco. When we visited my brother and my Mother in Florida, we went thorough Ybor City in the Tampa area.

Ybor City is a very cool, old world type community. Many Cuban people settled here in the 1950′s and brought their culture, food and skills with them.

Much of the signage is in Spanish. You can spend all day speaking Spanish if you like.

So, where did we go? To Havana Dreams Cigar Factory, of course! Many Cubans work in the US cigar trade, and especially in Ybor City. Here we see a roller making cigars the old fashioned way – by hand. Notice the form tool he is using for shaping the roll.

Surprisingly, the manager, Ernie, didn’t mind us shooting photos of his cigar rollers at work.

Here I am in the humidor, checking things out. Ernie is explaining some of the finer points about cigars that I did not know.

I bought some really excellent hand rolled “torpedoes” and they were great! Here you see Hui-chen and I posing in front of the store. If you look closely you can see Ernie taking our photo (reflection in the glass door).

You can see the full sized versions of these photos, beginning here.

I always blog on new teapots I get. This past weekend, Hui-chen and I were in Hualien. Readers of our blog know that I love Sanyi, and that is the place to go for wood products. Hualien is known for stone and mineral products in the same way.

This pot is made from “woodstone” and it does look like wood.

I also got a set of matching cups. Whenever you have the opportunity to get cups or a gongbei that matches your pot, you should!

This is a closeup of this amazing stone. In person these items really do look like they are made of wood – but they are all stone!

Readers of our blog know that its all about photos. No sense of blogging (web logging) on our own activities (as opposed to commentary on what others do, such as politicians) without actually showing you what we did through photographs. With the recent demise of my Nikon Coolpix 5700, I decided that it was time to upgrade.

I bought a Nikon D80 with a couple of lenses. You can look up the specs for yourself if you are interested, so let’s get to the photos. I am still learning the camera but after a few days I am already very impressed with it. I suggest that you visit my Flickr account and take a look at the full sized shots.

I love night shots. Naturally I was pleased when I took a few and found that the D80 does night shots very well! Here are a few shots taken in Hualien city.

All taken in ambient light, including this photo above. What I really like is that the D80 apparently can auto white-balance with mixed sources of different color temperatures.

I picked a great time to buy a new camera, because we visited Taroko Gorge this weekend. I’ll blog on this later but for now, check out these shots, many of them taken with difficult contrast situations. The D80 handled them well.

Using shutter priority, I slowed down the shutter speed to soften the water flow. I let the D80 handle the aperture.

Michael Turton took his vehicle to the Mistubishi repair shop to check it out after the accident. Work was halted when technicians found a snake had moved in while it was in the field!

I ran across these blogs recently. They are definitely worth checking out!

Andres is a pretty cool guy with an interesting background. Check it out.

This is Andres’ photo blog. Cool.

Tadpole, geocacher and blogger, with lots of interesting information.

Our good friend, Mr. Michael Turton joined us today to hunt a geocache. We planned on another cookout later in the day after the hunt.

UPDATE: Check out geocacher blogger Tadpole’s article on us here.

A beautiful area in Yong An. No matter what, it was a cool place to be today.

We were looking in a thicket because the GPS indicated that the cache was very close by. This looked like a good place to hide the cache.

More hunting in the deep thicket.

After some time searching, i decrypted the final clue on the geocache description sheet.

That led us to this tree. I hope that I am not giving too much away, but all this information is available online anyway.

There is it! Michael Turton was the first one to actually spot it. He said “does this look like a funny place for a rock to be?”

Bushman and Michael Turton pose with the geocache and my Garmin eTrex Vista-C Taiwanese version.

GPS with the geocache.

Contents of the geocache.

Out: the travel bug, top. In: a “rosette” casting. I work in the castings business and I always have unusual items like that. I am going to take the travel bug out of Taiwan in a couple of weeks. UPDATE: at the request of the travel bug owner, I have deleted this photo. Apparently, dishonest people might try to claim that they found it by using the serial number which could be clearly seen in my photo. That never would have occured to me, because of not only being dishonest, but also an incredibly stupid thing to do since the whereabouts could easily be confirmed by the next geocacher. Oh well.

Hui-chen, Michael and I pose at the geocache site.

One of the most important aspects of geocaching is to hide the geocache when you are finished. We packed everything up properly and then hid it where the owner had originally placed it. After that, we left to explore some other sites in the Yong An area.

Nearby are some of the wind generators that I have blogged on before. Michael Turton is also very interested in these machines so we went for a closeup look at them.

Unfortunately, while backing up along one of those impossibly narrow roads with no guardrails, Michael’s van slipped off the road and rolled onto a grassy marsh.

No one was hurt. But for a few moments, things were tense! I was in the passenger side and literally hanging over Michael, who was still seated in the driver’s seat. My seatbelt held me in position (and kept me from crushing Michael!). I opened the passenger door and Michael climbed out over me. I was deathly worried about my Hui-chen who was riding in the back seat. She hadn’t been wearing her seatbelt, but had grabbed the handle above the sliding door. She was standing up inside the van and was unhurt. I saw some smoke and told Michael that I was concerned about a fire and us not being able to get out in time. He couldn’t open the sliding door for Hui-chen to climb out of, so he ran around the back and opened the hatch. Hui-chen (and eventually I) walked out, unscathed.

The cooler! Oh man, all of our food for the cookout was in that cooler, not to mention the grill and everything else was scattered about. Not to worry though, this is Taiwan….

Michael goes back in to retrieve something from his vehicle.

“It could have been a lot worse.”

This is the tow truck operator that Michael called. One never knows how skilled someone may or may not be in Taiwan because no one is honest about their capabilities. Often, men brag about being able to do something, when in reality they can’t do squat.

This guy went to work right away, beginning with an assessment of the situation and a plan for recovering the vehicle. Once approved by Michael, he went to work.
He began by moving the vehicle away from the embankment. First he moved the rear end of the vehicle out. Here we see him setting up to move the front.

I’ve never seen anyone use logging hooks to capture the holes in wheel rims before, but this is how he moved the vehicle.

Then the tow operator rigged it up for the next operation….

Which was to flip the vehicle over! Notice how low the wheels suck into the ground. The soft ground really saved Michael’s van from more serious damage.

The two operator used a boom and 4 lifting straps….

And, demonstrating skill like I have never before seen, he set Michael’s van down on the road so gingerly, that I commented “he could diaper a baby with that crane!” I was very impressed with this man.

Up on the tow truck, the next stop was the gas station, where the tow operator demonstrated genuine concern for the condition of the vehicle. We added motor oil and water, which had leaked out due to it being on its side.

We were able to drive away. Those Japanese can build a car!

You can read Michael’s account here.