Hitchhiking São Miguel, Azores

I had heard the Azores were a beautiful place, but I wasn’t prepared for this level of beauty. I arrived late one evening and walked from the airport to Ponta Delgada, the biggest city on the island. The moon was full, it was windy and a little rainy but I soon found refuge in a narrow street that gave a surprisingly good level of protection from the environment.

I travelled to the Azores to practice photography, do some hitchhiking and -generally- to be on an adventure. With only 8 days, my time was limited so I decided to stay on São Miguel island. Its nickname is the green island and it didn’t take me long to understand where that came from. Rarely have I ever seen such verdant and lush landscapes. I did less hiking than I had hoped because I sprained my ankle on the first day and again on the fourth day, but still managed to walk a total of ±100km.
I got up before sunrise each day to catch the best light, and otherwise just spent my time hitchhiking and walking around looking for interesting scenes and people to photograph.

Hitchhiking was very easy. I learnt to say Eu quero bouleia (I want to hitch a ride) and the 2 weeks of learning Portuguese on Duolingo helped me a lot as I met quite a few people who didn’t speak much else than Portuguese. Everywhere I went I met lovely and polite people.
Improcouching on the other hand was really hard. For the whole duration of my stay I was not able to find a single person who wanted to host me for a night. I have never experienced this anywhere before and it remains a great mystery for me why I did not succeed with it here. My backpack weighed only 8-9kg, including water, clothes, sleeping bag, mattress and camera equipment but had I known finding a host would be so hard I would have brought my tent; sleeping in a hotel is not particularly interesting.

Camerawise I travelled with two compact cameras (one in each pocket!); a Ricoh GR II and a newly acquired Ricoh GR IIIx.

28mm and 40mm are my favourite focal lengths and this combo is the same I used when I hitchhiked from Oslo to Beirut 10 years ago with a Canon full frame DSLR. A notable difference here is the much smaller and lighter package. I brought a 21mm adapter for the 28mm but didn’t use it much.
Using compact cameras was great not only because of the size factor, but I felt I could photograph a bit more inconspicuously. I will definitely consider bringing these cameras on my future travels!

The pictures are edited and developed in Lightroom with colours inspired by Ricoh’s beautiful Positive Film setting.

I took 1182 pictures, 65% of them with the GR3x and 35% with the GR2. I’ve made a selection of 118 pictures (see below) and of these, 70% are taken with the GR3x and 30% are taken with the GR2.