329 Days 17 Flights 9 Countries 1 World…

“It isn’t what happens in life, it’s how you deal with it” someone once said to me on my trip.  The last eleven months have been the most eventful of my life, and at times the most enjoyable too.  I dreamed, planned, anticipated and fulfilled something that only a handful of the […]

   New York: Times Square and the Manhattan skyline There is so much to see in New York and to be said about it that makes it difficult for me to fit it concisely into this blog.  Pictures of places say more about them than I possibly could, so I have included as many as is necessary here ( being that […]

   So imagine the scene: you’ve just arrived at the airport in a large international city, at night, and with all your worldly belongings strapped to your back, when you realise you realise you ain’t booked any accommodation – no problem, you just call up a hostel and book a bed, right?  WRONG.  When you realise that every hostel […]

   Imagine a room full of brilliant architects, savvy businessmen, super-intelligent interior designers and top-notch security experts.  Now fill the room with laughing gas and feed them LSD pie for lunch.  Add several billion dollars to the mix.  Then, tell them to go and design a city like no other in the world, and have some pretty skilled […]

Staying at the Venice Beach ‘Cotel’ right next to the madness of the nearby seaside promenade, the phrase ‘only in America’ immediately sprang to mind upon arriving at this gigantic metropolis of a city. Made up of several mini-cities, L.A. resembles something like a huge microchip from the air with its block-on-block rigidity and punctuating industrialism. Venice […]

   Okay, so by now you’re reading this and realising that I’m almost home, and you’d be right – this ‘current’ update comes direct to you from my present location, San Francisco – but more on this at a later date.  Obviously it takes me time to think, write, construct and edit this blog, and that’s before I’ve found a […]

Fiji. Ahh Fiji. Finally. Fiji is a word that many people use to describe a place in their head that represents paradise. The people of this country know this, and they know that’s the reason people come here. But be warned: Fiji is not a cheap paradise. From the moment I hopped off the plane and the […]

Views from the Interislander Ferry:    Caught the Interislander Ferry without a hitch – spent the three-hour journey reading and occasionally popping up on deck to take in the beautiful scenery as we entered the Tory Channel and approached Picton on the South Island.   From there, Matt the Englishman, Colin the American and I boarded our Tranz-Scenic Coastal train service […]

Auckland (view from Mt. Eden) ‘New Zeeland‘ as it was originally named by the Dutch settlers (or ‘Aotearoa’, it’s real name in Maori, before any colonial country-stealing took place…) has a very, very familiar look and feel to it in certain ways.  I arrived on the evening of May 11th into Auckland to be greeted by Hayley (yay! x) at Base Backpackers hostel after […]

A flattering pic of the uber-traveller extraordinaire… So, has the ice melted away from the pavements in the UK yet?  Has the frost departed from the grassy fields of home?  Are the birds singing in the tre…oh like I care.  Sorry for all of you that already know this, sorry for all of you that are sick […]

  Time flies when you’re having fun.  It’s always the way.  It’s nearly the end of March already, and I’ve been in lovely Melbourne so long now it feels like home.  I’ve been working and trying to save up for New Zealand, although I’m finding it difficult to reign in what can be an expensive social life.  Melbourne’s […]

Well, what have I been up to then? Eh?  Lots of silly shennanigans.  All sorts of crazy sh*t.  I have truely fallen for Melbourne in a big way – I could happily live here for a while longer for sure, if I had the money and a friend in the Visas Department that is.  I don’t, […]

By the South bank of the river Yarra, Melbourne It’s strange when a city you’ve never been to before reminds you so much of a place back home.  It’s even stranger when you assume, before arriving in that city, that it will be just like somewhere back home, and that ends up being the case.  Melbourne and […]

Destination: Cairns So we made it.  First off – a slight apology over how long it’s been taking me to update this blog – it’s extremely difficult to find time, and a decent internet connection when you’re travelling about the place over a short space of time.  We covered a lot of ground on the East Coast […]

Townsville.  Hmm.  Not much to say about this litlle stopover in our journey really.  Any location that names itself a cross between two location-names (‘ Town’-s-‘ville’) obviously has problems with its self-identity.  It’s not all that big a place, and when we arrived (2nd Jan) the place was as dead as my prospects of having a useful career […]

‘The Broomstick’. That was the name of the racing yacht we boarded at Airlie Beach on 30th December 2006. There were others – ‘Condor’, ‘British Defender’ – yet we got the one with the slightly camp name. Nevertheless, The Broomstick set sail with a crew of three and a cargo of 21 layabout pissheads, all on […]

Fraser Island The object to the left of the van on the left of the second picture is a frisbee that I managed to capture mid-flight whilst photographing our 4-Wheel-Drive vehicles on the beach at Fraser Island, in case you were wondering. I could have said it was a UFO and made millions touting the picture to […]

So we made it somewhere for Christmas – it it wasn’t a crappy campsite either thank God. We stayed at Koala’s Beach Resort in the Queensland seaside location of Hervey Bay. Hervey Bay reminds me a little of Morecambe or somewhere similar: there’s a main promenade lining a stretch of sand that harbours rocky spots and […]

Rainbow Beach… and our sandman! Rainbow Beach is a nice little area raised slightly above the sea level, so-named due to the mixed colour of the sands on its lengthy stretch of coastline. The heat increases the more you travel up the East, and as we were now entering the ‘Capricorn Coast’, it was quite intense […]

  After leaving Brisbane, we were looking for somewhere preferably next to water, perhaps even a beach-side campsite.  In Maroochdore we found what we were looking for: the campsite was situated on the banks on a huge river which conveniently ran straight into the sea round the corner, all part of the same beautiful stretch of coastline.  […]