Trip to a fruit farm
Last weekend my family visited a fruit farm. We bought discounted tickets at a convention centre a few months prior and finally found time to make the journey. Every weekend before that involved going back to hometown or servicing the cars, so it was a nice break from the monotony. I also decided to bring a compact camera for taking photos (a Lumix FTC-25, nothing to write home about). I hadn’t got a chance to really take a picture with this camera in a while, so I was expecting some nice photos.
The place is around 2 hours away from our home. This meant that we had to go out quite early in the morning. At least as early as we could have, we went out at 8 a.m.
The place itself was fine. The parking has a small fee, understandable. The place seems to be recently opened, as evident of the clean toilets. The scenery near the parking is a valley where they mostly grow guava trees. The guava fruits were wrapped in plastic to make sure no pest would eat the fruit before it’s harvested.
The place is too big to be on foot only, so they provide a tram service (well, it’s a couple carts that’s hooked up to a tractor, but hey). It’s a unique experience going through the fruit farm in the tram while enjoying the scenery there.
The first stop of the tram is a checkpoint. There’s a cafe, some nice photo spots and also an animal farm. A decorated walkway that’s shaded by the trees connects all of them together. We walked through the walkway before going to the animal farm. There’s an additional fee there but it’s not expensive. The animal farm is the usual kind. Iguanas, hamsters, snakes. Also some chickens, goats, raccoons and hamsters. It’s quite nice touching and feeding all the animals there.
Next stop was the deer enclosure. There’s also ostrichs there. We gave them longbeans to snack on. They quite like it. Um that’s it really. Good stop, but I can’t write anything else :P
Then we went to a lake. A red clock tower can be seen near it, centering a roundabout. The activities there are boat related, offering canoeing, paddling or speedboat ride. We went with the speedboat. The ride lasted for around 15 minutes. We circled the lake for about 4 times, though it was nerve wracking seeing the water line get ever so close to the boat when it turns.
We ended the ride at a duck pond that’s in an enclosure. Umm that’s how I would describe it. The ducks really want bread, I can give you that. And that’s how I know ducks have sharp nails at the end of their webbed feet. There was also a place to shoot paintball bullets (I don’t know how to explain this either)
Another tram ride and we’re almost at the end of our trip. The last stop was a place to sort of eat and lounge at. There’s also a house replica there where they showcase old appliances like how it is from back then (though I forgot which time period they said). The place to eat wasn’t a building or on a concrete platform. Just some plastic table and chairs on gravel. Reminds me of wedding caterings.
There’s also a honey stand from across the road. They have multitude of honey, though not from other bees. More like flavoured honey. There’s one with ginger that doesn’t taste strongly of ginger, there’s garlic which is strong, and another with a herb that tastes very bitter. It took a good 5 minutes for the bitterness to wash away from my mouth.
The last tram ride brings us back to the parking spot. We were quite thirsty by that point so we went to the convenience store to buy some drinks. Apparently they sell local produce and products. Just a tad bit more expensive than what you could get from a supermarket, but it’s not like it’s robbing us with that pricing. Plus, support local produce? That’s enough justification really.
It was a pretty good trip overall. Quite a nice way to spend the time.
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tags: blog, trip, food, photos
Organising my photos
I’ve done quite the trip yesterday. That’ll probably be it’s own blogpost someday. One thing I will divulge here is that I used a compact camera instead of capturing the photos with a phone. It’s pretty nice having something for one specific purpose and nothing more. Plus I don’t check my phone that much during the trip because I’m holding my camera. Usually I’m glued to it.
Once we finished our trip we rested at home, which continued on today. Since we’re not going out I decided to organise all the photos that we took into an album on an external HDD we have. While I’m at it might as well put all the photos on my phone and the cloud (Google Photos) into that external hard drive as well. The HDD has a capacity of 2TB (not exactly 2TiB, more so around 1.8TiB), with barely anything on it. Also, I’m looking to empty my Google Photos anyway. It’s currently taking a space of 10GiB as of writing and I don’t want to pay for Google One or lose any emails sent to me.
So first things first, the camera photos. I’m fortunate to have a modern laptop that also has an SD card slot for some reason. Like a full size one. I know I’m thankful for that now; no need to buy an external adapter like all my other friends who’re into photography. I’d just have to copy the photos to my laptop and then transfer over it to the external HDD. All the photos took around 1GiB, thanks to each photo taking a whopping 6MiB. For comparison my phone only takes ~3MiB for each photo encoded in heic.
Now it’s Google Photos export. I just went to the settings in the Photos website and scrolled down to the section about data export. Following the process to create a data download. Originally I wanted to just have one archive to download, so I selected to have it be 50GiB size for the zip files. Unfortunately it failed, even when I selected it to be in tgz format. Guess I have to download several 2GiB zip files and unzip them separately.
Downloading and exporting it is just time consuming really. Other than pressing the download button 10 times it’s just waiting for the download and unzip those 10 files at once. All in all the export was around 20GiB (half of it was when Google Photos still offered free storage. Ah the bliss).
Then comes sorting the albums in the takeout with the ones in the camera. This is actually less hassle, as the export from Google Photos already separates the pictures into folders. All that I had to do on my end was copy and paste the folders into place. Well that and renaming the folders, I don’t like having spaces in my folder names :P
Oh yeah there’s also photos from my phone. For that one I transfer it to it’s own folder on the HDD and defer organising it to future me. How to transfer it is simpler than my camera. So when you connect your (Android) phone to your laptop you are given 3 options, one of which is to mount photos via MTP (which stands for Media Transfer Protocol). This means that your phone will only expose the photos. One ctrl-a ctrl-c ctrl-v later, and I have transferred all of the photos.
It’s nearing midnight as I’m finishing this blog post, and I would like to say that I have done all the transfers needed to my external HDD. It currently sits around 34.3GiB. Quite the storage, though somehow it feels less than other people’s. I’m not the type to take a pic of everything, so even on my phone, pictures aren’t taking most of my storage hostage. Maybe I should take more pictures now that I freed my storage somewhat.
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