Travel-Junkie.com is now thanks to Andy Moore’s excellent WP Mobile Plugin and a lot of adjustments on my part available on mobile phones, PDAs and basically (hopefully!) every mobile device capable of accessing the internet! Since I’m not able to check it in a real device, do have a look and let me know if it works properly…
Archives For November, 2007
Can You Spot What’s So Funny?
Today I was indulging in my favorite pastime when arriving in a new place, which is getting lost while walking aimlessly around looking at things! I just flew into Christchurch, by the way. Anyway, so I was walking down this street and I saw something which I found really funny (maybe it’s just me, though?) and I had to take a picture of it! It kind of reminds me of walking down a street somewhere in Asia. Quite charming, really! Do you think it’s funny as well?
Sea Gull
Just walked down to the internet cafe and for once I was fast enough in drawing my camera and getting a shot…
Travel-Junkie.com Meets Facebook
Travel-Junkie.com just opened up a franchise on Facebook. Head on over there to check it out and become a fan!
Highslide and Nextgen Gallery
This post has absolutely nothing to do with travelling, so stop reading if you’re not interested in geeky Wordpress stuff. In the process of making Travel-Junkie.com a better experience for my visitors I have discovered the excellent Highslide effect for images and loads of other stuff by Torstein Hønsi. So I started implementing this effect, which should have been pretty straight forward, especially considering that the gallery plugin I use for Wordpress, NextGen Gallery, comes with built in support for Highslide. In the end it took me far longer to get it to work exactly the way I wanted.
Six Months On The Road
Can’t believe that I have been travelling already for six months. Time flies when you’re having fun, right? Anyway, time to have a look at that past half year….
Some of the things that happened or that I did:
- Bought a car in Australia, drove it for 7000 km and then wrecked it!
- Watched two sperm whales, five pigs and one turtle get hunted, killed and gutted in Indonesia
- Had 9.473 unique visitors, which isn’t that much really, but my thanks go out to those boys and girls that do drop in for a visit and maybe even leave a comment!
- Climbed the volcano on Lombok and lost four toenails in the process
- Drank far too much Arak/Sopi/Palm Wine…
- Almost froze to death in Canberra
- Took 4 different Pelni boats and was the only foreigner on any of them
- Survived the Outback
- 37 people have subscribed to my english feeds and 4 to my german feed
- Dived Alor and snorkelled Banda, two places I had been wanting to visit for years
- Visited 4 countries (Oz, England, Indonesia, East Timor) and 3 continents
- Spent 8000 EUR on God knows what…
- Saw the Komodo Dragons and did not get bitten, yeah!!
- Sailed the Whitsundays. Loved that and just remembered I didn’t even put a post about that online. Well, it was only a day trip, but to make up for it, have a look at the picture on top…
- Saw my first two Wombats and then accidentally killed them both with the car. I added some seriously bad karma on to my shoulders that night!
- I received 4 donations totalling around 90 EUR and my Google ads cam to about 15 USD, so that’s almost my hosting fees for another 3 years, which doesn’t mean I’d reject more donations or would frown at people clicking on me ads…
- Visited gorgeous Kelimutu again
- Managed to brush up on my Bahasa Indonesia
- Worked a lot on my tan
- Read like 30 books
- Wrote 29 posts (actually 30 including this one), which could have been more, but I was probably too busy sunbathing…or reading…
- Took about 8 GB worth of pictures, of which maybe 2GB were worth taking. Have a look at the photos I put online!
- Managed to free dive down to 25m with a dive time of 1 minute 37 seconds on Banda
- Was involved in a motorbike accident in Indo
- Was kind of involved in a car accident in Indo, which provided a fascinating few hours for the locals that happened to be there
- The average life expectancy of my sun glasses dropped down to roughly a day
- Met some great people and a few weirdos…
- Managed to teach an American how to open a beer bottle with a lighter, which was hard work!
- My Google Page Rank went on a rollercoaster; from 2 to 3 down to 1 up to 2 down to 0 ; I must be doing something wrong, but honestly, I couldn’t give a monkey’s bum…
- Visited the youngest nation on earth!
If you want to know more about what I’ve been up to these last six months have a look at my archives or click on some of the links above. Enjoy!!
Twelve Apostles
Yesterday I rented a car together with two friends and we went on a roadtrip down the Great Ocean Road. A convertible would have been awesome, but due to money matters and, thank god, unavailability (sometimes I can be so easily persuaded to spend money on completely useless stuff) we had to settle for a tiny japanese car. It was still brilliant. We couldn’t have asked for better weather and I just loved the 12 Apostles, although I only counted eight, but who cares, really?
Fraser Island – One Huge Sand Island
.jpg "The Moheno Wreck on the eastern beach.")
Fraser Island is situated just off Hervey Bay. It is the largest sand island in the world and one huge playground for boys and their big toys. Girls love it as well, although they don’t seem to share the same enthusiasm when it comes to driving a 3 ton Toyota Landcruiser through soft sand and up and down steep hills.
Day 1
Our little group, 8 people all together, met at 8 am at the backpackers where we had booked our self drive tour to get some last minute instructions about driving in sand and getting us all back in one piece. Then it was everybody in the car and we were on our way to the ferry to Fraser Island. The first stop on the island was Lake McKenzie, a beautiful blue freshwater lake in the middle of the island. It’s just about 7 meters deep, so you can easily dive down there, although there isn’t much to see.
We had lunch there and then Sandra, one of the Swedish girls in our group drove us through dense forest on sandy roads to the beach at Eurong. Here Trudy, a welsh girl, took over and got us bogged down within 3 minutes. She thought that when we said she should go straight we actually meant straight and not just the middle track through the sand! Luckily we managed to dig us out quite quickly, though, only took about 15 minutes and it was quite funny, we were all in hysterics. The next stop was at the Moheno wreck, an old freighter at the eastern beach of Fraser. It’s very picturesque and would be even more beautiful if not for the love of signs Australian authorities seem to have (not that the Germans would be any better! ).
