Riding on my previous post about my long summer break in Portugal, today I decided to start recording my trip in Measuring Light.

I wasn’t sure how to start writing about this trip, such was the range of activities and pleasant experiences I went through for over 2 weeks. I decided that one single post to report everything would be too long a post and even difficult to manage if I am to include photos and videos of the 3 cameras I brought with me.

So what you are about to read is the first of several posts that I will roll out progressively, without any predefined schedule or time pressure. I will go with the flow, depending on my inspiration, motivation and available time.

Climbing Mount Pico

I decided to start with the highlight of my trip, which was the climb to Mount Pico.

You can find information from Wikipedia on Mount Pico here, if you are interested. If not, here is my summary: Mount Pico is located in Pico island, in the Azores archipelago. It’s Portugal tallest mountain, its peak sitting at 2531 meters above sea level.

Mount Pico is a volcano. Latest recorded eruption was in 1720.

Why do this?

You are right to ask. My other half and myself, we are not the kind of person who would sit all day in a sofa watching TV. I mean, we do it occasionally, but let’s say we are active and our lifestyles involve a number of sport activities, hiking being one of them.

Our motto is simple: do it now while we are still healthy and able to do it.

We love nature, we love the outdoors – something we cannot find in Macau, which is urban and densely packed. Nature and silence is a treasure to us. Wherever we travel, we always look for hiking treks and outdoor activities.

When planning this trip to Portugal, my girlfriend expressed her wish to visit the Azores. She had never been there. I had been to the Azores over 20 years ago, but only got to visit 2 of the total 9 islands of the archipelago. I was fine going there again, provided I would not visit the same 2 islands.

Since I’ve never been to Pico island, the idea to go there and then climb Mount Pico came natural to me. I recall challenging my girlfriend enthusiastically: let’s climb Mount Pico, Portugal’s tallest mountain!

Planning

I started researching and soon realized this would be no walk in the park. It would require some good planning. Climbing Mount Pico is a structured experience that involves some procedures to guarantee your safety.

Firstly, you can’t just show up and climb the mountain, you need to register yourself in base camp called Casa da Montanha. They will give you a GPS sensor which, in case you are lost, will be used by the rescue team to locate you. If proven you got lost due to your own fault, then you will have to pay for the rescue service.

Secondly, this is a long hike which may take up to 10 hours. Many things can go wrong during these 10 hours, namely rapid changing weather conditions. As they often say, up there you may find the 4 seasons of the year in one go. You need proper gear to handle cold, hot, wet and dry weather – you never know.

Then you need food and water in proper quantities to energize your body along the way.

If you are a meticulous, planning-oriented-control-freak kind of person like me, you start thinking about other potential risks and try to pre-empt everything to feel more comfortable and self-confident. But you can’t just load your backpack full of stuff for every possible scenario.

Get a certified guide

Need not reinvent the wheel to overcome the concerns above. You can actually hire a certified guide who will take you all the way up and down and give you his best advice. What else to make you feel safe and confident if not by bringing a guy who is actually experienced and knows how to do it.?

And, most importantly, to kill all your concerns so that you can spend every second of your climb enjoying the wonderful experience. This is what we did and frankly, to me this is a no-brainer.

There are amateur hikers who get lost up there because they decided not to hire a guide. Some people think they are brave, they are heroes and want to prove whatever point to everybody else. They know better, they think. These are the guys that during Covid refused to wear a face mask. Whatever.

We hired our guide from a company called Tripix several months in advance. I received from them a 30 page document with instructions and recommendations. It contained a comprehensive list of equipment we had to bring in our backpack.

Shopping

With this, we went shopping. Decathlon was a good place to get all the gear we needed. I take this opportunity to express my disregard to so-called sport stores here in Macau. If anything, those are fashion stores, not proper sport apparel stores. Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, you name it. Those are sport fashion, not sport apparel. And a total waste of time.

Decathlon is a proper sport apparel store. And a no-nonsense one. There is no fancy decor or poster of models wearing sport fashion gear with grafittis in the back. There is no coffee corner (yes, every trendy store needs a coffee corner serving lattes, macchiatos and green tea nowadays). Decathlon is no bullshit, straight to the point.

We bought our backpacks, wet, dry, hot and cold mountaineering clothes there. Good quality and reasonably priced.

Before our trip, we trialed our newly bought gear in a 2 hour, 10 km night walk in Macau. We wanted to make sure everything was ok. The strap adjustments of the backpacks, the hydration packs, rule out any hot spots or skin sensitivity issues from the fabric of our technical clothing. Last thing you want is to feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable during such challenging climb.

Which camera

I did consider the Hasselblad 907 100c to explore its ultimate 100MP photo quality. Furthermore, the XCD 4/28P lens with 22mm equivalent FOV made sense to me for wide landscape views. But the weight of the camera for this challenging climb was a concern and eventually made me change my mind.

After much deliberation, I decided to take the Sony RX1Rii. Full-frame, light and portable. Felt like the perfect camera for this occasion. But how about the 35mm lens, is it wide enough?.. Not a problem at all. More on this below.

Together with the Sony RX1Rii, I took the Insta360 X2 for some fun videos.

Just a quick note on a very useful accessory I used in this trip: the Peak Design Capture camera clip. I’m a big fan of Peak Design products, they really make your life easier. I’ve been using their straps and anchor links for many years now.

I had the Peak Design Capture camera clip attached to my backpack strap and my Sony RX1Rii felt 100% secure and rigid. And, best of all, instantly accessible whenever I wanted to shoot. Not having a strap around your body or the camera dangling around while you are hiking makes a hell of a difference. You feel totally free, you don’t feel any weight.

It works as advertised, you clip and unclip your camera in a few seconds. It’s so practical and it was perfect for this activity. Highly recommended!

D-Day

This was planned to be a night climb (!) so that we could get to the summit in time for the sun rise.

Meeting time was 02:30am at Casa da Montanha (base camp). We set the alarm clock to wake up at 01:30am. We had coffee and “breakfast”. Then we left our tiny little house in São Mateus neighborhood. It felt eerie because our house was in this isolated place with no one around, only the sea in the front and the mountain in the back.

Under the moonlight, my other half opened the sliding gate and I drove the car out of the property. When you are in such an isolated place, the abundant silence amplifies every little noise you make. The closing of the doors, your steps in the gravel, your breathing, your clothes, the tires of the car scratching the surface while you maneuver it slowly out of the property. The reassuring klang of the sliding gate’s steel lock.

Everything feels ghostly, sinister and spine chilling.

We then drove for over 30 minutes in total darkness up the mountain towards Casa da Montanha at an elevation of approximately 1200m.

Getting there got me anxious and, I admit, scared. There was nobody, not a single soul in that mountain driveway for what felt like the longest time. We were surrounded by total darkness. And I mean black, all black.

Ahead of us, this darkness was pinched by the front lights of our car. But then we could see them fading away to darkness in the distance, such was the emptiness of all. At some point I felt cold, but was too scared to stop the car to get my jacket. I was thinking what if we stop and then the car fails to get back to speed. Under these circumstances, you are scared and the most illogical things come to your mind.

When we finally reached Casa da Montanha, we felt relieved. There were cars, there were people walking around looking busy. They were climbers, just like us. We were no longer alone.

Meeting Matteo

It was 02:30am when we met our guide: a half-Italian, half-Portuguese guy named Matteo Cordeiro. He wasted no time assembling the group – we were 10 members coming from different countries – and gave us a technical briefing. We learned what we were going to face in the next 10 hours, the level of difficulty in specific parts of the journey. We learned how to use our headlamps and trekking poles properly.

The climb

At exactly 3:00am we officially started the climb. The route all the way to the summit was 4km long encompassing 1000+ meters elevation. Simple maths will tell you for every 4 meters you walk, you climb 1 meter.

Obviously this is not how it works. There were some easy, flat sections. Boring sections, as Matteo once put it, for which I replied to everyone’s laughter: “boring is good”… Yet challenging climbs were the norm. We often had to use our hands to move up.

We walked in silence. I guess everybody was focused and a bit nervous. One could only hear the steps in the solid, dried lava flows, and the breathing. Occasionally, Matteo would crack a joke to keep the spirits high. He did such a good job keeping the positive vibe.

It was dark around us, but our headlamps worked perfectly. You are guided not only by the light from your headlamps, but also from the others. So the path gets pretty well lit. Matteo was leading the group and he had a red colour guiding light in the back of his head.

Up there it was 9°C cold, but we were wearing T-shirts such was the intensity of the exercise. It was tough.

We were the second group of the night. Ahead of us there was a similar group of 10 people. We were quite distanced from them. You could see the tiny lights of their head lamps when you looked up, almost vertically, say the equivalent of 10 floors above us. I’m not exaggerating. It made me think oh man, those guys up there… we have so much more to climb.

Above them you could not distinguish the mountain from the sky. As you guessed correctly, everything was black. But then you could see the stars in the sky, which were bright and visible. I seldom looked back, because in the back you could see nothing. In day time you would probably see the slope of the mountain, but now there was only darkness.

Eventually, we started getting close to the summit. That’s when we started feeling the heat coming out of the the mountain, as well as some steam. Remember, Mount Pico is a volcano.

Reaching the summit

At 6:30am we finally reached the summit. It took us 3.5 hours. It was all smiles, we were excited that we finally got up there. Matteo congratulated each of us with a high five and then advised to get layered up because we would soon start to feel cold. Our bodies were still warm from the intensity of the exercise getting up there.

It was still dark. I opened my backpack to get my clothes and my girlfriend thought they were wet. In fact everything was dry, but it was so cold up there it felt wet. That’s when we realized the package of our protein bars, energy gels and hydration packs had shrunk due to the different air pressure.

We found a good spot, sat down, enjoyed our sandwich and to our surprise Matteo served us hot coffee. Then we started seeing the first rays of light in the horizon, a thin orange line that got thicker and thicker, illuminating the sky that turned from black to blue.

In the opposite direction, interestingly, the sky turned purple, pink and blue. The effect of the light rays in the atmosphere was such an amazing phenomenon.

The conditions were right for the first photos of the day with a proper camera (meaning not iPhone). As I turned on the Sony RX1Rii, I was surprised to see the battery was only half full. What the… It was probably because of the cold temperature. Luckily, after a few shots the battery level went up to full.

The explosion

When the sun finally showed up, damn. It was a blast.

Everybody went silent. Nobody dared to talk, nobody dared to disturb the amazing show of nature unfolding in front of us. We all looked at the sun as if it was a deity, a divine being we were silently honoring, holding in great respect at that very moment.

Witnessing all that from a privileged location above the clouds. It was jaw dropping and we were all mesmerized.

We stayed there for over an hour, enjoying the scenery that was changing every minute as the sun climbed higher and higher. I let the photos below do the talk. All taken with my Sony RX1Rii.

Below some equally interesting shots taken with the iPhone. Note the more vibrant colours, higher contrast, brightness and dynamic range of the iPhone’s computational output…

And below, some equally good looking photos taken by Matteo and shared to us by Tripix:

We sure enjoyed our time up there and took as many photos as we could!

The descent

Around 8:00am we started the descent.

We knew it already: going down is actually more difficult than going up. It’s slippery, you have to deal with loose rocks, every step needs to be carefully taken. You can easily twist your ankle, while you stress your knees and use your leg muscles to hold your body and control the momentum going down the deep slopes.

The extra weight of the backpack doesn’t help. Both my girlfriend and myself we fell once, hitting the ground with our butts in slow motion. Without the trekking poles, I can positively say it would have happened 10 times over. We both got bruises from this.

Under bright sunlight, now we realized what we missed while on the way up in total darkness. The slopes look daring such was the heights we were dealing with and the surrounding clouds exacerbated the feeling. Yet it was beautiful and we were lucky to get such good weather.

Having said that, there comes a point when you reach an altitude below the layer of clouds. In fact, we crossed through the clouds, which was quite interesting.

The descent took longer than I was expecting. I was beginning to feel not only physically exhausted, but also mentally. I could feel I was not the only one. There were no more jokes, no more small talk amongst us. We were all quiet, emptying what was left in our tanks.

Well… Finally, at 12:30pm we were back at base camp “Casa da Montanha”, where we started 9.5 hours before.

It was all smiles, emotional to some point.

Mission accomplished, we took a group photo and left. For 9.5 hours, we were a group of strangers from different corners that bonded together. And now we were saying good bye, knowing that probably we are not seeing each other again for the rest of our lives.

On our way home, we stopped at a restaurant for a well deserved high quality meal and… We were so desperate for a drink that we downed two bottles of rosé in no time.

In the next few days our legs hurt like hell. We couldn’t walk properly such was the beating.

But it was worth the effort.

Every time we looked at Mount Pico – which is huge and ever present in Pico island – we would stop for a moment, look up and think “wow, we were up there… above those clouds”.

What an amazing experience.