Solipse 2001, Zambia, 10 year Anniversary, Digital Edition

New Explore Australia website with expanded content

Explore Australia recently relaunched their website with a new design (by Thirst Studios) and heaps
of new content, including Fishing Spots, National Parks, Campsites and Caravan Parks.

So next time your going travelling anywhere around Australia, remember your Explore Australia Travel Guide !

Behind the scenes, the website was developed by Ennoble Consultancy Australia. It's powered by Coldfusion
and Oracle, with Maps produced via MapGuide Open Source and statically served using Amazon Cloudfront
and Openlayers.

New expanded Where to Eat and Where to Stay sections covering all of Australia

We just released an update to the Explore Australia online Travel Guide,
featuring brand new detailed Where to Stay and Where to Go Sections

A few examples:

Byron Bay, NSW - Where to Stay

Broome, WA - Where to Eat

Happy Travels!

New Releases from Explore Australia

Introducing Explore Australia

After several years of work, I am happy to announce that Explore Australia is now live on the web.

Explore Australia is an interactive travel guide which covers over 700 different tourist towns and regions.

The site was built using Coldfusion 8, Model Glue, MapGuide Open Source, Oracle XE, jQuery & Openlayers and runs on Ubuntu via Amazon Web Services.

This project wouldn't of been possible with out the hard work of all the wonderful developers who contribute their time into these open source projects. I've learnt a lot and managed to contribute bits back myself.

Enjoy!

Sideways: Travels With Kafka, Hunter S. And Kerouac

After the pleasure of attending this book's launch last week, I'm chomping at the bit to read it!

I'm actually going to wait for a few relaxed hours to really enjoy the book and potentially read the entire book in one sitting :) Otherwise despite my speed reading, I'll end up staying up very very late reading..

From Rainbow Serpent 2006

I love the title, having first met Patrick on the renegade Cairns floor at the end of Rainbow Serpent in 2006 (as seen above in full flight), I have no doubt he's conjured up what is going to be a highly entertaining read.

Having not read the book, I'd suggest jumping over to the Patrick's site and having a read about both the author and his drug fuelled adventures around the world.

You can buy it online at Boomerang Books or if your in Melbourne, I know that Readings had some copies last week!

I'll follow up with a review

Vuuv 2007 Photos

Hmm, always seem to wearing the same clothes!!! ahh the joy of back packing round the world. The german summer was pretty average this year, but the Vuuv had brilliant weather. Saturday was super cold at night, a classic rave like morning



Nicole, Oli, Diana, Steve and Wolfgang. I called Wolfgang on the way from Berlin and organised to camped with him, he had a mate Steve from LA there who I ended up staying with when I was in LA... plus a whole crew from Hamburg



Like a lot of German open-airs, there was a lot of corn around the festival site.



Diana's is looking as beautiful as ever on her 23rd birthday




Misha rocked up on Saturday and was looking extremely fresh, especially after the huge friday night the rest of us had





Jules and I decided to go tropo and head out into the cornfield for some chill out time... it's very green and geometric in there.. all these summer photos have a lot of skin....a bit of contrast ist gut... hehe

More photos in my Vuuv 2007 Album

Ozorafest Hungary 2007 Photos

What a great festival, Jules convinced me to go on Tuesday at Vuuv, so i changed my plans and it was Time to drive to Ozora, the site of the Solipse Festival in 1999.

We drove in Marie's bus the 14 hours via Prague and then down to Hungary, a few border crossing, so Jules and I got lots of stamps being Aussies, the rest of the crew being european's didn't. I love the reaction of the border guys when they see Jules and ask, "your Australian? Eh?"

Quite a interesting refernce point in my life to go back there after 8 years, I had only be travelling for a few months back then, I only spoke a smattering of German and i was 8 years younger.... lets just say I'm trained up these days. I also met a lot more people at this festival.... nice to have a sizeable berlin crew along too!



this thing was the money! so much fun... playing with G-forces...

A big musical highlight was Atmos, he was booked to play two hours, one hour classic which took me back years... wow... Silicon Sounds was pretty special... I remember having a sleep and then waking up, looking at my phone and grinning that I hadn't missed their set.

Of course having the festival washed out on Saturday night made things even more special as people just hung out in beer tents banging bottles on tables and dancing...or wading thru the market knee deep in warm muddy water with bales of straw all over the place. It made the festival and was a nice change of pace.



My flash died in the flood, but my tent survived better than some other ppl! Jules learnt the important rule never set your tent up with the door facing uphill, kinda asking for trouble.. espcially when there is a 6 inch river of water coming down the hill

Dad's family is Hungarian so it's always nice to visit, don't really have any connections there any more but it was really interesting to see people who looked like my relatives.



The hot mineral springs at Heviz were the prefect after party relaxation with 27C water!


There's more photo's in the Ozorafest Hungary 2007 album on picasa

Burning Man 2007 Photos

This is the crew i headed up to the Burn with, completely random group of people which clicked really really well :) Hat's of to Duff for organising everything! I was a real small world experience to ctach up with Radha after all these years. Driving the 32" RV into the bestival was a highlight on the road trip, I have seen so many desert roads in my life on TV and movies it was fun to do it myself.



The Space Elevator dancefloor at 10 - H, brilliant banging psy-trance... best music i heard this year... and what a crew! nice to get some monster dancing in



The mornings looked pretty sci-fi filmish :)



This looked odd during the day, but at night it was stunning...
Steve told me it was a prototype for some 3D TV stuff



Lots of interesting art all over the place... It was an adventure play ground!

I did lose some photos somehow somewhere on my PC

When the amazing double rainbow happened after the sandstorm / white out with 4m visibility i didn't have my camera with me.... the wide angle would of been perfect ... ah well some memories just will live on in my memory. Ya had to be there!

there's more photos on my picasa web album Burning Man 2007

California, next stop Burning Man

I arrived yesterday in LA, was an early start after a nice dinner in NY with my Noel and Jenny, Jack and my Brother and his girlfriend.

Headed down to Venice Beach with Steve (whom i met thru Wolfgang at the Vuuv) and his girlfriend Topanga.

It's amazing how much of this town is familiar from TV and movies.

I had a mission to find some google for Burning Man which was easily solved, plus a pair of aviator glasses, i had tried in NY but wasn't so lucky.... So i got shoes and sunnies now... my 'bowling shoes' finally died in Ozora, Hungary...

Venice beach was really nice, i even saw the canal out back behind the beach hence the name. No one was swimming or even on the beach, except for the drumming circle on the sand. Not many photos taken coz I left my camera at Steve's.

My mission now is to find a way to get to Burning Man, my original plan to join Alex (Berlin) fell thru, so i'm chasing down options at the moment.

Just changed my flight to leave LA on the 9th, so i'm back in Melbourne, Australia on morning of the Tuesday 11th September.

I have a few thousand photo's on my laptop to sort thru before i post them and some retro-spective blog entries as well.. all in good time, probably after the 11th!

What is your light switch like?

One of the interesting things about travelling is the subtle little differences.

In Germany, light switches are big fat buttons which cover the whole panel.

In Australia, the are usually little buttons like 18mm sq.

Here in NY in my brothers flat, the switches are the reverse of Australia, flicking the swtich up is turning it on, whereas in Oz here you switch it down to turn on the light..

New York!

So after a bit over two months in Europe, I arrived last night in New York. My brother Jono met me at the airport and we headed straight to the Eight Mile Creek pub. So nice to have a Coopers, Boags and some nice Aussie white wine!



Of course there are no photos of my brother or his fiancée Chithra, I did ask if i could take one nice shot for our folks, but alas no, They are planning on being back in Oz for Christmas, so Mum and Dad that's your chance then to see what they look like.

It's been about 3 years since i last saw them, I'm back on my travel weight, aka very slim and tanned. SO much that as Jono is much stockier than me, that people thought i was taller!!

Here's a view on the NY Skyline from Brooklyn, this is about five minutes from their house. I'll probably have another stab at these photos as i was awake for about 30 hours by this point and had just a few drinks under my belt. I only really realised how knackered and drunk I was when I tried to download the photos last night and my laptop didn't recognise my camera for some reason....

Just had eggs and bacon for breakfast, which i have been craving for a long time!

I got lots of photos to post from Fullmoon, Vuuv and the Ozorafest but that will take a while for me to sort thru the 2000+ photos....

My time in Europe was amazing, great to catch up with nearly everyone I wanted to, alas, Katja was working the whole time and my spur of the moment decision to go to Hungary meant I missed my one chance to see her, which really sucks.. ah well...

Had a nice going away in Kreuzburg at Marienplatz... Nice to see Oli, Nicole, Diana, Anke, Kyra, Fish, Andy, Julia and Mischa all at the same timwe...

Distracted == new blog layout

just got distracted by blogging and ended up resigning my blog's layout and colors!
and then i started geo-tagging photos in picasa.. course the places i went where not on the map...

problem: google maps with picasa doesn't know Olympos Turkey?
Solution: google, answer in the search listings
Wikipedia...:Coordinates: 36°24?10?N, 30°28?28?E easy

things which rapidly start to suck time...

so I'm back in berlin, after being in greece for the wedding (next post, me lazy),

Next up the Fullmoon Festival this weekend, Jules might be at the Voov, i mean VuuV!

in other news, just got the final approval for a big project which i really like :)

Next big flight, is to New York on the 14th of August,

also maybe http://www.ozorafest.hu/ ?

BTW: the photo on the left is from Soulclipse in turkey

Fusion Festival 2007 Photos

Fusion was a lot of fun, it was cold wet and over 30,000 people which made finding people a challenge... still I managed to catchup with pretty much everyone i wanted to.

My personal music highlight was on sunday afternoon, Atmos with heaps of the berlin crew. It's always nice to know exactly where to be to catch up with long lost friends!

Course i still find the new Atmos music a little to soft, but it's still beautiful music (not at the headcleaner level, but better than anything since).

Which was in stark contrast to a lot of the music at the fusion, the main techno stage could hardly be called a dancefloor, standing floor would be more appropriate!

Good to see Thoma dancing like old times! Having Dan and John along was super! I will never forget the moment john brought the bogan element to fusion. Geli, I'm glad to know the old berlin v hamburg politik hasn't changed!

Kombinat (spelling??) was also a lot of fun to, almost moshing in a big group of familiar faces is great fun.....

Fusion Festival 2007 - Germany

If there's two things i've learnt since starting travelling two weeks ago is that

1. Air France really sucks
2. Fusion is going to be one hell of a reunion in amongst 30,000 people!

I have realised that I am to a degree on my physical IM world tour catchup (MSN,GTALK,SKYPE) ex-pats too! Still it's very nice to be naive in a brand new city and feel challenged by not knowing the local language!

I'm currently in an occupied house in Barcelona, just under the hill with the crosses on top below 'Parc Guell' which makes following the recommendation of all my friends who have been here before to go there very easy to follow!

For the poor souls in Melbourne freezing in the cold, yes it's warm humid and i am trying to make the beers cold enuff!