Not so easy to read this in a small photo but...you can go both left and right to get to Launceston. You can also go left or to the rear to get to Hobart. Dunno...just pick the shortest route. [View Full Entry]

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A Dutch sea captain named Abel Tasman was the first European here, sailing these waters in 1642. About 70 000 square kilometres, it's almost twice the size of Switzerland at 41 000 and a little smaller than Lake Superior at 81 000. You can drive around it in a week although the most accessible sights are clustered along the eastern and northern coasts. I had just enough time for the eastern part, having spent too long in northern Queensland at the start of my voyage to Australia. I rented a car at Hobart airport and set out for the south with [View Full Entry]

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It's blowing a stiff, cold wind when I get to Melbourne early in the morning. I've been travelling in summer for six months and in spring weather for one, so I really don't have the right clothes for colder temperatures and have to make do with layers. Melbourne (pronounced Melbun - you don't sound the letter r, just as Cairns rhymes with “pens”) is different from any other place I've visited on this voyage because I know three people here: Belinda and Tanja, whom I'd met in Udaipur, and Roelof, whom I'd met on Gili T. This gives me people to [View Full Entry]

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I took the night train from Byron Bay to Sydney. This is a useful trick for backpackers on a budget because you save the cost of a hotel room. The downsides are that you don't see the countryside going by (not a problem if it's uninteresting anyway) and you arrive tired so the following day you don't get the most out of the new place. My hostel in Sydney was a former package shed for the railway station so I didn't have to go any distance to find it and they'd done a very good job of converting it. It didn't [View Full Entry]

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As I move further south in Australia the weather goes from chili peppers to watermelons: it's spring here, not summer. There's a good, strong breeze whose family name is Cool and we get two rainy days that make me wish I was somewhere else, preferably a big city with good indoor entertainment available. Byron Bay was named after Lord Byron's grandfather, not the poet himself, but that didn't stop an enthusiastic town clerk from assigning Byron's contemporaries to lasting fame in the town, resulting in Marvelll, Carlyle, Ruskin and Browning Streets and so on. They stopped him before he got [View Full Entry]

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Just below Brisbane, about a third of the way down Australia's eastern coast, lies the Gold Coast. My cousin, John Rutherford, lives there with his wife, Huguette, in happy retirement in a beautiful home in Oyster Cove. The last time I'd seen them was 11 years ago in Geneva. Their neighbourhood has been built mostly in the style of new classicism with symbolic porticos and pillars that serve only a decorative, not a functional purpose. I had my own bed and ensuite bathroom, and bedsheets that wasn't hotel lines, didn't hold the bad dreams and sweat of a thousand others before [View Full Entry]

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The International Whaling Commission introduced a ban on commercial humpback whaling in 1966, which is still in force. The exception is a few taken off the Caribbean island Bequia in the nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Estimates are that at least 200 000 humpbacks were killed during the 20th Century, reducing the global population by more than 90%. Japan had planned to restart hunting in 2007, but the IWC talked them out of it...temporarily. Happily, there is no moratorium on hunting them with a camera, so I went to Hervey Bay armed with a Nikon D-SLR and a JVC [View Full Entry]

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The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea. Those lines are from Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and it is believed that he was inspired by Captain Cook's voyage to discover the lost continent at the South Pole, reputed to be a land of comfort and ease, of milk and honey. Cook didn't find Antarctica and even said there was no southern continent. But that was on his second voyage to the south seas. On his first, he went to Australia. The original [View Full Entry]

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I consider buying a vehicle - a minivan with a mattress - but, reading the want ads and notice boards, I find prices are far too high and even motorcycles are too expensive. Many backpackers travel by bus but I choose a rail pass instead as it gives me a little more leg room and I can get up, walk around, go to the dining car when I wish. I begin moving south by heading for Mission Beach, travelling through a broad river valley, past palm trees and sugar cane and banana fields with blue and gryy/silver bags hanging on each [View Full Entry]

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I leave Semporna, take a minibus to Tawau airport, fly to KL, then to Bali, returning to the hotel I'd previously stayed at on Kuta Beach. I'm only here for a couple of days before flying on to Australia. It's the way I'd originally scheduled my around-the-world ticket because I thought I'd just hang out in Bali for a month. If I had it to do over again I'd schedule this flight differently, flying out of Singapore, perhaps, or KL. At Denpasar airport, during check-in I ask for the exit seat. It's my habit to ask for this as it gives [View Full Entry]

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