Playa Balandra — Intricate Explorer

Imagine being able to walk about a mile and half into the ocean, like Jesus. That's exactly what happened today at Playa Balandra. Except it wasn't that easy.

We'd heard about this place from the rumor mill that is Instagram. From the photos, it appeared to be a magical place where you could literally walk on the water. How was this possible?

Allow me to explain. You don't exactly WALK on the water. You walk into a bay of water that's only about 3 feet deep, for a mile and half. But it feels like you're walking on water because you're literally in the middle of the ocean.

In fact, it's actually a bit scary.

I'd recently read about the Mudflats of Alaska, which is considered one of the most dangerous places on Earth. It's this massive landscape of dirt, but when the tide comes in, the whole area basically turns into quicksand. It's extremely easy to get stuck, and many die from the rising water around them.

That's the first thing I thought of when Haley showed me things place. Taking a nice sunset shot in the middle of this bay, then being swamped by an incoming tide. I'm not a good swimmer. I've run a marathon before, but I can barely swim two laps in a pool without feeling tired.

When we arrived, I felt a bit more at ease. The place was freaking packed.

And... we stepped in the water. And... we kept walking.

I'm not going to lie, it started to get unsettling. Being that far from the shore surrounded by water felt unnatural. But we kept going. Our goal was to make it to the other side of the bay, to where this famous mushroom rock thing was.

After about 30 minutes of walking, we made it. It's kind of like walking in slow motion, every step you take is halved because your legs are partially submerged.

The mushroom rock thing was cool, but I didn't care for a photo of it. People were all around it and it was pretty blown out from the sun.

By this point, we'd scoped out the entire bay from below. From the looks of it, the best shot would be from above. Even though it felt like pure magic to stand in the water, we needed an overview shot. One key thing to learn in adventure photography is the difference between BEING in the cool spot, and SHOOTING the cool spot. You don't always want to BE where the cool shot is- you want to be far from it to be able to shoot it.

I looked around and saw that there was a trail leading up to this hilly overlook, and decided that would be our sunset destination. Since there was SO many people walking around in the water, it would be cool to isolate some shots of people from above.

I love using other people as models, especially for "far away" shots. If you post these shots on your personal social media feeds, people immediately think it's you by association.

We quickly climbed up the overlook, and began snapping away. The sunset didn't matter TOO much, mainly because the sky was blank. I aimed down at the ground for the entirety of this shoot.

Here's the first shot I got of a couple walking along the beach:

Playa Balandra — **“Tranquil Destination”**
*Taken on* *Sony a7rIII* + *Zeiss 24-70mm f/4*
[ISO 1600 ~ 46mm ~ f/4 ~ 1/400s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)

Next up a wanted an isolation shot of a guy walking through the massive bay. Believe it or not, this shot was actually fairly difficult to get:

A lot of people were walking around, but not many were walking in the MIDDLE of the bay. I had to wait for someone to walk out to the space with the biggest expanse of ocean around him. One thing I learned while editing these past two shots was about the crop.

I'm so used to cropping square shots for Instagram that I often crop the final image square. In reality, there's a lot of shots that look even better completely wide (3:2). The lesson is don't crop square if it looks better wide... Just upload it wide to Instagram and Instagram will crop it square for you grid.

And that was basically it. I didn't get a shot of the ENTIRE landscape, but like I learned at Bahía de Loreto, I'm only showing my audience my GOOD shots, even if they're smaller, more intimate shots.

But walking out, I found one more shot I loved. The mushroom. Like I said earlier, I thought it was kind of stupid. But from up here... Goddamn:

And that ship came right at the perfect time to line this up. Can't be a coincidence. That was pure perfect timing.

We traversed down the hill and decided to sleep in the parking lot. Later that night we tried to help a dude break into his car because he locked his key in it.

Pro Tip: The glass on Toyota Lexus’ is basically bulletproof. We took a hammer to the window and still couldn’t get inside.

Anyway, that’s about it. BYE.

I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.

Want to see my progress? Check out the Adventure Map.

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417 - Playa Balandra

418 - Punta Lobos

416 - Teatro La Paz