Archives For Notes

I am sat at the airport bar in Christchurch and I am just starting on my second beer. Nowadays you have to get drunk before you get on a plane. I still remember the old times, when a gorgeous stewardess would give you any booze you wanted for free with a beautiful smile on her face. Bad times for travellers indeed. You even go hungry on a plane if you’re not prepared to fork out for a meal yourself. The smiles and the fun are gone together with the gorgeous stewardesses, all being replaced by grumpy airline helpers with the charm of bored supermarket cashiers. You want to watch a movie? 10 dollars. You want to listen to the radio? 3 dollars for a headset. The only good news is that, for now at least, ticket prices have gone down a bit. Just wait for the next ‘oil crisis’, though.

And here I am, still nursing my beer, with a big grin on my face. People are looking at me in a strange way. You’re not supposed to show your happiness too openly, I guess. It makes people uncomfortable and conjures up images of an axe murderer. If they only knew! I’m on my way back to Indonesia, the land of infinite islands. I am truly enchanted by that country, by its people and by its diversity and I can’t wait to get back there. This time my travels will take me to Sulawesi and Kalimantan, none of which I know that much about. It doesn’t matter, though. Indonesia and I, we’ll understand each other somehow, we always have so far. Just to make sure, I have bought a phrasebook. I don’t need or want a guidebook, but a phrasebook will help me learn more of the language, which is one of my big goals for this trip.

For now I have more immediate problems than my worried fellow passengers. I have only one pair of socks left and they have big holes in them. I am pretty sure that I have to take my shoes off when I go through security and at times I can get quite self conscious. I don’t like people looking at me in a strange way. But hey, even if they do, why should I care? I’m off to Indo…

After being cooped up for far too long with far too many party nights in this little place called Queenstown I am finally off again in one week to my favourite country of all time, Indonesia. The Dutch, the English and the Portuguese once fought over it a few hundred years ago. But while they were unsuccessful in the long run, the Australians are doing a much better job right now, slowly and sneakily taking over Bali and beyond.

I’m in a bit of a predicament right now. According to Wikipedia there are 17.508 islands. Some time ago an earthquake created 6 more somewhere off Sumatra, so I’m a little undecided right now on where to go. I don’t want to stay too long on Bali. This has hardly nothing to do with the loud Australians, who I’m quite fond of, and more to do with the overall touristic busyness of the place. So my first option would be to head over to Java, check out Borobudur and some national parks and then slowly make my way along Sumatra all the way to Pulau Weh. I have a plane ticket from Medan to KL at some point, so that route would make a lot of sense.

But then, I never actually planned on using that ticket. One rule for getting an Indonesian visa is that you have to produce an onward ticket. Only when you arrive by plane, though, so there you go. My second option would be to catch a Pelni or cheap flight to Makassar on Sulawesi, do some diving, see if some people are getting buried in Tana Toraja and then head over to Kalimantan, which I have to admit I know not much about. Yet. Maybe somehow do a little quick visa run across to Sarawak and spend another 2 months in the Indonesian part of Borneo.

What would you do if you were in my pants?

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I’ve just been invited to BrightKite. Anybody who doesn’t know this service, it’s basically a location aware Twitter. You can log your locations, see where your friends are and what they are up to. This seems to be well suited for travel blogs. I read somewhere that a future feature will include a map with your logged locations, so you could basically map your travels and then include that on your website. Sounds quite promising, but as with all of these new social networking sites, time will tell if it’s worth your time.

Anyways, I have a few invites available, if anyone is interested. Just tell me your favorite travel story and a magic email will fly into your inbox. First come, first serve, lads and lasses…

I just stumbled across a charming little blog, LL World Tour. LL or Lisa Lubin has just gotten back from a trip around the world. While browsing through her posts I noticed a comment a reader had left. Here it is:

“You are on such an awesome adventure. I plan on living vicariously through you!”

This comment tells me that LLs reader would like to travel as well, but hadn’t quite realized that herself yet. That comment was made end of 2006, so maybe she’s bumming around on a beach as I write this. I’d like to think so. You should never live vicariously through someone else. You’d miss too much of your own life. You should just live.

What do you think?

It’s time to leave the safety of your feed reader behind and come have a look at the new Travel-Junkie.com. I vaguely remember saying it’ll be a month before I get it ready, but I just couldn’t help it. Have a look around! It’s been tested in the latest stable releases of IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera. Saying that there are probably still a few quirks around. If you find one then drop me a note.

The picture above was taken on a quick unplanned trip to Wanaka, about an hours drive north of Queenstown. Gorgeous little place with lots of little bars…

There’s some exciting news. At least I think so. Nobody else probably does, but whatever… I have started work on the Travel-Junkie Theme V 3.0. There’s gonna be lots of jqueryness, ajax magic, lots of gloss and overall it’ll be just fab, while still retaining most of the look and feel of version 2.5 (that’s what we’re on right now in case you didn’t know). It’ll be a long and rocky road, so you can expect the new look in about 1 months or so.

In other news… It seems that time is running out for me in New Zealand. It has started snowing occasionally, which I find quite depressing at times, so I’m thinking of packing my stuff to head for warmer climates, beaches and palm trees. If I do, then I will definitely be back next summer to do some travelling instead of just working. What do you think?

Apparently T-J.com has been down for the last four days. Visitor numbers dropped down from 250 to 5 a day. What people would see are 403 and 500 errors and it was all down to there not being a index.php file. Something fishy is going on here, I think. When I went to work in the bush 12 days ago everything was fine. Then suddenly… nothing! How can that be?

I’ve had enough of people leaving a comment and then put some f**king company name as their proper name. Use your proper name or a nickname, not some way of brilliantly thought out keyword to get more links. So far I’ve always changed the name according to what the email address said and deleted the link. From now on I will delete the whole comment, name, link and all, so don’t even try. It won’t be Travel-Junkie.com for long. Leave a coment if you have something to say, not to get one more bloody link. I don’t need those comments and I don’t want them either…

I am really sorry for not writing anything for so long, but I was busy with some other non-travel related projects and today I started a new job here in Queenstown. Nothing fancy, just helping out on construction sites, but it’s well paid and it was a quick way of getting some work. Now after todays work I got a job offer from the same guy to drive a bulldozer uprooting pine trees for the next three to four weeks. It sounds like fun, so I accepted, but it will mean that there will probably be even less new content here. It’d be really well paid though, so I could actually do all the fun things around here, like canyoning, skydiving or jetboating! I’ll hear more tomorrow about the job. Hopefully it’ll work out…

In a couple days Al Gore will visit the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, to talk about the need for a visionary treaty to deal with the effects of global warming. Add your voice to Al Gores petition, which he will take with him to Bali! At the time of writing 186,072 people had signed already.

Don’t you just love the English? They are loud, they are obnoxious, they always have to add their two cents and they always know better! But they are so funny as well and they love taking the piss out of themselves! What’s your most lovable nation and, more importantly, why do you think so?