This picture sums of my experience of Sierra Leone. It has made substantial progress from the days when it was seen as one of the most dangerous places on earth and the future is at last looking more optimistic for the next generation.
I traveled there with my colleague Mark Doyle to cover the reaction to the Charles Taylor verdict and to gather material for a television and radio package on how the country has moved on from its bloody past.
Sierra Leone is not what you expect. When you tell people you’re planning a visit there, it’s not unusual to get comments like, “Is it safe?” Many people still associate it with war lords, child soldiers and blood diamonds.
The civil war ended 10 years ago and today it’s a very different place. In the capital, Freetown, buildings are going up all over the place, the main roads are in the process of being upgraded and the markets are teeming. It is living proof of what can happen when there is peace.
We also traveled to the east of the country, to the main diamond mining area, the source of so called blood diamonds and saw first hand how foreign investment is transforming the economy. It is not just the Chinese who are doing the investing. Among the people we met was Beny Steinbetz, one of the world’s wealthiest men, who is optimistic enough about the future to invest millions in a modern open cast diamond mine in Koidu.
Sierra Leone is not only blessed with valuable natural resources. It also has a stunning coastline, which once drew thousands of European visitors. One of the best beaches is called river no 2 beach and is a 45 minute drive south of the capital. If you ever go to Sierra Leone it is well worth a visit. The villagers have set up a community project to look after this stunning beach and lagoon. They also serve healthy portions of fresh seafood at very reasonable prices.
In the city itself, Lumley Beach is the best place to go. Here you will find a beautiful long beach, where the water is clean enough to swim thanks to its location on the western edge of Freetown. It is also a popular place to go for sundowners with a growing number of bars opening up along the seafront.
The tourist industry is slowly recovering, but it is still some way off from attracting the mainstream market. A new Hilton Hotel is being built which could provide the catalyst to help the country reclaim its status as a tourist destination.
Clearly it is not all rosy. The country still has a lot of problems and has a long way to go before it regains what it lost during the war. Unemployment and poverty are rife and it remains one of the poorest places in the world. But the economy is growing, investment is flowing in, the government is stable and key reforms are being undertaken.
Our report on Sierra Leone will be appearing on the BBC later this month. In the meantime, you can see more images from my trip below.

I have found it particularly difficult to ensure there is a smooth transition in audio between clips from different scenes, particularly if the sound is very different, for example going from a clip shot in a quiet street to a clip shot in a noisy road. The trick to achieving smoother audio is based on the way our brains work and is called “signposting”. We like to be forewarned about what is coming up to avoid any nasty surprises. If you fade up the audio from the next clip a few frames before you actually see the images, you will signpost to the brain what is coming up, creating the impression that the transition is smooth.

In FCP there is a neat little trick to help you do this. Once you have stuck your two clips together, go to the audio channel and right click on the piont where the audio from both clips joins together and choose “Add Transition Crossfade”. Please note, you need to unlink the video and audio first before you do this or you will also end up adding a crossfade effect to your video. Highlight the crossfade, right click on it and now choose “Transition Alignment” and then “End On Edit”. This will fade up the audio from the upcoming clip until the point where the two clips join together.

There are exceptions to this rule, for example when going from a clip with natural sound to a soundbite from an interview. In this case you would want to choose “Start On Edit” as you don’t want to fade up the soundbite before you hear the person speaking. But it would make for a smoother transition to have the natural sound fade out at the beginning of the soundbite. At the end of the day it is all about experimenting to establish what is the least jarring to the ear and therefore sounds the smoothest to the brain.

Recently I traveled to Switzerland to shoot some news features with the BBC’s local correspondent, Imogen Foulkes. This is one of the reports we did, which looks at how tourism is ruining the Swiss Alps.

We filmed around the resort of Zermatt, home to the iconic Matterhorn. A 100 years ago Zermatt was a sleepy village, now it attracts almost two million visitors a year. When the high season begins, the population multiplies overnight from 6000 to as many as 40,000 people. The town prides itself on it’s green credentials, but it’s hard to believe this has any major impact. Today Zermatt is awash with big hotels as well as many shops, bars and restaurants, all consuming large amounts of electricity and generating a lot of waste.

We met the mayor, the head of tourism and a local environmentalist. What was interesting was that they all agreed the town cannot sustain this kind of development for much longer. But no one seems to know how to deal with the problem. One of the ideas being floated about is to impose a limit on the number of visitors. Increasingly only the rich can afford to stay in Zermatt, as the pressure on space drives up the cost of accommodation. It will be a very sad state of affairs if such a beautiful part of the Apls can’t be enjoyed by the vast majority of people.Zermatt’s problems are not unique. Many popular tourist spots around the world are facing the same dilemma. Too much development and you threaten the very thing that tourists come to see. Imogen Foulkes has more on this story on the BBC website.

When I am old and grey and somebody asks me what was the most bizarre experience of my journalistic career, I will probably mention this day.
I went out filming today with Rana Jawad, the BBC’s Tripoli correspondent who is in London at the moment. We decided to do a story about what is being done to regain control of the London assets of the regimes toppled in the Arab spring. Rana had arranged to do an interview with Libya’s deputy ambassador to London at the mansion of Saadi Gaddafi which the new government is in the process of reclaiming.
The mansion is in a quiet cu-d-sac, off what is commonly known as millionaires row in London, the most expensive residential street in the capital. The house is partially concealed from the road by a hedge and has a circular driver that takes you to the front door. We had decided to do the interview at the front door. I had set up my camera and was in the process of miking up the deputy ambassador, when I heard the sound of a motorbike coming down the driveway. I turned and saw two guys dressed in black on a motorbike. The mansion is currently occupied by Libyans looking after it for the new government. I assumed the guys on the bike were either staying there or friends of the residents. The bike came to a stop just behind me. After that everything appeared to occur in slow motion. The guy on the back of the bike picked up the camera and the tripod and they sped up the driveway. The cord for the microphone which I was holding was still attached to the camera, it snapped and I started running after them, but they were too fast for me. The last image I saw of my camera was of a guy on the back of the bike, holding the camera and tripod as they sped down the road.
We were in a state of complete shock. Never in a million years did we expect anything like this to happen in the most exclusive neighborhood in London. Speaking to the guys who live in the mansion after the incident, they told us they had to be constantly on their guard. The house has been attacked by pro-Gaddafi supporters and they always make sure there is at least on person in the mansion at all times.
Sadly, the incident happened after I had been filming in the house and the robbers got away with all the footage still in the camera. What can I say? Given the layout, they had to be watching the house to know when to drive down the driveway. It is just very bizarre that something like this can happen in London. I have filmed all over the world and never had any problems. And then I film outside Saaadi Gaddafi’s mansion in London and my camera gets stolen by two guys dressed in black on a motorbike. Too coincidental to be a robbery!
Rana told me it felt like she was back in the clutches of the Gaddafis. She has never been robbed in all the years she lived in Tripoli and had managed to escape unharmed during the uprising. We discussed the incident afterwards and we decided it has made us even more determined to do this story. We won’t let those thugs stop us!

But this is not representative of the country. Just a few hundred meters away you see a completely different world. The next photo was taken in a slum area which makes up a big chunk of the city. None of the houses have electricity or water. The UN estimates 70 percent of the population live below the poverty level, surviving on only $2 a day.

Equatorial Guinea’s new found wealth remains largely in the hands of the country’s long running ruler, President Obiang, and his family. Examples of how the money is being wasted are not hard to find. On the outskirts of Malabo, you come across a six lane highway with no cars. It was built for the Africa Summit in June 2011.

The highway takes you to a purpose built city that includes 52 luxury villas constructed for each of the African leaders attending the summit. The complex also includes a conference hall, artificial beach, luxury hotel and the county’s first 18-hole golf course as well as a landing strip, heliport, hospital and buildings for banquets and events. It is estimated to have cost over $800 million but when we visited the area only the hotel and golf course were in use. The rest, including the state of the art hospital, were closed.

This is the image of Equatorial Guinea the government does not want the outside world to see. It was not possible to film any of the complex and the photos had to be taken discretely to ensure we did not attract the attention of the authorities. Recently an AP photographer was arrested for taking photos in the local market and was only released when she agreed to delete the images.
Equatorial Guinea has also spent millions on co-hosting the Cup of nations, including building two new stadiums in Malabo and Bato. But it was not easy to find people who would openly criticise the government. The country has a poor human rights record. The authorities tend to take a hard line against anyone who speaks out against the government. The only major opposition party has just one member of parliament and President Obiang has managed to stay in power since 1979 by ruthlessly crushing his opponents.
The government is hoping to use the tournament to present a different image to the world. Some believe the president is mellowing in his old age and the oil money is beginning to trickle down to the rest of the population. But it remains to be seen if the more open approach adopted by the country during the tournament is only temporary or the start of a more tolerant phase in it’s history.

This is a photo of the theatre at Leptis Magna, one of Libya’s many undiscovered gems. My three week trip to the country with my colleagues, correspondent Mark Lowen, and shoot edit Ian Druce has come to an end. It coincided with a quiet time on the news front so we spent most of the time reporting on the state of play in the country, three months after the revolution ended.
We based ourselves in Tripoli and went on day trips out of the capital. Tripoli suffers from the same problems that currently affect much of the country. The infrastructure is badly in need of repair, building projects have stopped, rubbish is not being collected, there are no army or police, the court system is not working and the rebels still roam the streets.
Worrying signs are already emerging of tensions between the various militia which has resulted in deadly firefights in recent weeks. If the government does not find a way of dealing with this problem and persuading the rebels to join a national security force, the country runs the risk of falling into civil war. See my previous blog post for more on this.
On top of that, reconciliation seems a far way off in Libya. The UN estimates there are 7000, mostly pro-Gaddafi supporters stuck in prisons and detention facilities around the country. Many of them have been there since August, without being charged or getting access to a lawyer.  Human Rights organisations have also found evidence of torture and abuse in some of these facilities.
But it is not all doom and gloom.  Unlike Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Libya has a functioning government just three months after the end of the revolution that is beginning to grapple with the country’s many problems.  It is also encouraging to see that freedom of speech is on the increase. Hardly a day goes by that you don’t find a demonstration or strike in some part of the country. This would never have been tolerated under Gaddafi. And on the press side, although it can take frustratingly long time to organise interviews, most ministers were prepared to talk to us. That’s a far cry from the old regime, where no one ever spoke to the media.
Libya has many other factors in its favour. Aside from an abundance of high grade oil, it has a lot of potential as a tourist destination. The country’s vast Mediterranean coastline is made up of miles and miles of  sandy beaches. It also contains, ancient relics, the likes of which do not exist anywhere else in the world. We were fortunate enough to take a trip to Leptis Magna, the ancient roman city built on the edge of the Mediterranean, featured in the above photo. Unlike many other roman cities, sufficient traces remain to imagine what it was like in its heyday.
Back in the capital, Tripoli Zoo is another potential tourist gem. It is packed with a wide range of animals and birds, who are now in much better shape than they were when the city fell.  Read more here about our report on the zoo.
But the country has a lot of work to do before it can realise it’s tourism potential. The infrastructure needs to be restored, the mobile network does not accommodate international roaming, we battled to find good restaurants in the capital, the beaches are dirty and littered with rubbish and you can’t get alcohol, even in five star hotels.
This was my third visit to the country in the last six months. Each time I return, I fall more in love with Libya and it’s warm, hospitable people. I’m hoping I can come back again soon to see how it is getting on. Fingers crossed Libya becomes one of the success stories of the Arab Revolution.

My colleague Mark Lowen has more analysis on this story on the BBC website. You can read it here.

Libya is slowly returning to normal after the uprising that overthrew Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. One of the sites grinding back into action is Tripoli Zoo, which is hoping to re-open to the public in a few months time. But the battle is not over yet. Funding from international charities to feed the hundreds of birds and animals at the site is coming to an end and it is not certain whether the new government will foot the bill.
These images were taken at the zoo earlier this week, where we found the animals to be in a very good condition. It’s a far cry from the situation in August when many were in a desperate state as the Libyan capital found itself without food or water and the staff fled due to heavy fighting in the area. A large international aid effort was mobilised and several charities stepped in to alleviate the situation. Among them, the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the British based charity, Four Paws, which helped pay for food and medical supplies. It costs around £1300 pounds ($2000 dollars) a day to feed all the zoo’s residents. Large carnivores, like lions and tigers, can eat 20-30 pounds of meat per day to satisfy their appetite. We filmed one of the lion’s receiving it’s daily meal. To see such as big beast just a few feet from you, is an experience I will never forget, especially when it roared at us when we came too close.
The zoo has had some good news since the fall of the Gaddafi regime. One of the lion’s gave birth to two baby cubs at the end of October. The mother came from a group of lions owned by Gaddafi’s third son, Saadi Gaddafi, which are now part of the zoo’s animal collection.
Although the animals are in a much better condition than they were a few months ago, the zoo is not yet out of the woods. The financial support provided by charities over the last few months is due to come to end at the start of 2012. The director of Tripoli Zoo, Dr Anas Ali, is counting on the new government picking up the bill. If that does not happen, he hopes the charities won’t leave him in the lurch.
But the government will also need to pay for badly needed repairs to the zoo before it can re-open. It closed two years ago for renovations and was due to open in June 2011, but the building work ground to a halt during the revolution.
Some of these images have been published on the BBC website. Click here to see them. You can also view a news report here by my colleague, Mark Lowen, on this remarkable gem in the middle of Tripoli.

You get some beautiful sunsets in Tripoli. This is the view of the sun dipping below the horizon from our hotel along on the Corniche. The city seems to go on for miles but much of it appears run down. It does not strike you as the capital of a country that is rich in high quality oil reserves. Despite that, Tripoli has a certain charm about it which appeals to me.
It’s been very quiet on the news front since we arrived on Monday. The original plan was to stay here for 3 weeks, holding the BBC fort over the festive season. But I think we will battle to keep ourselves busy.
After the revolution, interest in Libya from the outside world has died down. The interim government is still trying to set itself up and oversee the first phase of the transition to democracy. Many of the brigades that fought in the revolution are still armed and it remains to be seen if the various factions can achieve national unity.