Cape Verde trip: snippets

I have just returned from a press trip to Sal island in Cape Verde – a group of islands in the Atlantic about 500km west of Senegal. The focus was a ground-breaking ceremony for The Resort Group‘s Tortuga development (see BIW news release), and it was a tiring trip.

As BIW’s PR guy, I flew out from London Heathrow on Friday, changed flights and met a journalist contact in Lisbon, landing on Sal in the early hours of Saturday morning. After grabbing about seven hours’ sleep, we met up again, had breakfast and then killed time until meeting our Resort Group contacts for lunch in a nearby hotel. This gave time for questions before the ceremony itself. This was followed by some formal speeches, champagne, a barbecue/buffet at a nearby restaurant, then back to the hotel, get changed, midnight taxi to Sal airport and jump on a plane back to Lisbon. I finally got back to London Heathrow at about 11am Sunday, having slept for about two of the previous 27 hours!

Flip video

Having read lots about Flip video cameras, I bought one at London Heathrow on Friday (at about £80, I figured I wouldn’t be making a big dent in my bank balance if I didn’t get along with it – my daughter got one for Christmas too). I gave it a try on Saturday, videoing the Hotel Riu Garopa during the morning and then recording images of the ground-breaking ceremony, in between taking some photos of the event with a digital SLR. This morning, I have been experimenting with editing my efforts and – as a social media fan – posting the results to YouTube (hotel here – a bit rough and shaky, mind, though I like the music I found on Soundclick.com).

I used to carry a small tape recorder when I needed to tape interviews, but I reckon the Flip would be a valid alternative for anything up to 60 minutes, particularly as you could also show extracts of the person speaking, gesturing, and what he/she was pointing at, etc.

@tubejubilee

My journey to London Heathrow was disrupted due to “a person under a train at Finchley Road” (Jubilee Line) and “earlier signalling problems at King’s Cross” (Piccadilly Line). Coming back yesterday, the Jubilee Line had been suspended between Waterloo and Stanmore for engineering works, so I had to re-route slightly. If only I’d known about the Twitter feeds that now exist for most of the lines!

Speaking of Twitter, New Civil Engineer magazine says it has got its RSS fixed and that its Twitterfeed is worth looking at again (see previous post).