I love my technology. As much as I prize light packing, when I travel I’m normally accompanied by my Canon SLR, iPhone and Samsung laptop. I’ll capture beautiful landscapes on my Canon, and it can even capture HD video. The iPhone meanwhile, is good for flicking out for a party snapshot, or those days I can’t be bothered lugging my Canon around, while the laptop is good for storing all those memories on and researching new experiences. But there’s always been a bit of a gap in my recording of memories- if I’m out in the surf, or on a mountain, or doing some solid hiking, or if I just want to take a video out a precarious hotel window of the streetscape below, I’ve never really had a way to do that. Snowboarding in Japan a few years ago I found myself trying to snowboard whilst holding my iPhone, and other unique moments such as dogsledding in Finland went largely unrecorded. Whether or not that makes for a more soulful experience can be debated, but after only a few short months I can’t imagine being without my GoPro.

Out of the Box

The GoPro Hero3 (Black Edition) camera is seriously tiny. And light. It’s almost hard to believe when you first pull it out of the box, but it doesn’t feel cheap, having a rather nice matte silvery finish and the buttons feel nice and solid. There is a large shutter button on top, and in combination with the power button on the front of the device, you can cycle through menus and make selections. The third and final button turns the WiFi on and off. It’s all very easy to use, and there are LEDs on all sides to let you know that the device is recording, no matter what angle you find yourself looking at the camera from. It is little features like that that make you feel that this thing has been engineered to perfection. In addition, the WiFi indicator is a blue LED. I love blue LEDs. The camera itself is vaguely reminiscent of little spy cameras from Get Smart or old Bond movies, and this adds to its appeal. It’s a very tasty little unit. The recently released Hero3+ is basically the same camera, but smaller again still!

The GoPro Hero3+.. fun for travellers

The Hero3/3+ comes with a waterproof housing, which allows it to be taken underwater, for activities such as surfing, swimming, or snorkelling; but also allows its use in the rain or snow without worry. The waterproof housing attaches with some screw bolts to adhesive mounts, which you can stick to your snowboard, surfboard, bike helmet, or wherever you want to record from. But here’s my first gripe about the GoPro. There’s only 2 mounts in the box, and you’ll undoubtedly want more. The GoPro is one of those marketer’s wet dreams, because once you have one, you’ll need to keep spending money on accessories to be able to do all the things you want to do with it. This wouldn’t be such a problem if the accessories were cheap, but cheap they are not. You’ll stump up A$30 (U$25) for a packet of new mounts, for example. And they frequently engage in the wasteful practice of putting more accessories in a packet than you actually want. For example, when I bought my surfboard mounts, the pack came with 2 mounts, which is ok, but then also an FCS plug mount. The plug mount is a cool device, but why would you want an adhesive mount as well as a plug mount? They should be able to be bought separately, but they’re not, if you want one you have to also buy the other. Likewise, the “Grab Bag of Mounts” or “Caps and Doors” might contain that little extra bit you might want, but it’ll come with a whole lot of other bits you don’t need.

In addition, you will soon work out that there’s no other way to attach the camera to a mount without involving the waterproof housing. This is a shame, because the waterproof housing adds a bit of size to the camera (though it’s still small) and it’d be nice to just use the camera on its own when there were less chance of it getting wet or damaged. There is a device you can buy called “The Frame” which allows you to do this, but again, it’s not something included in the box. The box does however include a “skeleton backdoor” which replaces the standard waterproof back door of the housing. The skeleton backdoor has holes in it, which gives access to the built in mic and allows better audio recording than the waterproof backdoor.

Lastly, the GoPro Hero3/3+ Black Edition comes with a WiFi remote control. The remote has two buttons on it that, when WiFi is activated on the camera and the devices paired, basically do everything that the two buttons on the camera do. It also has a little LCD screen identical to that on the camera, so you know exactly what function has been engaged. The WiFi remote is also waterproof, though only to several metres deep and not the same level of protection that the waterproof housing offers the camera. I’ve been unable to destroy it when surfing however.

What really brings the GoPro into a world of its own are the free iPhone app and GoPro Studio 2.0 software, which round out the device and really make it worth the purchase. The app can be used to connect to the camera with the built in WiFi, and allows you to control the camera remotely. You can do everything the included remote can do and more- for example you can view the shot in (almost) real time, allowing you to place adhesive mounts accurately and set the scene before shooting. You can also browse images and video on the device, and download them to your phone. From there, you can upload them to Facebook or YouTube or wherever you want. Meanwhile, the GoPro Studio 2.0 software is a great product for editing your videos, trimming them, cutting them, adding titles and so on. You can also use it to create timelapses. It’s powerful without being overbearing- if you’re not a pro editor, but get frustrated with the limitations of most free software, then you’ll love GoPro Studio 2.0 as much as I do. I even use it to edit the video from my Canon SLR.

Geeky Tech Stuff

The GoPro Hero3 Black’s video modes are numerous and wondrous to behold. Inside that tiny little body is the capability to record video at 720p at up to 120 fps, 960p at up to 100 fps, 1080p at up to 60 fps, 1440p at 48 fps, 2.7k at 30 fps, and even 4k at 15 fps! The frame rates higher than 30 fps give good ability to get silky smooth slow-motion, as in my surfing clip below, and you can even do 240 fps if you don’t mind WVGA resolution. I’m not sure what that would be useful for, but maybe if you were a golfer examining his swing in fine detail or a tennis player examining his technique or something similar, you might like this.

The video modes are all 16:9 widescreen format, except the 960p and 1440p, which are in ye olde 4:3. I kinda like 4:3 for some things- you might find that it allows more vertical space in your movies, so that you can see the ground, or your wheels. I find the 4:3 is better during surfing as it allows you to see the board and head at once more easily, when mounted on the nose of the board looking back. The camera also includes Cinema modes for 4k and 2.7k, which are 17:9 and would really only appeal to hardcore videoheads. For these people, the camera can also operate in a mode called “Protune”, which results in rawer, unprocessed video with subdued colours, allowing full creativity in post-production.

The camera has several “Fields of View”, including Narrow, Medium and Wide. Essentially, these correspond to different regions of the sensor- Wide uses the full image sensor resulting in a picture utiltising the full capabilities of the little fisheye lens, while Narrow uses only the middle part of the sensor, expanding the narrow, less-distorted central part of the scene in the final video.

The camera can also take still pictures at full 12MP 4000 x 3000 resolution, either one at a time, in a burst of images (useful for a sequence), or periodically for a timelapse. The timelapse images must be combined into a finished video using the GoPro Studio 2.0 software, but the process works well and is simple to execute.

Important Practicalities

All of this technological firepower is nice to have, and the 2.7k 30 fps mode in particular is stunning. The 4k 15 fps might be nice if you are filming a static landscape, or remote control footage from a drone, or something that looks grand but remains reasonably still, allowing accurate interpolation in post production.  However, with display resolutions above 1080p being few and far between at time of writing, it might be some time in the future before you can view these files at full res. Possibly computer monitors will soon start hitting higher resolutions, but 4k TVs or projectors will set you back thousands. In the meantime, your ultra HD video takes up extra space on your memory card and is downscaled by video software  to play on your computer screen. Worst case, your software will refuse to play it (like my Window’s Media Player on Windows 7).

Perhaps the biggest annoyance of the GoPro Hero3/3+ is the battery life. With WiFi off, I struggle to get through a 90 minute surf on full charge without the camera dying mid-session, which is a shame. With WiFi on, you’ll get even less. To get through several hours of activity, like a day up on the mountain snowboarding, you need to turn the camera off whenever it’s not in use and turn the WiFi off.  This is not really that surprising, because with a device that tiny, battery technology just isn’t up to it yet. Hopefully this will improve in the future.

Another important thing to note is that the included remote control, a much touted feature of the Black Edition of the Hero3 over the White and Silver editions along with the extra video modes, is less useful than you might think. I had grand visions of using the waterproof remote while surfing, so I wouldn’t have to reach to the front of my board to start and stop recording. I found a way of velcroing the remote to my arm, then made an unfortunate discovery out in the surf. WiFi signals, it turns out, do not travel underwater. Whenever one of either the camera or the remote goes underwater, the signal cuts out, and then the devices take up to 30 seconds to pair up again. This makes the remote basically useless for surfing, or any activity where water is involved. But when water is not involved, you can very easily use your phone to not only control the camera, but also view its output. So what is the remote good for? Well, maybe some dry land activity where you don’t want to have a phone in your pocket. To be honest, I haven’t found that situation yet.

Ultimately, due to the uselessness of the remote and the way the battery is drained by the WiFi usage anyway, unless you’re only filming something for a few minutes you’ll find yourself turning off the WiFi and just using the buttons on the unit to control the camera. Luckily they are really easy to use and make different beeping noises, so even if you have the camera on your head it’s still easy to operate. For setting up the shot, selecting a mode and reviewing footage, you’ll use the phone app and the WiFi, but only briefly and only if you can spare the charge to do so.

Travelling with a GoPro

Now there are other reviews out there that will wax lyrical about tech specs and performance but this being a travel site, and I being a traveller, I wanted to talk a bit about what you might use the GoPro for. Here’s a quick list:

• Surfing
• Snowboarding/Skiing
• Mountain biking
• Riding a bicycle around a new city
• Snorkelling on a reef somewhere
• Dogsledding
• Hiking
• Skateboarding
• River rafting

In short, just about any activity where to whip out your SLR or any other kind of camera would be impossible or too cumbersome, such as these skateboarding and surfing videos:

But there’s more! The timelapse feature of the GoPro is so easy to use that I’ve taken a shine to filming timelapses with the camera mounted precariously on the front of my car or out hotel windows, as can be seen in the video of my drive to the snow below, or of the tide coming in at southern English locations in my England roadtrip video (see points 5:55 and 10:20 in the video below). The GoPro lens is tiny, and I can film better quality timelapses on my Canon SLR, but it’s much harder to set up, and I don’t want to hang the SLR out the window of a hotel lest I kill the camera or someone standing outside! A GoPro timelapse is also good for its 4000 x 3000 resolution, which gives you enough pixels to be able to pan and zoom at full 1080p without needing extra equipment, like I do in the England Roadtrip video.

For all regular video footage of life on the road, I tend to use my SLR, with its big lens, superior optics and ability to easily see what you are filming. However my SLR is limited to 1080p. If you absolutely love your large resolution, you might want to film using the GoPro. Alternatively, if you’re looking for a tiny camera which is capable of filming video and taking still images, that packs into your daypack unnoticed, you might want to use a GoPro for everything. For me, it’s just for action video and timelapses, filling a niche between the party snapshots on my iPhone and the superior capabilities of my SLR.

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Heading up the Kosciusko Express Chair at Thredbo.

Yes, that’s right, Australia has mountains. Not particularly high mind you, but higher than hills. The Great Dividing Range cuts a sliver of the country from North to South separating the lush, fertile east coast (which the English landed upon) from the parched, sunburnt interior (which the Dutch landed on earlier, concluding that Terra Australis was a bit crap). The tallest mountain, Mt Kosciuszko, stands at an altitude of 2228 metres or 7310 ft. And it has snow. As you might imagine, the snow is not particularly consistent, but the terrain is steep and good, so when the snow is on, the skiing is great.

For me, the Australian snowfields always held some magic. It meant warm nights by the fire in a steeply-roofed lodge, peering out at the crisp view through the cold window glass. Getting the week off school to get some shred. Laying in bed too excited about the adventures of the next morning to sleep. Of struggling to get out of bed as early as possible to dress in a brightly coloured onesie and hit the first lifts. Of going up and down the mountain countless times ignoring the pain of weary muscles until the lifties said “last ride”. Of coming back to the pad, darkness descending, getting out of the wet uncomfortable boots and getting into some logic puzzles (as a geeky kid) or a couple of beers (as a geeky adult). Of meeting a cute blonde girl who worked at the hotel hiring out gear, randomly running into her on the slopes one day and then finding that she ripped harder than either I or my brother. Of the album One Hot Minute by the Red Hot Chili Peppers which had just come out prior to heading down to the mountains and which was on solid rotation the whole trip. To this day those songs still remind me of the snow.

Stretchin’ the old peg legs in the middle of nowhere on the drive down to the snow.

My own parents even met down at the snowfields. Mum had been told in confidence by their mutual friends that my dad was a “dragon” which in baby-boomer speak apparently meant “ugly”. When they met at the snow for the first time the first thing she said was that he wasn’t a dragon after all. A downhill tyre tube incident where they ended up submerged in a frozen creek sealed the romance. As soon as I was old enough, they put me on skis. In my teens I learnt to snowboard and three weeks after I met my now-fiance, when I was a poor grad student, I convinced her to drive down to the snow with me despite the fact that she hated the cold. As a romantic getaway it wasn’t my best effort- we ended up sleeping on the shores of Lake Jindabyne in the back of my beat up old Holden Commodore wagon, next to all the snowboarding gear. However I did take along plenty of blankets to ensure she was warm and an acoustic guitar so I could serenade and woo her, and I like to think she had a good time, even if she’s never explicitly stated so.

Camping in the back of my old car next to Lake Jindabyne. The stuff dreams are apparently made of

But even in those days I was being lured more and more by international travel, by faraway lands, by the deep powder in the ski-fields of Japan and North America and Austria, and my work also was leading me further and further from Australia. Meanwhile, a trip to the snow in Australia has never been cheap, with a daily lift ticket north of $100 and total trip cost almost equalling that of an overseas trip. A bunch of years thus went past with nary a visit to the winter wonders of the Great Southern Land. Until this year with the mercury sinking, when nostalgia got the better of me and I clambered into my Mini Clubman and hit the highway south to Canberra and the Snowy Mountains beyond.

These days, the roads are much better than when I was a kid. Dual carriageway freeways stretch from Sydney all the way to Canberra and only the final hour or two is on single-lane highway. What used to be an 8 hour drive has been reduced to around 6. And the driving is great. The road passes Goulburn, Australia’s historic first inland city, and the shores of the stunning Lake George, said to be capable of filling and emptying in mere hours, subjecting it to mysterious theories about where all the water might go, if evaporation alone cannot account for the change in water levels (the lake has been empty since 2002).

West of Cooma, the landscape turns arid, with the gnarled trunks of snow-gums and large boulders strewn across the countryside. The area is rich in wildlife, with species of kangaroos, wallabies and wombats abundant and well adapted to the conditions. I passed a sign warning of kangaroos for 7 kilometres, and skeptical that they could be localised to such a small area, I nonetheless passed the carcasses of no less than ten kangaroos on the side of the road within that space. Standing at times nearly 2 metres high, you really have to look out for them when driving at dusk or at night, with collisions producing similar conseqences to that of elk in the northern hemisphere for all concerned- driver, car, and beast. Meanwhile, wombats are everywhere- my friends and I once came across one on the mountain while we were snowboarding. It was blizzarding and the wombat was attempting to dig a burrow into the snow. Like kangaroos, they are often found plodding along the centre-line in the middle of the night. Dark in colour and the size of pigs, they pose a serious danger to cars (and we to them).

I round a bend and finally there is the great Lake Jindabyne, formed after construction of the Jindabyne Dam, part of the vast Snowy River Hydroelectric Scheme. Formation of Lake Jindabyne flooded the old Jindabyne settlement- parts of the town can still be seen when water levels in the lake are low.

At only 2 in the afternoon, I am wondering whether I can fit in an afternoon of boarding, but heading up over the pass into the mountains the weather turns ugly with wind and sleet bucketing down and the road covered with snow and ice. The cost of a half-day ticket being prohibitive unless conditions are good, I turn around and tiptoe my way back down the mountain in the Mini, passing a black kangaroo standing majestically on the side of the road with the snow falling all around.

Lake Jindabyne

I head to my accommodation at Carinya Alpine Village, the cheapest I could find at short notice. I frown at having paid over $80 a night for what is little better than caravan park accommodation. A budget destination the Snowy Mountains surely are not. Short of organising a large group of friends to occupy every last space of an expensive on-snow lodge, your best option is probably the hostel at either Thredbo or Jindabyne, although they will set you back a similar amount. My cabin is literally too small to swing a cat (I can just fit my snowboard inside beside the two bunks) and heated to a “barely there” state by a rattly old electric heater. Gaps in the window have let dirt blow onto the beds from outside. The walls are paper-thin and a school group is going nuts in another (larger) cabin just outside. The kids (who are actually pretty nice kids) have also practically destroyed the already-grim shared concrete and corrugated iron toilet block. Internet access? Forget it- I can’t even get a 3G signal on my iPhone here. Nonetheless, the property that the Carinya Village occupies is naturally beautiful and I sleep like a log with the help of a few extra layers of clothing. The people talking in the cabins around me do a good job of rousing me from my slumber at an early hour and I see the joyful first rays of the sun peeking through the trees with an endless blue sky.

There are two main snowfields in the area, each around 30 km from Jindabyne. Perisher Blue is an amalgamation of 4 smaller resorts- Perisher Valley, Mt Blue Cow, Guthega and Smiggin Holes, thus covering a vast area, with the resorts linked by ski-trails and the ski-tube, a train which runs underneath the mountains and is very convenient. Meanwhile Thredbo has Australia’s highest lifted point, and offers mostly steeper terrain than its counterpart. This year, it is top-to-bottom, with the help of snow making machines located lower on the mountain. Under such conditions it offers runs as long as ten to fifteen minutes flat out, and will be my destination today.

The last time I went snowboarding was in Niseko in Japan just before I experienced the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Metre deep Japanese powder Thredbo has not, but ten centimetres (4 inches) of snow has fallen overnight, and it’s not too bad. I try out my GoPro camera “boot-cam”, which breaks off my boot after 3 runs. Undeterred, I mount the camera on my brand new helmet and spend the day exploring the mountain from top to bottom. The mountain is as exhilarating as the surrounding countryside. At the windswept peak, wide, steep expanses of snow offer endless opportunites for carving. Lower down, the sparsely spaced snowgums provide fun dodging the trees while the groomed runs are filled with moustachioed men in fluoro onesies stroking big egos and first-timers bruising their tailbones. I’m surprised to find that the on-mountain food has improved somewhat since I was younger- at the Merritts Restaurant they are serving everything from German sausages with sauerkraut to pretty good chicken laksa and Indian food. Even the prices don’t seem as steep as I remember, but that may just be because I’m from Sydney and in recent years suitably desensitised to being ripped off.

Worn out and with muscles aching, I climb back into my frozen car for the trip back down the hill. The next day dawns equally as glorious, and I ascend to an unexplored peak with fervour. Making my descent through a rock garden I hit a patch of ice and next thing I know my board is at my eye level and whack! The back of my head unexpectedly strikes either rock or ice with force. The chin strap on my helmet smacks my jaw shut and I check my teeth to make sure none are chipped or broken. With my head pulsing, and thanking providence for the purchase of my helmet a day earlier, I make my way gingerly down the mountain to the village at the bottom. On the way down, the GoPro boot mount, which I had glued on with contact adhesive overnight, breaks off again and I’m forced to stop to pocket the camera. I’m not seeing double or anything but I do feel somewhat nauseous, so at the bottom I take a breather for an hour until the feeling passes before heading back up for a blissful afternoon of boarding.

On my final day, I wake up to an overcast sky with the stiffest neck I can ever remember having and a headache which lasts another week. Evidently I have some whiplash as well as concussion. Snow related injuries are not new to me or my family- I previously broke my wrist snowboarding in Austria, a feat repeated recently by my brother-in-law, while my father broke his collarbone skiiing in Australia and had to be stretchered off the mountain. At some point today I need to drive the 6 hours back to Sydney- I have meetings I need to be at the following day. I check the snow cams and the visibility on the mountain is next to zero and the winds are approaching gale force. I call Perisher Blue and am told that a half day ticket costs $100, almost the same price as a full day ticket. With the money, the weather, and my pounding head I decide to give it a miss and get back on the highway. I arrive back in the steel and glass harbour city, and true to form there is a major power failure in a tunnel that leads back into the city and I have to take an alternative route choked with the worst traffic I can remember ever dealing with. It seems all the more monstrous after my blissful few days on the open road. But the air feels that little bit warmer than it did just a few days earlier, and spring is just around the corner.

The highest lifted point in Australia, close to the peak of Mt Kosciuszko

My old history teacher from highschool, Mr Quill, used to say that the two most unnatural things a human could do were to ride on the backs of horses and speed down a snow-covered mountain on skis. I have to admit he has a point. The last time I got on a horse, it stood there eating grass defiantly while I futilely implored it to start walking. Meanwhile, the snow is even more ridiculous. Where else can you mortgage your house to afford a holiday where you freeze your arse off, dress in ridiculous waterproof outfits and boots that you can’t walk in, and come home with lasting injuries? If we were made by a benevolent creator, he was surely surprised when we strapped wooden sticks to our feet and hurled ourselves at speed down slippery mountain peaks.

Regardless, the snow will always hold that magic for me- the cold, dry chimney-smoke winter air of the mountains and the anticipation of white-knuckle adventure.

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