They don't call me Dave 'Hubble' Warburton for... obvious reasons
On the morning of 21 May, I stepped outside to get a can of hot coffee from the vending machine (that sentence alone might have merited a blog post back when these things weren't normal) and saw a few people from my hostel gathered on the other side of the street, swapping around what looked like three pairs of differently shaped sunglasses clumsily fixed together. Because that's what it was.
Apparently, there was an annular solar eclipse going on that I hadn't even known about, but was able to enjoy through this crude and extremely medically inadvisable apparatus. Don't try this at home, and certainly don't try to take a photo through it with your camera. It will look shit. But I thought it might amuse you. It should have looked a bit more like this:
You might know that I'm a little lacking when it comes to motivations for visiting countries, but despite having spent a lot of my wandering and sightseeing time over the last couple of years with my head above the clouds, accompanied by the humbling tones of Carl Sagan audiobooks reminding me I am eternal star stuff, I hadn't even considered looking to the skies and planning my trips to coincide with spectacular stellar events like this. Maybe I'm still traumatised by what happened the last time I saw an eclipse.
If I'd woken up 30 minutes later I would have missed this eclipse, so I got lucky this time. And as this cigarette burn on my retina doesn't seem to be going away, I should remember this morning forever. Like my vision really needed to get any worse. Always wear protection, kids!
