of life, the Universe and everything especially how to live well!
Hi my name is Lis and I’m addicted to blogging! Actually only 81% which surprised me, but then there is all the rest of the online world as well - if the test had included those I’m sure I’d be 100% addicted.
81%
Thanks Lynne for this link And no its not sponsored I just thought it was cool!
This is the 3rd Part of the summary of our trip around Australia: if you came in late:
The general plan I described as we waited to service the truck in Melbourne pretty* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *much worked out - that’ a first! We wanted to go to Broken Hill, the unlikely location of my first post-graduation job back in the 80’s so we headed pretty much due north. We dodged rain through Ballarat, Bendigo and Swan Hill on the Murray River it was fine up at Midlura but the damage had already been done at Mungo National Park* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated * Broken Hill was a serious case of deja vu unlike the rest of Australia Broken Hill hasn’t had a property boom and most of the town, including the house I lived in most of the time was still there and only now being renovated!
Broken Hill ended up being a week-long stop as we took a 4WD course and shopped for a month! The coure was a very,very wise investment - as it would have cost a lot more that the $450 course fees if we had got stuck on the backroads to Cameron’s corner in the middle of nowhere but with excellent internet access! You have to get stuck once on a trip and the time at Cameron’s corner was long enough to be fun without becoming too tedious - in short a couple of hours rain turned the desert into green and stuck us for a couple of days waiting for the mud to go away!
Now there seems to be a bit of a gap in the blog record - I didn’t realise I’d left so much out, or maybe some some of the entries went missing in the blogsphere? - but at least we had a diary so I will now try and fill in the gap a bit! Heading north from Cameron’s corner - we looped back through Queensland to get to Innaminka in a long day, there was plenty of water on the road but nothing to serious and the road improved as we got further north, Innaminka’s claim to fame is the famous Burke & Wills dig treat and their graves. Its tiny town still, with a decent pub and on Cooper’s Creek. We camped on the “common” and were pleased to find a resourceful business which had setup a combined laundry and hot showers!
Heading further north go us to the famous Birdsville Pub, though we didn’t stay there we did have an excellent meal - in fact any meal I didn’t cook would have been good by then! Now we were back on the tourist track and had an easy run down the Birdsville track- practically a highway after the stuff that we had been on! The roadhouse 1/2 way down was basic but featured a free, natural hot pool - can’t ask much more than that really! The end of the Birdsville track is Maree, which is the start of the Oodnadatta Track -following the old Ghan railway north to Alice Springs.
In Maree we ran into the fellow Kiwi’s from Camerons Corner - they had had a much more interesting time of it than we had - water over the bonnet- luckily they had a snorkel - we didn’t the road was closed after them once they got thru! Now following the old Ghan we got another geographical extreme the lowest point in Australia is Lake Eyre
This wasn’t far out of William Creek which is no horse town with a pub and a camp ground and weird array of space debris from the “nearby” (400km) missile base of Woomera
After basically 2 weeks worth of camping we were very happy to see the remote, underground town, of Coober Pedy. Other’s have said it was very isolated and weird, but they hadn’t spent 2 weeks travelling through some of Australia’s most remote areas. In fact compared to the well-known remote areas of Kakadu and Cape York this area really is very, very under-developed and well worth a trip if you are passing through.
We thoroughly enjoyed Coober Pedy for it’s urban environment, restaurants, multi-cultural community - we ate in a Greek restaurant surrounded by Greek speaking locals!
We spent a couple of days there, splashing out on an underground motel and checking out the lcoal sites including the underground bookshop, the underground Serbian Othordox Church and the underground homes. Mining under the town has been banned for a number of years because of the risk of collapse, but you can extend your home - so one house has about 22 rooms and the “renovation” had a profit of many $10,000’s ! Outside of town it’s still all small scale mining - no large companies allowed - a truely unique spot - but not exactly beautiful!
Coober Pedy is on the sealed Darwin-Adelaide highway but we headed back to Williams Creek to continue on up the Oodnadatta track towards Oodnadatta itself. Turning off to do a mere 15km detour to the Peake Telegraph station we hit the worst corrugations were the worst we have experienced. We drove back to the main road the corrugations were still bad, it took bascially 1 hour to do 15km. As we drove along, we detected something, and stopped – we had to fasten down the battery again, it had worked itself loose again. Also the car horn started going on of its own volition. The horn panel needed to be thumped to get it off again. Something had worked loose. We got to Oodnadatta as we drove in, the horn went on permanently this time and we drove back to the garage. The mechanic pulled the connection on the horn, fastest I’ve ever seen a mechanic move really!
The next morning Truckie wouldn’t start so rather than continuing into even more remote country further north we headed back to the bitumen and Uluru, Ayers Rock. Tourist central suddenly - we barely got a spot at the road house at the turn off to Yulara (500km away) and at Yulara we had to queue and pay over $30 for a site! It was bit like Sydney again really. The rock hadn’t changed since the last time I was here, except we didn’t get to climb it, closed because of the wind. Heading the back way to Alice we went via Kings Canyon - which for my money is a much more spectacular site with excellent walks through, around and up it! We got off seal again and took on the “notorious” Menindee Loop Road - not even a serious off-road adventure after what we had been through! We camped at Glen Helen where there was a lodge and a bar, and an expensive restaurant. We compromised and went for Happy Hour, cooked tea the gas stove finally failed, there was a leak in the inlet joint which caught fire which we had to hurriedly turn off. We were rescued by two Italian guys who lent us their one. We were cooking and having the meal in a shed as there was no other facility and it was out of the biting wind. Lucky we didn’t burn it down!
As I have said before I have been enjoying writing over at HubPages I
thought I would finish off the year with a round up of my published articles to date. However this post got too long so I am going to have to split it up on topics!Back in October 2007 HubPages announced their Flagship Hub program - choose one of their topics: write 1500 words add 3 videos, 5 photos and 10 links, get paid $25 - I can do that I thought! Also I knew enough about internet marketing by now to know that the topics chosen weren’t random - they reflected searches people were doing and wanted information on, which meant also that I was more likely to make money off the advertising sales from EBay or Amazon.
Vacation Packing List and Tips I struggled to get this one together - not quite sure why? I guess I don’t have other people’s obsession over packing I just do it - the article does well in the search engines though so a lot of people are asking the question - it seems to cause a lot of anxiety - something which has always missed me - though I have to got off-line and throw some stuff in a bag soon for the flight tomorrow!
Air Travel Tips Now this one I could actually use some of my own photos given Paul’s fascination for WW2 relics! It also puts in one place some handy websites for planning on getting the best/most comfortable trip possible. If you want to know which seat to pre-book this one is worth a look
India Travel Information Tips Advice I have been to India twice, though long, long before the digital camera so none of the photos or videos are mine - though the video about crossing the road is an all- time favorite of mine because it’s so true! I got lucky with this and got “stumbled” from one of the web2.0 sites - I got over 400 visits withing a few hours - I spent most of the night up watching the figures- unfortunately I didn’t make a spectacular amount of money but I did get the $10 bonus for this hub - the only one to date!
Italy Travel, Information Tips Advice Well like I said I didn’t choose the topic - but I figured I could use a lot of the same resources as for the India one, plus I know some good European travel sites. I have been to Italy - but it wouldn’t be my pick of Europe - though I know Americans love it! I must say though it was exceptionally to find some gorgeous photos and videos to use for this one.
The whole travel tips theme was developing nicely so I threw in another one that answered a question often see in the backpacker travel forums:
Should I take my Laptop Backpacking was a pretty easy to write having dragged a laptop all around Australia for 6 months - and no you probably shouldn’t!
Now I am trying to make a living doing this so with an eye on the new products news and Christmas I reviewed :
Kindle a Solution for Travelers? If you want one of these new e-book readers please buy it from the link in this article - the 10% of $399 would be very nice!
Map of Europe was the result of a slightly odd keyword combination that I was trying - it fits with my Travel theme anyway but I can’t say its been a resounding success yet! I think I will use it as a central article to spawn off a series of European tips in the new year.
You can approach hubpages from a keyword-driven marketing approach or just for fun - most people do one or the other - but I like to mix it up a bit! My fun hubs include this one about the earliest form of life - found in Shark Bay WA:
Stomatolites which gave me an excuse to show off some photos from Shark Bay Western Australia.
Hubpages is a good place for publishing quick 1000 - 2000 word articles on travel. There are an awful lot of article sites out there but travel really needs picture and video and colour. Would you pick up a travel book with no pictures? The other nice thing at HubPages is the community feel - there is an active forum and 99% of the comments you get on an article are from fellow hubbers - you can become a fan of a hubber and be notified when they publish a new hub. You can also share hubs on the standard Web2.0 sites (Stumble, Digg, et al). So go and check it out and have a look around!
This is the 2nd part of my summary of our trip around Austalia: Part 1 is here
As New Zealanders the East Coast of Australia is nearby and a common destination to escape the winter cold, or even the summer cold! So for this long trip we weren’t interested in spending a lot of time on the east coast but wanted to get to the more remote areas harder to get to without a rugged vehicle and more than a week or 10 days break.
So having got ourselves sorted out we hightailed it south, ticking off Byron Bay as the most easterly point and headed south to Sydney to catch Priscillia The Musical. We then had a bit of a detour to do some street racing and learnt not to put petrol in the diesel engine. We actually went to Bathurst to see the famous Dinosaur remains at the museum and also the satellite tracking station at Parkes which was featured in the film The Dish and was pivotal in the communications for the first moon landing in 1968. I apparently appear to have missed blogging about these so I have added some photos now! Next stop on our detour was to get to the top of Australia - Mt Kosciusko is the world’s easiest “highest point on a continent” to reach - its a great trip, complete with chair lift! So heading further south we got to Melbourne and caught the ferry to Tasmania pretty much exactly a month after we arrived in Brisbane.
Tasmania is a state often missed by both Australian’s and visitors. We enjoyed the island and found it a charming combination of excellent food (cheese and chocolate to name but two specialties, oh and wine too), beautiful scenery, a compact geography, and some of Austarlia’s oldest European historic sites. On the 1stMay we got to the southernmost point in Australia called SouthWest Cape
It must be said though that the climate is more similar to NZ’s or the UK’s rather than the rest of Australia. Its cooler, wetter and far more variable. The best weather is generally February - March.
OK The TV is starting into the the summer season of repeats so I thought that I would re-cycle some electrons and do a series of digest posts of our trip around Australia so far. This blog really started to keep a record of the trip to replace the normal diary and collection of 100’s of photo prints that need to be cataloged and stored after every other long trip I’ve done. So at least it all fits on the laptop now! The photo album is here if you are interested.
I assumed that we’d have better access to the internet than we did. In reality having the laptop was great because we could keep a diary and download photos as we went, even when there was no internet access to be had for 100’s of kilometers
One of the things I was determined not to do in the blog was to fall into the really, really detailed diary entry “well having had a big night out with the Swiss girls we met at the Chinese we didn’t wake up until 9am, we went down the road to the little German cafe to have their excellent muesli and goats milk with a local pineapple milkshake” if you see what I mean! It gives travel blogs a bad name!
One of the disadvantages of blogging as it all happens is that you do not have any perspective on events at the time so doing this digest at least allows me to fit in all into perspective.
The timing of the trip was basically dictated by when we knew we would have able to rent our home out most easily, which in New Zealand is early in the New Year, which fitted with having Christmas at home too.
In the end we left in early March in a hurry on to get to Tasmania before it got too cold, we probably would have been better off leaving a month or so earlier because the weather was bad in Tasmania by early May.
Brisbane as a starting point was chosen because
It didn’t take us too long to get set up : we arrived on a Wednesday, found a 4WD on the Friday and picked it up the following Thursday after arranging the initial inspection and repairs. We then took another week to practice camping in Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast. We knew the area so we figured it had the right combination of pleasant caravan park and good local malls to buy all the bits and pieces in.
I have been doing it a fair bit of writing over at HubPages and have published another Flagship Hub this one about GPS Receivers. I must say it’s a reasonable amount of work for $25 but I only do the topics I am interested in and most times learn something which is of use to me anyway! So if you are planning on buying someone a GPS for Christmas or even just sometime in the future - please follow that link By following it you will help be to earn a bonus of $10 if I get enough traffic in the first month. Of course if you want to buy something from Amazon or EBay (doesn’t have to be a GPS - just click through on the link) that would be even better! So even you aren’t planning on buying follow the link - please?
I actually first used a GPS back on an exploration job in Chile in the early 90’s and I was amazed at the time even that even with the woeful standard of the local maps we could safely navigate all over the featureless plane of the Atacama knowing a) whether we were inside our exploration lease and b) where the road was to get back to camp! It was the first time I had ever heard of a GPS and the only reason we had was because the boss was a yachty and they had become popular in the marine world for obvious reasons.
On out trip around Australia we did carry a cheap little unit - knowing the state of the outback roads I thought it might be useful. It was once, we had to some tricky navigation in outback Queensland heading towards Innaminka doing lots of turns to various roads which all led to stations. The danger in this sort of country was not so much dying alone in the desert - but running out of fuel if we went too badly astray was a real possibility - so the GPS was a good double check, which easied the tension when we argued about the turns - though what the driver was doing arguing with the navigator I have no idea!
Typically with technology the prics have come right down - the little unit we have we bought for about NZ$80 last year, the unit we had in Chile was top of the line and worth many $100’s of dollars at the time - maybe NZ$800 in today’s $. They both had about the same functionality! So that link again: GPS Receivers
What do you think of my new cool toy? I do enjoy writing, it’s great when I’ve got a first
draft done, and editing and publishing comes easy. I don’t mind gathering the material and doing the research either! Its the first draft I can procrastinate on for hours though: clothing is washed, kitchens tidied but ultimately I surf the web. When I had a dial-up connection it wasn’t so bad, pull the wire out and end of distraction - it took too long to dial up again to use for casual procrastination. Now however with always on wireless broadband it not so simple, its just there, another tab in the browser calling, come and see, check your email, check your rss feeds, check your webpage stats, check your adsense earnings for the hour!
Now however I have a solution and here it is - my latest technology device! Its got a whole lot of advantages over the laptop:
Its important to get the right pad and pen though:
Don’t you hate those people who have all the Christmas shopping over by October! I haven’t done anything yet - but at least have the excuse that I don’t really want to have to carry it all home with me when we take a trip over to New Zealand for Christmas! The Christmas Parade is on here in Perth today - but rather intelligently its actually an evening parade - after the shops shut - which I thought was a cool idea, though I doubt that we bother going into town for it.
So anyway here is the shameless plug - if you need to buy some books and can’t get them locally then buy from Amazon Books
The books are good and their shipping is quick - with the decline of the US$ its not a bad price either, although the free shipping offers NEVER apply to New Zealand! I have also successfully shipped books to friends and family overseas direct from Amazon too!
Well we’ve decided to get back into competition in ballroom dancing aka Dancesport. We danced our last competition in February 2007 a the Masters Games in Wanganui, New Zealand. Officially we quit because we were going overseas, but as far as I was concerned we quit because we weren’t having fun competing anymore. We still enjoyed dancing and we continued to improve but we had got totally over competing, after nine years we had had enough.
For those of you not familiar with Dancesport let me explain the judging system in Dancesport. Each event has somewhere between 1 and 5 dances and 3 or more judges, but always an odd number of judges. In the events we dance its ether 1 or 2 dances. Each dance is on for 1.5minutes, maybe 2 minutes for a final. There can be up to 8 couples on the flooor at a time (depends on the floor size). In a round the judge has to mark a certain number of couples back to the next round or final: so out of 8 maybe 6 back to a final. In a final each couple is ranked from 1 to 6 (or however many couples are on the floor) . The couple with the most recalls get to the next round, the couple with the most “1’s” in the final wins, its a marking system called the “Skating System“.
The result is that each judge only has a few seconds to mark a couple through or rank them in a final. That’s why you get the whole OTT thing happening with hair, costume, makeup etc. You’re see very few pastel dresses on the floor, bright colours attract the eye, anything that works for the peacock works in Ballroom Dance!
Why did we get out dancing competitively:
What’s changed our mind about competiting:
you? Its quit spin tingling sometimes and its just happened to me on the Internet! I have no idea who this guy is, I followed a link on a forum and there he is listing the 5 biggest mistakes he made starting an online business I wouldn’t bother repeating them all hear -that’s why hyperlinks are great - but
# 1 Too many ideas - check - really MUST right down a business plan
#2 Focus on 1 thing and get it right now that’s a good idea! I’m going to try that
#3 Haven’t’ made that mistake but fair comment
#4 Didn’t pay money to buy some e-books - well I have just started doing that in moderation and yes I think at the very least you short cut a lot of reading a lot of forums etc. You need to do both for the context though.
#5 Being in a niche I enjoy - well I am in that - but I have thought about giving it away to concentrate something more profitable - so maybe not !
